GYC 2008: For This Purpose

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Sean Pitman ~ The Emperor Has No Clothes: Creation vs. Evolution

Sean Pitman

Early Man

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this opportunity to bring us all here together, this youth conference, where thousands of young people are seriously interested in learning about you and what you have planned for our lives.

Please be with us today, especially in this topic that's becoming more problematic for your church these days.

I must not stumble over all these chords.

Early man is a fascinating topic because we're human and we want to know where we came from.

And the popular concept is that we came from apes, of course.

There's all these hominids that can gradually, stepwise, evolve higher and higher, more humanoid features until finally we showed up as Homo sapiens.

And so I just like to look at the story and see how scientific.

Or is it more what I call just-so stories, so that where people make up legends and they pass them on?

And let's just see how concrete these stories are.

Ernest Houghton, he's a Harvard professor of anthropology, he writes, you can with equal facility model on Neanderthal or Neanderthoid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the liniments of a philosopher.

These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public.

So put not your trust in reconstructions." So if you don't believe the reconstruction, upon what, And he's an evolutionist.

So then on what basis do you believe this?

Here's William Howells, Harvard professor also of anthropology.

A great legend has grown up to plague both paleontologists and anthropologists that a man can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone, gaze at it, pass his hand over his forehead, like Johnny Carson, you know, once or twice, and then take a sheet of paper and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like as it tramped in the tertiary terrain.

If this were quite true, an anthropologist would make FBI look like a troop of Boy Scouts.

Why is anthropology so problematic when it comes to interpreting the meaning of bones?

Are many mainstream beliefs based on real science or blind faith in fairy tale stories that have grown into legends?

It started out basically with the famous Piltdown Man find.

This Piltdown Man or Dawn Man was discovered by Charles Dawson in 1912, and this is Dawson over here.

It was an ape-like mandible, so this part of the skull, combined with the top piece, which was human-like.

And then It was revealed as a hoax in 1953.

It was deliberately produced as a hoax, because everybody thought that this is what the ape man would look like or should look like.

Because obviously, if you combine an ape jaw with a human-like skull, that's kind of a missing link.

But what's interesting about this is that the hoax was not discovered for 40 years.

This was the ape man in science, mainstream science, for 40 years.

And no 1 discovered that it was a hoax, because no 1 looked or investigated scientifically very carefully.

Because if it already matches what you believe to be true, why investigate it?

Nebraska Man is the next man or missing link that came along.

See, here's Nebraska Man, nice drawing and his beautiful wife there.

And then from that tooth, they waved it over their forehead, and then they drew Nebraska Man based on this, and This is the missing link.

And Nebraska Man, this tooth was attempted to be used as evidence in the Scopes Monkey trial, but it wasn't allowed by the judge, thank goodness, because later on, it was pretty embarrassing.

You can see, isn't that incredible, what those anthropologists can do with a tooth?

He's a mainstream scientist back in the early 1900s.

And his discussion about this tooth around the time of the Scopes Monkey trial.

Osborne chided Nebraska native William Jennings Bryan in the press, who was a prosecutor in the case.

He said, the earth spoke to Bryan from his own state of Nebraska.

The Hesperopithecus tooth is like the still small voice.

This little tooth speaks volumes of truth in that it affords evidence of man's descent from the ape." So he also went on to say that such drawings or reconstructions would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no scientific value and undoubtedly inaccurate.

Okay, so he thinks this drawing is probably not quite true to form, but he still thinks it's a missing link, right, between apes and man.

But then they went back a little bit later.

They dug around where they found the tooth, and they found the rest of the skeleton, and it was a pig.

So He was just a little bit off in his...

And, you know, if that had become known ahead of time for the Scopes Monkey Trial, I just wonder if that would have made any difference in the outcome of the historical outcome of the trial.

Java man is a combination between this skullcap and this femur.

This femur is a modern human femur in structure, and this skullcap is from a gibbon, which is a type of monkey.

So they were found in the same level, layer of sediment, about 12 meters apart in the sediment.

And because they were so close together, they must have belonged to the same animal.

So they put them together, and they built Java Man.

Missing link, because you got an ape skullcap combined with a human femur, so it must be a missing link.

Eventually, they showed that this was a...

They realized that this was a false association, and they removed Java Man from the Museum of Natural History in the 1980s.

It took them a long time to figure out that this was a false association, that they weren't really the same creature.

So now let's look at creatures that aren't actually combinations of other creatures or outright hoaxes.

Here, lots of hominins have been found that seem to show sort of an evolutionary sequence in morphology.

You can start out with, from left to right, the bush baby.

And it kind of, kind of, you know, if you kind of use your imagination, you can kind of have an evolutionary sequence in morphology that gradually gets up into the modern human form.

You know, The gibbons hold their hands above their heads and they go bouncing along.

And then you got the orangutan and the chimp and the gorilla and then humans.

And you notice they're all kind of hunched over a little bit.

So obviously, if you can find a chimp or something that walks upright and holds its head upright, then that would be a missing link, clearly.

And then humans is more of a parabolic shape.

So if you can find jaws that are more parabolic in shape, then that's obviously a missing link.

So Ramipithecus was found in 1932 by a famous anthropologist, Louis Leakey.

So he put the fragments back together kind of in that parabolic U shape, right?

And then later, this is what, the full jaw was found, the mandible was discovered in 1977, And it was more of the U shape.

So obviously, the previous reconstruction was mistaken.

The Geologic Record

This first picture is a picture of the Grand Canyon.

You can see the horizontal layers all the way down a mile deep into the Grand Canyon.

And you notice the top also is very, very flat, as are all the layers that are horizontally pancaked there.

They're all like knife blades as far as separation of 1 layer from the next.

And then you see these little buttes off in the distance, and we'll talk a little bit about them as well.

The geologic column is made of sedimentary layers that have turned to rock.

The layers are generally very flat and even relative to each other, as in that first picture.

These layers are generally found all over the globe.

Some areas of the world have few layers or missing layers, completely missing layers.

And some areas have most, if not all, of layers, a full column.

The column is found on mountains, such as the Swiss Alps, Mount Everest, the Rockies, Himalayas, Appalachians, and other mountain ranges, and is popularly thought to be a record of millions and even billions of years of Earth's history.

And the geologic record contains fossils as well.

So there's names to the layers and then there's certain key index fossils as well that are associated with the layers and we'll talk about those more in the fossil record section.

So question is what would you expect an old geologic column to look like?

If the geologic record is truly representative of millions and billions of years of Earth's history, you'd kind of expect the first layers a long, long time ago to be laid down all flat.

And then they get uplifted a little bit, and they're eroded.

And then you got more layers laid on top, and they fill in these little gaps.

And then you get more erosion and more layering as you go on over time.

And so I would expect something to look like kind of like this over millions and millions of years.

The geologic columns should look more like that.

You know, there's the tops of dendritic looks to erosion of mountain ranges, and it's pretty random, a dendritic or tree-like pattern to the whole type of erosion that we generally see.

Here you see on the surface of these rocks an unevenness of erosion, And yet you see the layers that were previously laid down.

There is no erosion, evidently, that happened for millions and millions of years until the very top.

And then they got some erosion happening significantly.

This is the Grand Canyon in schematic cross section.

And then the Grand Canyon is actually uplifted a bit.

And then it's cut down like this in this very sharp V-shaped form.

And then these layers here are flat relative to each other, not really eroded except for flatly.

Because see this grand staircase, these layers here?

These layers once extended all over the Grand Canyon.

See these longitudinal staircase levels where they've been washed away?

It's a nice flat erosion, not the dendritic type of erosion that we usually see today.

And my question is, how do you do that slowly?

Here's a Coconino shale or a sandstone over the Hermit shale in the Grand Canyon.

You see the line between them is really flat, except where there's these sharp cracks in the underlying hermit shale that are filled with pure Coconino sandstone.

And my question is, how do you get a crack forming over millions of years without any contaminants.

The only thing it's filled by is the overlying sediment, pure Cockatino sandstone.

No debris, no other type of contaminant going on, pure Cockatino sandstone.

How does that happen over millions of years of time?

Here's the Kakaniyo sandstone on the bottom, and you see the angle here of the layers.

And then it got shaved off, shaved off flatly, and then you've got the Tora Weep formation on the top, flatly deposited as thin as a razor blade between the 2 layers.

How do you shave something off so flatly, slowly, is the question, and non-catastrophically?

This got shaved off nice and flatly, and then this layer got deposited on top nice and slowly.

Envisioned by evolutionary theory, there should be considerable evidence found of erosion and infilling by successive geologic formations during the weathering expected over millions of years.

The geological layers of the Grand Canyon are remarkable in showing little or no evidence of erosion between different layers.

Instead, we see pancake layering very much consistent with the rapid deposition envisioned by the flood map.

Erosion did not occur until all of the layers had been deposited.

How did they survive any erosion over millions and hundreds of millions of years that they sat there as the surface of the earth, or the surface of the underwater sediment.

And they didn't get eroded in an uneven manner.

And here's all these layers also in the Grand Canyon.

Many of them are what are called turbidites.

They were deposited by underwater currents or these turbiditic flows that contain mud flows.

And here's a little experiment done by Professor Veit.

He has a video series as well that is very interesting.

Here you have a typical surface of the earth with valleys and hills and what have you.

And now we're covering them with water, the underground fountains shoot out, it's pouring rain from the top, ocean water is being poured over the land and you have these massive catastrophic mud flows.

I'm going to create an earthquake over there.

And the mud is going to start flowing under the water from the high ground over hills, over valleys, there it goes.

It actually goes over the tops and into the valleys and covers everything.

And you will see that it fills up the valley and smoothly covers the top.

Now what if there's an earthquake over there and there's an upheaval and boom!

Another 1 comes along and flows over this 1.

The Fossil Record

This hour's lecture anyway, is the fossil record.

And most people, at least as children, are interested in fossils, especially dinosaurs.

And there's a lot of really interesting fossils that can be found in the geologic record.

And mainstream interpretation, of course, is that they're millions and millions of years old.

And from an Adventist perspective, at least my perspective on Adventism, is that that's not tenable.

Either these fossils are young and Adventism is true, or they're old and Adventism isn't true.

So let's look at a few arguments from both sides and see where you end up.

It's interesting because the fossils in the geologic column from lowest, the Cambrian, all the way up to the Tertiary and Quaternary are very ordered.

They are very predictable, which is surprising given the perspective of a flood where you would expect some sort of chaos, sort of mixing up and stirring up things and things randomly buried, but they're not.

In the fossil record at the lowest level in the Cambrian, you got single-celled organisms and worms and mollusks and things like that.

You move up a little bit and finally you get the first vascular plants and then some primitive fishes and then finally first reptiles and finally mammals.

And it looks like it goes from simple to complex just like in standard evolutionary theory.

Can a massive flood or a series of closely spaced catastrophes explain such an ordering of the fossil record?

And to be honest, it's somewhat difficult.

And I don't know if anybody that I've ever read has a complete answer that satisfies all these problems.

If the fossil record represents a series of rapid catastrophes within recent history, why is it so ordered and predictable?

Why do simple organisms appear in the lowest layers and progressively more and more complex organisms appear in higher and higher layers?

I'm not suggesting that this is a complete solution to the problem, but these are some possibilities that are at least worth considering and thinking about.

Number 1, in real life or in modern life, where do things usually live?

Where would you expect if you would go look for something in a water column or in a geologic order, where would you expect to find worms, mollusks, snails, et cetera, relative to, let's say, fish or ducks?

Where would you expect in that vertical orientation within the lake to find mollusks and worms and simple creatures?

And where would, on generally speaking, where would you expect to find mammals and ducks and things like that?

Let's say I got a big, giant bulldozer, and I'm going along bulldozing a whole bunch of mud.

And it's a relatively small little pond, let's say.

And I just slosh the whole pond in 1 shot with this bulldozer.

And I just instantly freeze everything in that pond, bury it, boom, like that.

Where would I expect to dig it up a few years later?

Generally, you expect at least a similar order, simple organisms and then more multicellular organisms, and on and on up you go.

However, that doesn't explain everything.

There's also an interesting paper that was published in 2001 in ecology research.

And it seems like the relative abundance of creatures as they lived in life, the total population size is related to their distribution within the fossil record.

They write, species identities and the relative abundances are non-random properties of communities that persist over long periods of ecologic time and across geographic space.

This is consistent with species abundance contributing heavily to evolutionary patterns.

In other words, if a species has a much greater size in population, more likely or not, you'll expect to find it lower in a column or more widely distributed in a bunch of ecologic niches or environments.

And so if you have, let's say, trilobites that are millions and millions and millions of them, you'd expect them to be on very low levels, as well as all the way up through all the higher levels.

And that is, in fact, what we see in the fossil record as well.

So Relative abundance, not necessarily order of evolution, can explain evolutionary patterns as per this paper, which I think is pretty interesting.

If you have a catastrophe and You happen to survive because you are able to escape a little better.

You have some...you can climb mountains a little faster.

You'll generally tend on overall to be buried higher.

You may be able to survive the first few hits of a massive catastrophe and survive a little longer and get buried a little later.

There's also sorting factors like sorting in water.

Water itself as a medium is a natural sorter of materials.

For example, different types of pollen thought to represent an evolutionary sequence may in fact represent a water sorted pattern to at least some degree because it's known that different types of pollens sink in a water column at different rates.

Here's a scanning micrograph of different types of pollens and deciduous pollens for example sink in water in a few minutes, compared to pine pollens, which float for much longer times and sometimes years before they sink.

In 1933, Paul noted that pine pollen could retain its buoyancy for up to 4 years.

Would you expect pine pollens to be higher or lower relative to deciduous pollens in the fossil record?

And that's exactly what, generally speaking, what you see.

Pines are thought to have evolved after deciduous.

Different morphologic expressions of the same organisms in different environments is also interesting.

The exact same creature in different environments will look different, which is kind of startling.

I got into this debate with Glenn Morton.

And 1 of his big arguments is for Manifera, or these plankton creatures.

And you can see that lower, the early Paleocene, 645 million years, versus the late Paleocene, 58 million years ago, you can see an evolutionary sequence that's kind of gradual.

You know, kind of a rounded look here, and then less and less rounded, and then more angular by the time you get up to here.

And so for a long time, this was believed to be an evolutionary progression in morphology.

But then subsequent experiments came along, and it was found that all of these creatures are identical.

It's just if you put them under different pressures and different temperatures, They take on different morphologic shapes.

So a few more problems for flood geology.

How do proponents of catastrophe like me explain some of these things.

For example, termite nests have been found in the Morrison Formation.

You know, these termite nests underground that are built in different regions of the world, especially Africa, massive, massive termite nests.

And this is generally what they look like.

And These formations have been found in the fossil record, which begs the question, how on Earth, during a massive series of closely-spaced watery floods or catastrophes, do you get termites building gigantic nests like this, which today take, you know, 50, 100 years to build.

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Series

Sean Pitman ~ The Emperor Has No Clothes: Creation vs. Evolution

The Geologic Record

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Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Atheism, Apatheism, or Adventism

4. Should We Still Take Genesis Seriously?

1h 23m

Apologetics or Apologies: How to Share Your Faith in Adversarial Settings

Disarming Pharisees and Sadducees

47m

Egypt, the Exodus & Moses' Quest for God's Destiny

3. The Wilderness, the Training, & the Eternally Burning Bush

1h

Does Theistic Evolution Create More Problems Than It Solves?

50m

Questioning Faith: Making Sense of God, the Universe, and Eternity

01 Has Science Disproven That There’s a Creator?

1h 4m

Questioning Faith: Making Sense of God, the Universe, and Eternity

03 Given the Laws of Nature, Are Miracles Possible?

1h 4m

Baptizing the Devil: Evolution and the Seduction of Christianity

5. Evolution and Last Day Events

1h 3m

Plenary

Q&A Panel Discussion

54m

Origin Stories: Creation vs Evolution

Bending Time or Bending Truth

56m

Country Wisdom Season 2

Is the Bible Trustworthy?

28m

Sound Doctrine