When I say 'evolution,' I'm referring to the notion that man evolved from lower primates, as is shoved down the throats of students from the first grade on.
Not one missing link fossil has ever been found showing a transition from one species to another, yet the notion that it happened is treated as fact.
Carbon dating has on many occasions indicated ages that vary by many thousands of years, from different parts of the same body.
The "age rings" in the ice core from Greenland (I could be wrong on the location) that allegedly showed an age of many many thousands of years, until a WWII aircraft was found underneath those thousands of years worth of ice.
Fossilized dinosaur and human footprints found together.
The ever-changing "age" of the earth, from one billion years to two billion to, what is it now, four and a half billion?
The notion that we all evolved from a "simple" singe-celled organism--that notion has suffered quite a blow since these organisms turn out not to be simple at all, but rather are incredibly complex machines that show intelligent design.
The circular reasoning of using fossils present in certain strata to date the layer, while also using strata to date the fossils.
The biggest aspect of the lie is the fact that evolution is taught not as what it is, a theory. It is presented as scientific fact despite the utter lack of empirical evidence to support it. Virtually all elementary science textbooks will contain some variation of this line: Millions of years ago, dinosaurs walked the earth. There is no way that stating that something happened millions of years ago can possibly be anything other than theory. Is it treated that way, though? Nope. Fact is, it's dogmatic.
When you mention the notion of a Creator and evolution, I'm not sure exactly where you're coming from. I certainly concede that microevolution is reality. Not macroevolution, however. And lumping the two together is how the issue is handled. They're presented as a part of the same package, so that the observable truth of microevolution (variations) lends credence to macroevolution.
There are many, many more inconsistencies in the evolution theory I've read or seen pointed out, but I don't remember well enough to present them here. I've also seen survey results that show only a slight majority, around 55% if memory serves, of scientists from related fields believe in evolution as taught. But few are willing to publicly challenge it, for to do that is perilous to one's career.
I'm not a scientist, just a layman who happens to believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant and infallible word of God, who created the universe and all within it. Despite what you or anyone else believes on the topic right now, you too will believe at the end of the day when every knee shall bow. That's reality that will happen and I praise God that I know it already.
The bottom line is that evolution is one of satan's most successful lies. Get someone to doubt one part of the Bible and you're well on your way to killing their faith in God, which is exactly what satan wants.
If you're a scientist or teacher in the field, however, there are creationists who will gladly debate you or any professor at any university. There's also a standing $250,000 offer out there for anyone who can present straightforward empirical evidence of evolution as taught.
MM out.
Great answer, MM! Thanks.
Atheists exist because of people like MississippiMan. The antievolutionists on this thread are spreading lies and inaccuracies like nobody's business. Is it any wonder that people ditch Christianity, when they get exposed to people who attach Christianity to the utter unscientific hokum of creationism and treat them as one and the same? I will illustrate by dissecting MM's post:
When I say 'evolution,' I'm referring to the notion that man evolved from lower primates, as is shoved down the throats of students from the first grade on.
Just like math and chemistry are so "shoved". So, MM, please separate the human "kind" from the nonhuman "kind" amongst these fossils: From
human-ape transitionals 
Not one missing link fossil has ever been found showing a transition from one species to another, yet the notion that it happened is treated as fact.
Smooth Change in the Fossil Record http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/fossil_series.html
Carbon dating has on many occasions indicated ages that vary by many thousands of years, from different parts of the same body.
Without citations this is meaningless. And even if it were true, it doesn't matter because carbon dating only dates things up to about 50,000 years old, because the half-life of carbon-14 is only ~5,000 years. Other atoms are used to date the earth back to 4+ billion years ago, atoms with half-lives of millions-billions of years. This mistake of MM's is the most common display of creationist ignorance about radioactive dating. It is epidemic in their circles. Repeating what MM says to a geologist is like telling a politician that Americans elect a prime minister. If you want some actual information, go here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html
The "age rings" in the ice core from Greenland (I could be wrong on the location) that allegedly showed an age of many many thousands of years, until a WWII aircraft was found underneath those thousands of years worth of ice.
I am sure this is garbled, but MM supplies no source so it is impossible to check. In ice cores you can find volcanic ash from specific known eruptions that occurred long before WWII, you can find lead deposits from when people began smelting lead a few thousand years ago -- there are a lot of ways to check your method of dating ice layers. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icecores.html
Fossilized dinosaur and human footprints found together.
Not even Answers in Genesis believes this one anymore, at least the Paluxy tracks which are the only ones commonly claimed. http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/faq/dont_use.asp
The ever-changing "age" of the earth, from one billion years to two billion to, what is it now, four and a half billion?
Yeah, and it has been for ~50 years, which is about how long modern techniques have been around. ~4.55 +/- 0.1 or so. What's the relative variation in the creationist date? 6000-10000 years? That's at least 25% uncertainty for a supposedly massive geological event, except one that left no evidence!
The notion that we all evolved from a "simple" singe-celled organism--that notion has suffered quite a blow since these organisms turn out not to be simple at all, but rather are incredibly complex machines that show intelligent design.
Look at yourself in the microscope -- you're made of cells too. Your fundamental proteins are shared with those microorganisms. Your DNA and RNA sequences in some places match exactly. See the universal rRNA sequence similarity tree:
...humans are but a hair on a twig. Quite close to corn and single-celled eukaryotes in the grand scheme of things. As for complex biochemical machinery, see the rebuttals to Behe. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html Especially this one, which reviews the massive literature of the field of evolutionary immunology, which is figuring out how our tremendously complex immune system (one of Behe's favorites) evolved: http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/Evolving_Immunity.html
The circular reasoning of using fossils present in certain strata to date the layer, while also using strata to date the fossils.
And the strata are dated by radiometric methods, so independence is acheived. See the dating FAQs already cited.
The biggest aspect of the lie is the fact that evolution is taught not as what it is, a theory.
Just like atomic theory, heliocentric theory, etc. You, like all creationist, have no concept of what the term "theory" means in science. Evolution is a Fact and a Theory http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html Even Answers in Genesis now says not to use this one: http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/faq/dont_use.asp
It is presented as scientific fact despite the utter lack of empirical evidence to support it.
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution The Scientific Case for the Theory of Common Descent with Gradual Modification http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
Virtually all elementary science textbooks will contain some variation of this line: Millions of years ago, dinosaurs walked the earth. There is no way that stating that something happened millions of years ago can possibly be anything other than theory. Is it treated that way, though? Nope. Fact is, it's dogmatic.
Well, gee, we only see dinosaur bones in rocks dated as old by radiometric methods. It's not biologists that came up with radiometric dating, it's physicists. This is getting at what Doonesbury what getting at in his original cartoon! Creationists, in order to deny evolution, have to deny established science in most fields! Of course, maybe God made the world to *look* old, but it's actually not. But then God would be lying to us, wouldn't he?
When you mention the notion of a Creator and evolution, I'm not sure exactly where you're coming from. I certainly concede that microevolution is reality. Not macroevolution, however. And lumping the two together is how the issue is handled. They're presented as a part of the same package, so that the observable truth of microevolution (variations) lends credence to macroevolution.
See the transitional fossils links already provided. There are many examples of gradual "microevolution" crossing species, genus, family, and even class boundaries.
There are many, many more inconsistencies in the evolution theory I've read or seen pointed out, but I don't remember well enough to present them here.
Well, that's an impressive argument.
I've also seen survey results that show only a slight majority, around 55% if memory serves, of scientists from related fields believe in evolution as taught.
That must be why 300+ scientists named "Steve" have signed on to a rebuttal of various creationist lists of scientists (who are usually not scientists): Project Steve http://www.ncseweb.org/article.asp?category=18
But few are willing to publicly challenge it, for to do that is perilous to one's career.
Please. Overthrowing established theory and replacing it with a new one is every scientist's wildest dream. It means fame. The only thing is, you can't do it by spreading half-baked argumentation and underinformed, evidence-ignoring tracts from a particular subculture of a particular religion. This will only convince people that actually know something about the topic that you, and (unfortunately) your religion are crackpots. Why Christians don't defend themselves from the cancer of creationism is something I don't understand.
I'm not a scientist,
Obviously...
just a layman who happens to believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant and infallible word of God, who created the universe and all within it. Despite what you or anyone else believes on the topic right now, you too will believe at the end of the day when every knee shall bow. That's reality that will happen and I praise God that I know it already.
Except for the implied bit about the literal truth of Genesis, none of this has squat to do with evolutionary theory.
The bottom line is that evolution is one of satan's most successful lies.
Actually this applies far better to creationism. Do you know how many atheists are out there that became atheists because they realized that they were being misinformed by ignorant creationists, and assumed that if creationists were that dumb, then Christians must be also?
Get someone to doubt one part of the Bible and you're well on your way to killing their faith in God, which is exactly what satan wants.
Right. And adhering to a literal interpretation of Genesis, which is fairly obviously poetry, is *the fastest* way to get intelligent, inquisitive young people to realize that doubt is the rational, right stance towards the Genesis story, because *the physical evidence is not consistent with a literal interpretation*. Your contortions already in this thread are evidence of that. In order to accept creationism you had to reject physics and many other sciences. This was precisely Doonesbury's point (although whether Bush has said anything about creationism that, say, Gore has not also said is debatable).
If you're a scientist or teacher in the field, however, there are creationists who will gladly debate you or any professor at any university.
Yes, and bus in their supporters. They are much less open to having a written debate, where sources can be traced and claims examined one-by-one.
There's also a standing $250,000 offer out there for anyone who can present straightforward empirical evidence of evolution as taught.
LOL! You speak of Kent Hovind, one of the looniest of the loonies. He has constructed his "offer" such that it is impossible to win. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/
MM out.
Indeed. Folks, here's my point. I'm sure that MM is a perfectly decent fellow. He has just been mislead by his preachers, teachers, etc., who have been similarly mislead. All of this misleading is conducted by well-meaning people who have gotten themselves committed to a very peculiar interpretation of the bible -- total literalism including young-earth creationism -- that wasn't even common until a Seventh-Day adventist came up with it only ~100 years ago. See Ronald Numbers, The Creationists for a thorough history. Or his online essay: Creationism History http://www.counterbalance.net/history/intro-frame.html He says:
George McCready Price and ‘Flood Geology’ During the first two thirds of the twentieth century, during which most Christian fundamentalists accepted the existence of long geological ages, the leading voice arguing for the recent creation of life on earth in six literal days was George McCready Price (1870-1963), a scientifically self-taught creationist and teacher. Born and reared in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, Price as a youth joined the Seventh-day Adventists, a small religious group founded and still led by a prophetess named Ellen G. White, whom Adventists regarded as being divinely inspired. Following one of her trance-like "visions" White claimed actually to have witnessed the Creation, which occurred in a literal week. She also taught that Noah’s flood had sculpted the surface of the earth, burying the plants and animals found in the fossil record, and that the Christian Sabbath should be celebrated on Saturday rather than Sunday, as a memorial of a six-day creation. Shortly after the turn of the century Price dedicated his life to a scientific defense of White’s version of earth history: the creation of all life on earth no more than about 6,000 years ago and a global deluge over 2,000 years before the birth of Christ that had deposited most of the fossil-bearing rocks. Convinced that theories of organic evolution rested primarily on the notion of geological ages, Price aimed his strongest artillery at the geological foundation rather than at the biological superstructure. For a decade and a half Price’s writings circulated mainly among his coreligionists, but by the late 1910s he was increasingly reaching non-Adventist audiences. In 1926, at the height of the antievolution crusade, the journal Science described Price as "the principal scientific authority of the Fundamentalists. That he was, but with a twist. Although virtually all of the leading antievolutionists of the day, including William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial, lauded Price’s critique of evolution, none of them saw any biblical reason to abandon belief in the antiquity of life on earth for what Price called "flood geology." Not until the 1970s did Price’s views, rechristened "creation science," become fundamentalist orthodoxy.
I think that the creationists here should be mad that they've been lead, by some preachers preying on their gullibility, into believing an obscure 7th-day adventist doctrine that wasn't even popular with fundamentalists until recently. Satan and the atheists never had it better than when creationism became popular. Think about it. And *READ THE FAQS*. All your questions have been answered before. You might just learn something. eagleman