7 simple, common-sense evidences that blow the literal Bible out of the water

From r/atheism some good ammo, common knowledge, and easy to understand material to use in our all-but-pointless-debates with theists! Enjoy:

7 simple, common-sense evidences that blow the literal Bible out of the water

The Bible has quite a few dates and talks about lots of old men who supposedly lived for 900 years. Using these dates and records, Christian apologist Bishop Ussher created the most commonly accepted chronology that claims that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. Most Christian Fundamentalists still accept this date or at least a very similar one. Here are seven reasons that they are crazy! These can be some fun little tools for anyone who wants to debate a Christian fundamentalist in front of a reasonable audience.

1. The Pyramids Everyone knows that they are there. Even Southern Baptist apologists can't deny their existence. So how does their very existence destroy Biblical inerrantism? Because every single one of them was built hundreds of years before the Bible says that the Flood supposedly wiped out humanity. The Great Pyramid of Khufu in Giza was built around 2550 BC according to Egyptian records. That is 200 years before the flood. Embarassingly, God's miles high flood made no mark on the pyramids or their contents. The mummies and artifacts inside are still dry and in great shape. If there really had been enough water to cover the Earth, it would have exerted a force of at least 1.8 million pounds per square foot on the Pyramids (assuming that the water was high enough to cover the entire Earth and all the mountains as the Bible says). This amount of pressure would have completely destroyed the antiquated architecture and mummies.
2. Tree Rings Dendrochronology, the study of tree rings, is an interesting and informative science that can tell us much about history. Every year, each tree creates a new growth ring. The size of this ring depends on the conditions of that year. Scientists can take cores of these trees and count the number of tree rings in order to give the age of the tree. Each year has a distinctive pattern depending on the local conditions. Amazingly, we have a species of tree, known as Bristlecone Pines, that provide a record of tree rings that extends back 11,000 years to 9,000 BC. This is an obvious problem for those that believe that the Earth was still "matter unorganized" back then. We even have a tree, known as Methuselah, that has now been alive for 4,842 years and counting as shown by its rings. That means that the tree was born in 2831 BC. This tree (and many others) kept living right on through the Flood that supposedly killed everything in 2350. The lowly Bristlecone Pine has toppled the Holy Bible simply by living when it should have died.

3 Carbon Dating Radiometric dating is one of the strongest killers of Biblical literacy and one that creationists love to hate. Basically, radiometric dating measures the amount of an isotope and its decayed products are present in a given sample. It is based on the universally admitted fact that radioactive things decay at a certain rate. Through simple math, one can figure out the age of the sample. Radiometric dating is important because it proves that fossils are much older than a few thousand years old. This data shows that the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years which obviously destroys the Ussher Chronology. Creationists often claim that "decay rates may have changed" or "I carbon dated my dead cat and the answer was off, so..." I have heard all kinds of silly attempts to discredit radiometric dating. The fact remains that we have used this method with not only carbon-14, but with more than 50 other isotopes to confirm the dates. Each of these 50 isotopes decays at a different rate. Yet, they all agree that the Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old. This is important. The half-lives for isotopes range from 70*10^-18 seconds for Be-8 to 2.28*10²⁴ years for Te-128. This is a huge range of time. That means that God would have had to speed up each of the 50 isotope's half-lives by vastly different factors in order to fool us into thinking that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. How ridiculous. My question is: why do creationists make insane claims about basic laws of physics in order to defend a Bronze Age myth?

4 Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Sumerian Before 2250 BC and the Tower of Babel, according to Biblical mythology, the only language on the planet was Adamic. All of the other languages, including Egyptian and Sumerian, were created by the confusion of tongues. Therefore, it is devastating that we have found hundreds of examples of writing that date to a thousand years before the Tower of Babel. Egyptian writings are also powerful evidence against Biblical literalism. The first known Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription was the Narmer Palette which is a collection of writing that dates to 3200 BC. This writing existed 1,000 years before the Tower of Babel when the Egyptian language was supposedly created. The first examples of Sumerian Cuneiform date to 3300 BC. Obviously, two completely different languages existed long before the Tower of Babel "created" them all and neither of them was Adamic.

5 Egyptian Dynastic Records Thanks to a well-developed system of record keeping and well-preserved papyri (which oddly enough, survived the Flood), we know an amazing amount about the Egyptian dynasties of the Old Kingdom. We know the exact years that each pharoah rose to power and then was replaced beginning with the Pharoah Zanakht, who rose to power in 2649. This line continues unbroken until the Pharoah Unas (2356-2323 BC) who obviously survived the "Global Flood" in 2349. This line continues until Nemtyenmzaf (2255-2246 BC) who reigned while God was changing everyone's language. Luckily, God forgot Egypt existed and no major disruptive linguistic change occurred during those few centuries when the Tower of Babel suppposedly happened.

6 Kangaroos, Lemurs, Frogs, and Emus Besides the obvious absurdity that Noah crammed 2 of each of the more than 5,000 mammal species, 10,000 bird species, 1,000,000 insect species, and 9,000 reptile species in a 450 foot long boat, there are other biological problems with the Bible. Leaving aside all the evidence for evolution, we can look at current animal distribution to see that Noah's Ark is bunk. Supposedly, Noah collected 2 of each animal into his boat and rode the Flood out for a year until he disembarked and released all of these animals from one point on Earth (legend says in Turkey). They then reproduced and spread out to where they are now. If this were true, animals would be present wherever they could have migrated since the Flood. Animals go where they can survive. That would mean that there would not be the kind of differences that we see in the world. Why are most Marsupials in Australia? Are we really expected to believe that all the Kangaroos got off the Ark and made a beeline for Australia without leaving one behind on the mainland? Why did all the Lemurs head for Madagascar? Why are the platyrrhines only found in the Western Hemisphere and catarrhines only in the Old World? How did all those animals get to Australia or any other island at all? Frogs cannot survive in salt water, so how did they get to Australia? I could list such problems in animal distribution forever. These questions are all easily answered by evolution, but they really make no sense if we accept Genesis.

7 Oil and Coal Every time a creationist drives he is benefitting from the fact that he is wrong. Petroleum only exists because the Earth is billions of years old. As most know, it is formed when the remains of phytoplankton and zooplankton settle to the bottom of the sea and are compressed and decomposed in anaerobic conditions. There is no other way to make petroleum. Enormous amounts of heat, pressure, and time are require to create petroleum. Only geologic time could do it. The gas in your car is great proof that Christian Fundamentalists are wrong when they said that the Earth was 6,000 years old.

These seven common knowledge evidences will convince any rational, intelligent person that Biblical literalism is absurd. With a little bit of high school history and science, anyone can realize the truth.

Biblical inerrancy is dead. I would love to see the apologists try to resurrect it in face of so much evidence.

Can God Exist?

Can God Exist?           

Notice that I’m not asking if he does exist, only if it is possible for a being such as the god described in the bible to actually exist.  Many properties attributed to god have counter properties that should logically render his existence, as least as described near impossible. 

A pair of incompatible properties is omniscience and free will.  Omniscience concerning the past and present is not a problem, but omniscience regarding the future implies it has been determined.  That is possible only in a deterministic world where free will can’t exist.  If god knows everything that has ever been, and ever will be, then no human could ever be held responsible for their actions since god created them knowing in advance everything they would do throughout their lives, thus free will is an illusion and you can hardly be punished or rewared in the afterlife based on the actions you had no real part in deciding in any meaningful way.  Not only that but god would also know everything he would do forever on in the future, negating gods free will as well.  In order to have free will, you must have more than one option, each of which is avoidable. This means that before you make a choice, there must be a state of uncertainty during a period of potential: you cannot know the future. Even if you think you can predict your decision, if you claim to have free will, you must admit the potential (if not the desire) to change your mind before the decision is final. 

The problem of evil is the argument that the existence of evil is incompatible with the concept of an omnipotent and perfectly good god. Variation does not depend on the existence of evil.  A truly omnipotent god could create all possible worlds.  A "good" god can create only "good" worlds.  A god that created all possible worlds would have no moral qualities whatsoever, and could be replaced by a random generator.  The standard response is to argue a distinction between "could create" and "would create." In other words, god "could" create all possible worlds but that is simply not in god's nature.  This has been argued by theologians for centuries. However, the result is that a "good" god is incompatible with some possible worlds, thus incapable of creating them without losing the property of being a totally different god.

One of my favorites is the omnipotence issue.  Could god make a rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it?  If not he’s not omnipotent, if he can, then there is something he can’t do, lifting the rock, so he is not omnipotent.

The dysteleological argument or argument from poor design is an argument against the existence of god, specifically against the existence of a creator god. It is based on the following chain of reasoning: An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator god would create organisms that have optimal design. Organisms have features that are suboptimal. Therefore, god either did not create these organisms or is not omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent.  A few examples of the suboptimal design: The existence of the blind spot in the human eye. The unstable hollow bones built for flight in birds like penguins and ostriches, and the sturdy bones built for non-flight in animals like bats. Vestigial third molar in humans.  Some other primates with differing jaw shapes make use of the third molar. The vestigial Femur and pelvis in whales, the ancestor of whales lived on land.  And thousands of others.

Origin of the Universe

Origin of the Universe

So maybe I accept evolution, but if it’s true then how did the universe start, that had to be god right?

Wrong.  If there was a god then he is responsible or our powers of logic and reason and to disregard such a gift should indeed be blasphemy to a believer.  According to creationists there existed an omnipotent god that always was and always will be, and through his power and will the universe came to be.  Certainly a simple explanation, but I suspect there is more to it.

To some, actually to most people, believing in a universe creating itself is a ludicrous idea, and maybe it is, but does a divine creator really make more sense?  Some things we know about the beginning, there was a big bang.  We know this because we can see the evidence left behind by the bang all around us today in the form of background radiation that permeates the universe, it DID happen.  What can be argued is if the bang was the source of space-time and matter.  As our knowledge in the field of quantum physics continues to expand, the idea of the bang being the start of EVERYTHING is becoming somewhat outdated.  But let’s talk about the bang first.

According to big bang theory, there existed a singularity before time and space where the laws of physics may have operated in a different way.  It is said that in this state of near infinite mass and density that space may have had time like properties and time space like properties.  This singularity, becoming unstable exploded forth becoming the universe.  It inflated at an extreme rate carrying along matter with the spatial expansion.  The background radiation is just one piece of evidence supporting this idea, another is that space is still expanding, and the expansion rate is still increasing.  Right now every galaxy in the universe is moving away from every other galaxy.  I hate to use this example because it’s used so often but it does explain it simply.  Take a deflated balloon, with a black marker make 20-50 dots on the balloon, now blow it up, what happens?  All the dots move away from each other, that is what’s happening in our universe now. 

A popular creationist argument against the big bang goes like this, everything that has a beginning must have been created, or everything that has come into existence was brought into existence by something else, and that original something else was god.  As long as you don’t put too much thought into that it seems to make some kind of sense.  The kitten came into existence because the cat gave birth to it, the chair came into existence because I built it.  This logic is ultimately flawed however, because quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of space have been observed to produce particle/anti-particle pair for short periods of time out of nothing, temporarily violating the law of conservation of energy.  Therefore having a beginning does not necessarily require a cause.  It’s possible the singularity that set off the bang could have been a type of fluctuation, appearing from nothing to make something.  Now would you consider it more likely that a super complex almighty god came from nothing, or a singularity?  Sure we’ve seen particles appear out of nowhere, but have you ever heard of a dog popping into existence out of nothing?  My point is that with the complexity ascribed to god, the only logical way he could exist is if he evolved into his omnipotence, but we’ll deal with the nature of god later.

Now the big bang isn’t the only scientific model for the origin of the universe though it is still incorporated into the others since it is nearly impossible to deny that it happened.  Another origin theory is Brane Cosmology, derived from M-Theory.  It provides a larger framework for existence and a causal event for the bang.  It postulates that the visible, four-dimensional universe is restricted to a Brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the "bulk".  In the bulk model, other branes may be moving through this bulk. Interactions with the bulk, and possibly with other branes, can influence our Brane and thus introduce effects not seen in more standard cosmological models.  A collision of 2 or more branes would provide an energy release large enough to account for the big bang.

As one of its attractive features, the model can explain the weakness of gravity relative to the other fundamental forces of nature, thus solving the so-called hierarchy problem. In the Brane picture, the other three forces (electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces) are localized on the Brane, but gravity has no such constraint and so much of its attractive power "leaks" into the bulk. As a result, the force of gravity should appear significantly stronger on small (subatomic or at least sub-millimeter) scales, where less gravitational force has "leaked". Various experiments are currently underway to test this.  That’s the beauty of science, it is a continuous effort to discover the truth, no one claims science has all the answers, only that science has the potential to one day have them.

There is another theory of the origin of the universe that derives from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.  Before we get into what that is and where it leads you need to know about the 2 slit experiment. 

If you shine a light through two very narrow slits, very close together, onto a screen. The light wave emerging from one slit interfered with the wave emerging from the other slit, and the result was not two narrow stripes of light (one for each slit) but a whole series of stripes that we call an interference pattern. Now let's consider this in terms of photons, particles of light. You might expect it to work as follows.  We shine the photons at the slits, some go through one slit, some through the other.  The photons emerging from one slit interfere with the photons emerging from the other, and we get an interference pattern.  Now suppose we make the light very dim, and replace the screen we use to observe the result with a photographic film, thus giving us a permanent record of the light striking the screen.  Dimmer light means fewer photons, and if the lights dim enough we can actually see the impact of the individual photons on the film.  Instead of stripes, we get very tiny spots where the photons hit, but the spots arrange themselves into the interference pattern.  That is, the places where we would have bright stripes if the light were brighter, are the places we see most of the photons hitting. Where the dark stripes would be, we get very few photons.  One can actually make the light so dim that photons pass through the slits one at a time.  Physicists have already done this! And as the spots accumulate on the film, the interference pattern appears.

And there's the problem. If we send just one photon at the slits, and it passes through one slit or the other, what is there for it to interfere with when it emerges? There must be interference because if we do this over and over again, an interference pattern emerges. However, if the photon passes through one slit, there's nothing coming out of the other slit!

The only way to resolve this is to go back to wave thinking again. The wave particle passes through both slits, and the result that emerges from each slit interferes with the result from the other slit.  It's more than simply saying we don't know which slit the photon passes through.  The photon doesn't pass through just one slit at all.  In other words, as the photon passes through the slits, not only don't we know its location, it doesn't even have a location.  It doesn't have a location until we observe it on the film.  This paradox is the heart of what has come to be called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.

The Copenhagen interpretation denies that the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics has anything to say about what nature is really like, in particular, as regards the central problem of measurement.  The wave function of a physical system evolves, according to the Schrödinger equation, into a linear superposition of different quantum states encompassing all possibilities. But actual measurement always finds the physical system in a definite state; and this is referred to as “the collapse of the wave function.” The paradox is usually presented as the parable of Schrödinger’s cat imprisoned in a box with a capsule of deadly cyanide gas that would be released the moment a radioactive nuclide decays. The cat is therefore in a superposition of being alive, being dead, and being both alive and dead at the same time until the box is opened, or a measurement is performed; at which instant, the cat is either dead, or alive.  Simply this means that nothing is truly real until it is measured, such as by an observation.  Now if the universe is viewed in this manner, existing in a superposition of all of its possible states, once its wave function was collapsed, one universal history out of all possible histories becomes true.  This in turn means that the universe could have come into a definite existence 20 minutes ago, but since its wave function collapsed the history of everything leading up to this point has become real retroactively, giving the universe a beginning without a true beginning. 

So now you’re probably saying well scientists can’t even agree on things, they must be wrong.  It’s important to understand that none of the theories mentioned preclude any of the others from existing.  But my point in mentioning them is this, the universe is an amazing awe inspiring place, and we know just a fraction of what there is to know about it.  By accepting a creator god we are eliminating the need to continue the pursuit of knowledge about our universe, and how can anyone claim ignorance as a desirable human trait?  It may very well be that science is way off the mark with its interpretation of the available evidence, but as new knowledge comes to light we are able to form a better more complete picture of existence.  To claim that you already have all the answers because an old book tells you so is the height of arrogance, Truth can only come from the combination of knowledge and wisdom, which in turn can only be derived through the application of thought and reason.

Evolution vs. Divine Creation

Let me start off by saying that anyone who reads all of this, well, you have way too much time on your hands… though not nearly as much as I do.  I put together what you're about to read inbetween working on chapters of the book I'm writing, just to keep me busy when I'm not feeling especially creative. Having been raised as a catholic I thoroughly understand what makes people want to believe in a creator god, I admit, it’s a nice comforting thought.  What I’m going to do here is try to explain why atheism is the only logical conclusion to come to when considering life, the universe, and everything else.  I have no illusions that I will change the mind of anyone who believes in god so I’m really writing this for me and not you, but feel free to continue on.  I’m going to talk about many topics, from the origin of the universe to that of life, to the history of religion and religious beliefs, to a study of the bible itself, and as a result this will probably be posted in many parts so bear with me.  I’m not going to go in any particular order as far as the topics go but life feels like a good spot to start.

Life

Evolution vs. Divine Creation

How did life arise on the planet earth?  According to the bible god created the heavens and the earth, and all life in six days through his power and word and will.  Well that was an easy answer, guess we should move on to the next topic.  Wait could there be more to it?  Going by what the bible tells us god created all life during those six days.  There was no new creation afterward which means that all of the diversity of life came into being at once.  Think about the implications of that.  Humans and dinosaurs would have been sharing the planet.  As a believer you may say, so what, why couldn’t they have been?  Well there is one glaring flaw in that way of thinking, there is no other way besides the bible to confirm this assertion.  There exists no physical evidence to support the supposition that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, there is however, much evidence to the contrary. 

But wait, there is evidence of humans and dinosaurs together you say?  We used to call them dragons?  There are cave drawings and burial clothes with seemingly dinosaur/dragon images.  Even today people report sightings of dino like creatures around the world.  I’m sorry to say this provides no proof at all, claims and drawings and old fantasy stories do not equal evidence, especially when weighed against the counter evidence.  One thing that would prove beyond a doubt that man and dino lived at the same time would be the discovery of fossilized human remains in the same geological strata as a dinosaur’s.  To date, despite the massive amount of dino fossils unearthed there has been no such discovery.  There have been many hoaxes regarding human bones or tracks in the last 50 years, and while far too time consuming to get into each example, they have ALL either been proven false, or miraculously vanished somehow and could not be tested.  Anyone who would like to cite and discuss specific examples please do I will be happy to discuss it with you. 

Now is it possible that human remains may actually be found next to some dino bones?  Sure it’s possible.  That’s the thing with science, anything that could potentially be possible rules out the use of the word impossible.  Something being possible however does not mean it is probable.  This is where the power of the human mind comes into play, using logic and reason, what seems more likely to have occurred?  Of all the fossils of dinosaurs uncovered there are no human remains with them.  Of all the human fossilized remains found there are no dino bones present with them.  There are millions of years of time separating the last of the dinosaurs and the earliest man according to our geological records and radioactive dating of the bones.  Again, what seems more likely?  That we have yet to find a piece of evidence linking them, or that they didn’t exist together so no evidence can be found? 

If you accept that dinosaurs and humans did NOT live at the same time then you need not read further, because by accepting this you have rejected the account of creation given in genesis and thereby rendered the bible false or at least highly suspect from then on.  Many will not accept this though, and nor should they on its own, after all, lack of evidence is not evidence in itself for an opposing theory.  Though logical deduction does tend to point away from the biblical account.

What is the opposing scientific explanation for life on earth?  In a word, abiogenesis or biopoesis which is the study of how life on Earth could have arisen from inanimate matter.  Most amino acids, often called "the building blocks of life", can form via natural chemical reactions unrelated to life, as demonstrated in the Miller–Urey experiment and similar experiments, which involved simulating some of the conditions of the early Earth, in a scientific laboratory.  In all living things, these amino acids are organized into proteins, and the construction of these proteins is mediated by nucleic acids.  

The first living things on Earth are thought to be single cell prokaryotes, perhaps evolved from organic molecules surrounded by a membrane-like structure.  The oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 billion years old, approximately one billion years after the formation of the Earth itself.  By 2.4 billion years ago the ratio of stable isotopes of carbon, iron and sulfur shows the action of living things on inorganic minerals and sediments, and molecular biomarkers indicate photosynthesis, demonstrating that life on Earth was widespread by this time. The sequence of chemical events that led to the first nucleic acids is not yet known. Several hypotheses about early life have been proposed, most notably the iron-sulfur world theory and the RNA world hypothesis. 

There is no standard model for the origin of life as of yet, there are many differing hypotheses, but all adhere to a similar framework.  It is also important to note that the gaps in our knowledge do not provide proof that god created life.  The gaps merely mean that we don’t know for sure YET.  Many people of faith have used their lack of understanding as evidence for god or gods.  Remember that before we knew what the sun was there was a sun god to explain it, though that seems silly now. 

Even though the initial emergence of life is still debated by scientists, there is little to no debate about what happened next, evolution.

Evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations.  This change results from interactions between processes which introduce variation into a population, and other processes which remove it. As a result, variants with particular traits become more or less common.  A trait is a particular characteristic, anatomical, biochemical or behavioural, that is the result of gene–environment interaction.

The main source of variation is mutation, which introduces genetic changes.  These changes are heritable, and may give rise to alternative traits in organisms.  Another source of variation is genetic recombination which shuffles the genes into new combinations which can result in organisms exhibiting different traits.  Under certain circumstances, variation can also be increased by the transfer of genes between species, and by the extremely rare, but significant, wholesale incorporation of genomes through endosymbiosis. 

Wait, isn’t evolution only a theory?  It’s not a fact or a scientific law.

I’ve heard this statement many times in my life so let’s clear this up really quick.  Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty, above a mere hypothesis but below a law.  Scientists do not use the terms that way, however.  According to the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses."  No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature.  So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution, or the atomic theory, or the theory of relativity, for they are not expressing reservations about its truth.  The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'  All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence.  Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers.  The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.  The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time.  Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.

So what kind of evidence is out there supporting evolution? 

The animals we are most familiar with are tetrapods, they are vertebrates and they live on land. That includes humans, almost all domestic animals and most of the wild ones that any child would recognize: mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. The vast majority of vertebrates, however, are not tetrapods, but fish. There are more kinds of fish, in fact, than all the species of tetrapods combined. Indeed, through the lens of evolution, tetrapods are just one branch of the fish family tree, the members of which just happen to be adapted for life out of water. The first transition from water to land took place more than 360 million years ago. It was one of the most demanding such moves ever made in the history of life. How did fins become legs?  And how did the transitional creatures cope with the formidable demands of land life, from a desiccating environment to the crushing burden of gravity?  It used to be thought that the first landlubbers were stranded fish that evolved to spend more and more time ashore, returning to water to reproduce.  Over the past 20 years, palaeontologists have uncovered fossils that have turned this idea upside down. The earliest tetrapods, such as Acanthostega from eastern Greenland around 365 million years ago, had fully formed legs, with toes, but retained internal gills that would soon have dried out in any long stint in air.  Fish evolved legs long before they came on land. The earliest tetrapods didmost of their evolving in the more forgiving aquatic environment.  Coming ashore seems to have been the very last stage.  Researchers suspect that the ancestors of tetrapods were creatures called elpistostegids.  These very large, carnivorous, shallow-water fish would have looked and behaved much like alligators, or giant salamanders.  They looked like tetrapods in many respects, except that they still had fins. Until recently, elpistostegids were known only from small fragments of fossils that were poorly preserved, so it has been hard to get a rounded picture of what they were like.  In the past few years, several discoveries from northern Canada have changed all that.  In 2006, Edward Daeschler and his colleagues described spectacularly well preserved fossils of an elpistostegid known as Tiktaalik that allow us to build up a good picture of an aquatic predator with distinct similarities to tetrapods, from its flexible neck, to its very limb-like fin structure.  The discovery and painstaking analysis of Tiktaalik illuminates the stage before tetrapods evolved, and shows how the fossil record throws up surprises, albeit ones that are entirely compatible with evolutionary thinking.

Now if fish with feet aren’t enough to convince you let’s talk about some other transitional fossils.  Creationists like to claim that no transitional fossils exists, but they do, in abundance.  As evolution is a continually ongoing process ALL fossils are transitional fossils, but some people need more obvious evidence.  Archaeopteryx is one of those. 

Archaeopteryx is commonly seen as the earliest known bird, but many suspected that it was better seen as a dinosaur, one with feathers. Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s colleague and friend, discussed the possible evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, and palaeontologists speculated, that dinosaurs with feathers might one day be found.  In the 1980s, deposits from the early Cretaceous period about 125 million years ago in northern China vindicated these speculations with discoveries of primitive birds in abundance, alongside dinosaurs with feathers, and feather-like plumage.  Starting with the discovery of the small theropod Sinosauropteryx, a variety of feather-clad forms have been found.  Many of these feathered dinosaurs couldn’t possibly have flown, showing that feathers first evolved for reasons other than flight, possibly for sexual display or thermal insulation.  Palaeontologists are now beginning to think that their speculations weren’t nearly wild enough, and that feathers were quite common in dinosaurs.

The discovery of feathered dinosaurs not only vindicated the idea of transitional forms, but also showed that evolution has a way of coming up with a dazzling variety of solutions when we had no idea that there were even problems. Flight could have been no more than an additional opportunity that presented itself to creatures already clothed in feathers.   

Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds, it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features.  They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group.  Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two.  Check out a recent Futurama episode for a funny look at this topic. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.

Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology.  All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships.  Geneticists speak of the "molecular clock" that records the passage of time.  This molecular data also shows how various organisms are transitional within evolution.

Another major point raised by creationists and the religious is that of irreducible complexity.  They state that partially evolved organs can not function, and thus provide no evolutionary advantage and would not be passed on.  And example used frequently is that of the eye.  It has been said that half an eye is no good, or a quarter of an eye, either it was formed all at once in present working order or it could not be.  Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even "incomplete" eyes might confer benefits, such as helping creatures orient toward light and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement.  Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics.  It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.  There have been MANY other organs cited by creationists, all have been shot down, from wings to bacterial flagellum.  And in animals today there exist vestigial organs, things which once had a use but no longer do and are evolving away, such as the human appendix, or the feet and toe bones of whales.

A couple other interesting things to note as far as evolution and the fossil record goes.  Homosapiens, according to the evidence available can be traced back to roughly 200k years ago.  Our humanlike ancestors go back much further, but those hominids are not human, though many species were very close.  Horse evolution provides very compelling evidence for evolution as well, check it out if you get a chance. 

Accepting the abundance of information supporting evolution does not necessarily rule out the existence of a creator god, but it does rule out the bible as a reliable source of information, and without that source evidence for the existence of a god becomes scanter.