Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark? Can You Say Fraud?

Today, Bob started railing about evolution. Again.

Bob's rant was prompted by the discovery of a early ancestor of triceratops. This new dinosaur, named Albertaceratops nesmoi, was discovered in the badlands of Alberta, Canada, and provides evidence that triceratops were related to other centrosaurs. Bob moaned that all this talk of transitional fossils "makes his eye twitch" because it's just evolutionists deceiving people.

But then Bobbo made a promise.

He promised to prove that Noah took dinosaurs aboard his ark and that dinosaurs existed until a few centuries ago.

Bobbo said he won't act on his promise until tomorrow, so you would have to tune in then.

But I don't want to wait, so I turned to Google. I pulled up the free sample from his product page to review his arguments. I wasn't surprised to find the Bobbo's understanding of dinosaurs is as weak as his understanding of Christianity.

Bobbo's makes several claims to support his argument. First he states, "[D]inosaurs were nothing more than reptiles that continued to grow."

Wrong!

Dinosaurs didn't display the same growth characteristics as other reptiles. Reptiles grow slowly over time, taking many years to reach maximum size, while dinosaurs grew very large in a relatively short length of time. To quote Discover Magazine:
“They did not grow like typical reptiles,” says Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at the University of California at Berkeley. Tyrannosaurus rex, for example, took only 20 years to reach full size. But the biggest dinosaurs were off the charts. Apatosaurus also called Brontosaurus), one of the long-necked plant eaters known as sauropods, needed only 15 years to reach 25 tons. “They’re just growing faster than anything on land today,” says Padian.

Not only do they not grow like typical lizards, dinosaurs display characteristics of warm-blooded mammals. This means that dinosaurs are much more than Komodo dragons that live to 500 years, as Bobbo claims.

Bob next asserts that "[d]inosaurs on Noah's Ark is actually much simpler prospect that people assume" because not only were dinosaurs small, God sent Noah "a couple of cute Tyrannosaurus lizards" with which to repopulate the entire planet. So Bob is claiming that God sent a breeding pair of every single species of dinosaur to protect on the ark.

Really?

Science has identified 527 different species of dinosaur, with predictions stating we'll find 1300 more.

So if Bob is correct, Noah had 3654 dinosaurs aboard the ark (or 1827 breeding pairs) plus a breeding pair for all the other species of animal in the world. It is just not physically possible to construct a boat large enough to contain a breeding pair of every animal in the world. It's just not possible.

Finally, Bobbo argues that man and dinosaur lived side-by-side because of "countless artifacts, drawings, carvings, statues, mosaics and depictions throughout history...re-create these beasts." And because we have these artist's rendering, it proves that man and dinosaurs existed together. We just didn't call them "dinosaurs" until 1841, when Richard Owen coined the term. Before then, they were "dragons."

What? What the hell is Bobbo talking about? This claim is so broad and nonsensical it's hard to even understand the claim. But I'll try.

First, there are lots of historical renderings that look like dinosaurs. But that doesn't mean they are dinosaurs. These ancient depictions are the product of folklore, of human imagination. Human beings created these images to support children's stories, teach tribal morals, or simply to scare the bejesus out of their enemies. None of them prove man and dinosaur lived side-by-side.

Look at it this way: If I found a 5000 year old pictogram depicting a pig with wings, does it mean that pigs at one time had wings? Of course not. I would have to produce physical evidence that demonstrated pigs had wings.

So is there any physical evidence that human beings lived alongside dinosaurs? No. There are no human fossil remains are found in proximity (both physically and chronologically) of dinosaur remains. In fact, artifacts that claim to prove coexistence are frauds.

Frauds, much like Bob's arguments that Noah had dinosaurs on his ark.

But you can't tell Bob this. Because facts never get in the way of his beliefs.

2 comments:

Lumberjack said...

Again and again Bob says something like this: The more discoveries are made, the more evidence accumulates supporting an earth about ten thousand years old and the less credibility the evoutionists have. The case for evolution is crumbling. It’s a “Fariy tale for adults,” one of his regualar guests tells us all.
Why, then, we must ask ourselves is this “evidence” not presented with blaring trumpets in scientific forums and eagerly offered for peer review?

Bob would say, “Oh, the evidence is censored out by the liberal media, textbook publishers and the secular-humanist sceintific establishment.” Yet nowhere that I know of is there a web posting of a trail of rejection letters from professional accociations to suppport their claims of censorship.

Bob wants it both ways.
A) Evidence ovewhelmingly supports a young earth.

B) Suppressed by the media and scientists, this same evidence is not available for scrutiny by qualified audiences.

How convenient for the young earth crowd.

Remember as kids shouting, “Put up or shut up!”? Young earth creationists will do neither but complain bitterly of unfair treatment.

Irl Hudnutt said...

It's amazing how many times Bob claims that people have been brainwashed, that scientists are "censoring" the proof, and how all the "evidence" has been stripped from the textbooks.

Not that Bob can prove any of it. He can only bitch and moan about some vast conspiracy preventing the "truth" from emerging.

Bob isn't a scientist, philosopher, or theologian.

He's a crackpot.

A crackpot, plain and simple.