Whales

For some unexplained reason, UTEOTW, you seem to be totally unable to process the following fact:

"We believe God, not science"

That IS our interpretation!!!!

You say that rock is 100,000,000 years old; we say that it is ~6-10K years old & that's simply how God created it!

Or to say it in simpler terms, God said "let it be", and it was; just like man found it (whatever "IT" happens to be), and then started deducing all the ancient age interpretations that are now so prevalent.

If you choose to accept man's version, fine, but don't start dinigrating others because we don't agree.

One more time, try to understand. The "evidence " is the same for all; some of us just prefer to accept by faith the scenario that God gave for it all, while you & others prefer to believe man and his scenario!

All your 'epistleing' and palavering is not going to alter our acceptance of God's version.

Now if you are talking about some topic that God does not address, then I'll listen to your "expertise", but if God has said "---", then I'm going to believe Him, regardless of your scientific interpretations.

Once more, our "INTERPRETATION" is that we believe God rather than man when there are conflicts!

So please, get a new horse to ride and drop the "What's your interpretation?" The horse you insist on riding has died!

 

The evidence left in creation does not leave the literal 6000 year seperate creation as a viable interpretation.

Why can't I believe that God that filled my eyes with light from the great galaxy of andromeda after traveling 3 million years to get there? There were no men involved between his creation and my eyes. Therefore, the great galaxy of andromeda is not a lie.

The interpretation that we must take the first chapter of Genesis literally, however, is from men such as yourself. There is a possibility of error there.

I choose to believe God rather than men.

 

Paul of Eugene sez:

Glad to hear it.

Now, What does God SAY?

 

This is a very easy question - let me be direct.

Gen 1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
Gen 1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
Gen 1:23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

1Cr 15:38 But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.
1Cr 15:39 All flesh [is] not the same flesh: but [there is] one [kind of] flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, [and] another of birds.


Clearly the Bible - which is ultimate truth - eliminates the possibility that A) Land Animals came before marine animals, and B) that land animals and marine animals have a common ancestry. So right off the get-go the evolutionary conjecture is trumped by the Word.

I am reminded of the little AiG sketch Ken Ham does when he speaks. He draws 2 half circles separated by a space. He asks the question "what should this be?". Most people 'fill in the blank space' and say it should be a circle. However, Ken Ham simply states that nothing is missing it is exactly the way he drew it. If you look for something that is not there, you can invent all sorts of 'links', but that doesn't make them true. Clearly, there is no observational evidence in the present that can verify the evolutionary claims. There is only fossils of the past which must be interpreted to mean anything. Unfortunately, no one (at this forum anyway) was here a few million years ago to observe this evolution. For now, you must have faith that it happened as evolution describes.

Unfortunately for evolutionists, that faith is contrary to the faith one recieves from reading the Bible.

From AiG:
To make a tail for a whale
The difference between the tail of a whale and a cow’s tail (or that of any other mammal, for that matter) is quite simple. When a cow swats the flies from its back, it moves its tail generally from side to side. A whale, however, can’t do this. Not that it has to swat flies, but it does have to move its tail up and down in order to swim.

Now while this differing way of moving a tail may sound insignificant, it isn’t. It is enough to show that the supposed evolution of whales from land-dwelling mammals cannot possibly be true. Why not? Simply because that little change of direction in the way the tail moves, could not happen without some rather elaborate changes between the side-swinging creatures and those which swing their tails vertically.

Any land-dwelling mammal wishing to evolve into a whale could certainly practise moving its left-right tail in an up-down fashion, and there is no doubt that it could certainly improve up to a point. Maybe even learn to swim faster and catch more fish. But after that its tail movement would begin to crush its reproductive apparatus against its pelvis. This would have a tendency to lower the animal’s sexual urges somewhat and it would soon lose interest in reproduction—not a very positive evolutionary step. Taken to extremes, this new tail movement would simply crush the whole pelvis. Such a transition would have no survival value whatsoever. The selective pressures of the environment, or natural selection, would work against any such change of tail on a land-dwelling mammal.

To make the claim as evolutionists do, that land-dwelling mammals evolved into sea-dwelling whales is to claim that there had to be simultaneous accidental genetic changes which allowed the tail to grow larger while the pelvis grew smaller. And all this ignores the problems caused as the ever shrinking pelvis or hip bones reached the point where they were far too small to support the creature’s weight on its hind legs, and yet still too large to let the animal move its tail up and down with any efficiency.

Of course, tails are not the only thing on whales that make them different from land-dwelling mammals. To totally convert a land-dwelling mammal into a whale you would also have to replace its sweat glands with thick layers of blubbery fat, change its eyes so that the light rays under sea water are still brought to focus on the retina, change its skin to produce a curious surface efficiently designed to streamline the flow of water, and also find some way to enable it to give birth to young which suckle under water without drowning, a rather essential ‘adaptation.’

In other words, if you wanted to make a tail for a whale you could not do it by using evolutionary random chance small mutational accidents on some land-dwelling mammals, no matter how long you let the process take. A whale’s tail is too well designed to be made that way. In fact, it shows all the evidence of the intelligent engineering which we associate with deliberate creation.

 

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/re1/chapter5.asp

Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) are actually mammals, not fish. But they live their whole lives in water, unlike most mammals that live on land. But evolutionists believe that cetaceans evolved from land mammals. One alleged transitional series is prominently drawn in Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. This chapter analyzes this and other arguments for cetacean evolution, and shows some of the unique features of whales and dolphins.

Wonderful whales
Cetaceans have many unique features to enable them to live in water. For example:

Enormous lung capacity with efficient oxygen exchange for long dives.

A powerful tail with large horizontal flukes enabling very strong swimming.

Eyes designed to see properly in water with its far higher refractive index, and withstand high pressure.

Ears designed differently from those of land mammals that pick up airborne sound waves and with the eardrum protected from high pressure.

Skin lacking hair and sweat glands but incorporating fibrous, fatty blubber.

Whale fins and tongues have counter-current heat exchangers to minimize heat loss.

Nostrils on the top of the head (blowholes).

Specially fitting mouth and nipples so the baby can be breast-fed underwater.

Baleen whales have sheets of baleen (whalebone) that hang from the roof of the mouth and filter plankton for food.

Many cetaceans find objects by echo-location. They have a sonar system which is so precise that it's the envy of the U.S. Navy. It can detect a fish the size of a golf ball 230 feet (70 m) away. It took an expert in chaos theory to show that the dolphin's ‘click’ pattern is mathematically designed to give the best information.1

One amazing adaptation of most echo-locating dolphins and small whales is the ‘melon,’ a fatty protrusion on the forehead. This ‘melon’ is actually a sound lens—a sophisticated structure designed to focus the emitted sound waves into a beam which the dolphin can direct where it likes. This sound lens depends on the fact that different lipids (fatty compounds) bend the ultrasonic sound waves traveling through them in different ways. The different lipids have to be arranged in the right shape and sequence in order to focus the returning sound echoes. Each separate lipid is unique and different from normal blubber lipids, and is made by a complicated chemical process, requiring a number of different enzymes.2

For such an organ to have evolved, random mutations must have formed the right enzymes to make the right lipids, and other mutations must have caused the lipids to be deposited in the right place and shape. A gradual step-by-step evolution of the organ is not feasible, because until the lipids were fully formed and at least partly in the right place and shape, they would have been of no use. Therefore, natural selection would not have favored incomplete intermediate forms.

Missing links
Evolutionists believe that whales evolved from some form of land mammal. According to Teaching about Evolution, page 18, they ‘evolved from a primitive group of hoofed mammals called Mesonychids.’

However, there are many changes required for a whale to evolve from a land mammal. One of them is to get rid of its pelvis. This would tend to crush the reproductive orifice with propulsive tail movements. But a shrinking pelvis would not be able to support the hind-limbs needed for walking. So the hypothetical transitional form would be unsuited to both land and sea, and hence be extremely vulnerable. Also, the hind part of the body must twist on the fore part, so the tail's sideways movement can be converted to a vertical movement. Seals and dugongs are not anatomically intermediate between land mammals and whales. They have particular specializations of their own.

The lack of transitional forms in the fossil record was realized by evolutionary whale experts like the late E.J. Slijper: ‘We do not possess a single fossil of the transitional forms between the aforementioned land animals [i.e., carnivores and ungulates] and the whales.’3

The lowest whale fossils in the fossil record show they were completely aquatic from the first time they appeared. However, Teaching about Evolution is intended as a polemic for evolution. So it reconstructs some recent fossil discoveries to support the whale evolution stories that Slijper believed on faith. On page 18 there is a nice picture of an alleged transitional series between land mammals and whales (drawn at roughly the same size without telling readers that some of the creatures were hugely different in size—see the section about Basilosaurus in this chapter). This appears to be derived from an article in Discover magazine.4 The Discover list (below) is identical to the Teaching about Evolution series except that the latter has Basilosaurus as the fourth creature and the Discover list has ‘dates’:

Mesonychid (55 million years ago)

Ambulocetus (50 million years ago)

Rodhocetus (46 million years ago)

Prozeuglodon (40 million years ago)

One thing to note is the lack of time for the vast number of changes to occur by mutation and selection. If a mutation results in a new gene, for this new gene to replace the old gene in a population, the individuals carrying the old gene must be eliminated, and this takes time. Population genetics calculations suggest that in 5 million years (one million years longer than the alleged time between Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus), animals with generation lines of about ten years (typical of whales) could substitute no more than about 1,700 mutations.5 This is not nearly enough to generate the new information that whales need for aquatic life, even assuming that all the hypothetical information-adding mutations required for this could somehow arise. (And as shown in chapter 9, real science shows that this cannot occur.)

... article continues... to to the page to see it

 

http://trueorigin.org/whales.asp

Here is one that is somewhat technical.

 

UTE, I have been asking your for months now to prove it Biblically BEFORE we deal with any scientific evidence. Why? Because (unlike scientists) the Bible is ultimate truth and is NEVER wrong. I can, using the Bible and the Bible alone debunk the whole of evolution. I can then offer alternative interpretations of the evidence you claim supports evolution.

You, however, have no absolute foundation whatsoever for your faith in evolution. You have already told us how you think the Bible is wrong - an allegorical fairy tale made up to appease the minds of simpletons. You engorge your humanist ego by proclaiming that you know better than God.

Well God has an answer for people like you:

Job 38:4 Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Job 38:5 Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

Indeed! Where were you when the world was created? What witness can you produce who saw it happen any different from the way God describes it in His Word? What written record can you produce of an eye witness? The Bible is the only eyewitness account from the One who was there, but you have chosen to reject it and instead believe that "man can be as God" determining for themselves what happened - disbelieving God's own Word.

 

According to the Bible, those scientists are wrong. For it clearly says that on day five that God created all of the marine life including the great sea creatures (whales) and then on day six, He created all of the land animal life and then created man.

 

Careful, TC, comments like this will get you accused of keeping true "intellectuals" from becoming a Christian.

It's OK to believe God so long as you don't believe Him literally. People that do that are just uneducated, simple, showing their fundamentalist ignorance and driving "thinking" people from Christianity.

Hang in there bro. The opposition writes tomes "proving" their beliefs, but they have yet to come up with anything to refute THE WORD except their own willful stubborness.

These so called debates would be so much calmer if they (evolutionists) could find the guts to simply admit that they have more faith in science than they do in God's word. But apparently if they did that they would have to re-thing their creation premise and that's obviously a no-no!

If they would just admit that there is truly no PROOF for either stance and interpretation of the evidence requires that you either believe science, or God!

They place their faith in science, while we place our faith in God's word. Real simple!

 

Indeed - and I have not yet seen a non-literal exegesis from any evolutionists here. You guys claim the Bible HAS NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT THE CREATION OF THE WORLD OR THE ORIGIN OF MAN. Re-affirmed over and over and over... and then you spout off evolutionary doctrine in place of any exegesis.

See what I mean.. here it is again.

No I would assert that you are absolutely wrong. The Bible does indeed have a lot to say about creation and the origin of man.

You mean like when I repeatedly tell you that if you take the Bible as your presupposition, and assume thousands of years instead of millions... then take the Bible again and assume a world wide flood that you can see there was plenty of catestrophism to account for 'millions of years' of catestrophic layers rather than uniformitarial yearly layers in the geologic strata? Or when we see that the vast majority of fossil layers on earth is strata laid down by water? Or when we see that there are marine fossils everywhere on earth (including the top of Mt. Everest? Or like when we watch Mt. St. Helen errupt and lay down thousands of "yearly layers" in just hours. Or like when we watch large canyons with hundreds of 'yearly layers' laid down in just days? Or like when we see physics calculations that allow for starlight time from galaxies billions of light years away to get to earth quickly because of the general theory of reletivity? Any of this ringing a bell?

More accurately, they (evolutionists) place their faith in Man's ideas... we (creationists) place our faith in God's Word.