Friday, April 24, 2009

The non flood

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Fossils are not all mixed up in the sense that we see animals from different time periods mixed in with dinosaurs. If all these animals coexisted with one and other we should see bones, not hundreds of miles away, but embedded in the same rock strata.


Your example of a small dog like creature carries no weight. It has been well known for some time now that small mammals lived along side dinosaurs. Add to that that your example is dog-like not a dog ... or a wolf or any other modern animal. We have found fossils of dinosaurs that have eaten other dinosaurs, why haven't we found fossils of dinosaurs that have eaten deer ?


It was the dinosaur’s extinction that allowed mammals to evolve into the multitude of species we see today. What I am waiting to see is a modern day animal’s bones found in the same strata that date to the same time period as a dinosaur. Not just nearby but embedded in the same rock. This should be a fairly simple task; we find multiple species of dinosaurs embedded in the same rock all the time. You pick the species, but it must exist as a living creature today.


If I understand you correctly, you are postulating that given time and reptile could grow to be as large as a dinosaur. While it is true that reptiles are technically indeterminate growers, if there were no limits to their growth, then we should see dinosaur sized geckos.. but we don’t. Why is that? There can be other limits to an animal’s size other than genetic code to stop it from growing. . Structurally its body form simply might not support a huge amount of body weight, or the organs it has are inappropriate for large sizes.For example, some dinosaurs had 'brains' in their tails to help them manage their bodies. Clearly dinosaurs were disposed to large sizes, geckos are not.


This new petroglyph is better than the first, but I still see problems here.

I went back a page from the link you sent for the petroglyph.


http://www.bible.ca/tracks/native-american-dino-art.htm


They printed this quote from the park guidebook - "There is a petroglyph in Natural Bridges National Monument that bears a startling resemblance to a dinosaur, specifically a Brontosaurus, with a long tail and neck, small head and all.". I was disappointed that I could not find an online copy of the guidebook to read the quote in context. The also mention that the “The park literature attributes the petroglyphs to the Anasazi who inhabited the area from approximately A.D. 400 to A.D. 1300.” This jives with the information available on the park site.

Now the cave paintings in France are estimated to be from between 15,000 to 17,000 B.C. I know that if you are young earth creationist , you don’t accept that age, even though it is likely that the same dating methods were used to determine the age of the petroglyph.. that you do accept. But that is another issue. I will ask that you grant the cave paintings in France are at least as old as the petroglyph in the picture you sent. If you don’t agree to that premise, I would ask to explain why not and how old you do think the cave paintings are. Ok … so assuming the cave paintings in France are at least as old as the petroglyphs, the question of why, when those people created such detailed pictures of the animals in thier enviornment, are there NO pictures of dinosaurs?? There were dinosaurs in France … fossils prove that. So why no dinosaur paintings in the cave?


The petroglyph itself presents some problems as well

There are anatomic anomalies from what we know about sauropods. It is not likely that sauropods dragged their tales as depicted here as evidenced by the lack of tail marks when we find foot prints such as those in Glen Rose Texas. The head here is depicted as being very round, however sauropods heads were elongated much like a horses. It is not known if sauropods smiled or not.


Here are two unenhanced pictures of the petroglyph .




























The‘sauropod’ is still reasonable visible but there seems to be something missing. Hmmm. what could it be ? Right , the glyph of the man. I admit that when taking pictures of rock faces, not all details are always visible. That notwithstanding, in the example you sent the in the man is very visible and is in fact much clearer than the sauropod, but is completely indiscernible in the unenhanced photo. You would think that there would be at least a hint of a man figure there, but no it is just not there . I can’t go so far as to say that the pictures on BIBLE.CA have been altered, but it does seem strange that the man is not visible in the pictures I found. I am trying to find an image analyst to take a look at the BIBLE.CA pictures and determine if it actually has been modified.


And while we are on the man figure .. why doesn’t the park literature make mention of it ? This would be a fairly important fact. Even without the guide in hand, I can safely surmise that there is no mention of the man glyph in the guidebook because if there was, surely BIBLE.CA would have quoted that as well, but they didn’t.


Still, even without the man figure there does appear to be petroglyph sauropod that was created by Native Americans between 400 to 1300 A.D. So let take a closer look at the glyph itself.

Here are two pictures of the glyph outlined to showing the entire glyph, not just the 'sauropod'



As you can see, when the entire glyph is exposed the picture looks far less like a sauropod than BIBLE.CA would lead you to believe. In one outline the ‘tail’ is not attached, and in both outlines there appears to be a an extra set of legs attached to the tail. There is something growing out of the back in both. While I suppose it still looks something like a sauropod, I don’t see the clear sauropod image that is depicted on BIBLE.CA.


Finally there is your last statement that ‘God-did-it’. How do you know this ‘supernatural force’ is your god? Why not Allah-did-it, Buddha-did-it , Vishnu-did-it, Fairy’s-did-it or the Flying Spaghetti Monster-did-it ? There is as much empirical data for each of these supernatural beliefs as there is for yours. That being said, if your final answer is God-did-it then I simply reject that as an explanation. As Christopher Hitchens said, “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof’. And while absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence it is certainly absence of probability. If not then the existence of fairies is equally possible as the non-existence of fairies.


Don’t get me wrong, you are welcome to your faith, but I don’t think it fair to expect others to accept or even respect that which has no evidence.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you, Nicole, for formulating such a thorough response. I do not have time at the moment to address each of the issues you bring up, so I will focus on 2 for now.

    First, the absence of the man in your version of the images. If you carefully examine the broken line of rock which crosses right at the end of the tail and follow it to the left in each picture you will see that your images end much, much sooner. The section of rock with the man on it is not shown at all in your pictures.

    Second, the issue of reptiles growing their whole lives. You are quite right. There is a limiting factor which keeps the size of modern reptiles and lizards to a reasonable size. It's called old age. Men in Noah's day regularly lived to be 500-900 years old. This is probably due to a better climate and better genetics. It stands to reason that animals would be affected by the same factors. Take a Komodo dragon for example (http://crossetts.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/komodo-dragon.jpg). Komodos have a typical lifespan of 20 years. Imagine this large lizard living 200 years and growing the whole time. Tell me that would not look like a dinosaur! However, all I was saying originally is that most dinosaur skeletons are actually rather small (the size of a chicken or dog). The giant skeletons we see in museums are the exception, rather than the rule. They could easily have reached sexual maturity when they were relatively small, and only grown large when they were very old.

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  2. Hi tofor .. I don't know if you have subscribed to my blog -- here is my response

    http://the-non-flood.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-appear-to-be-right-about-petroglyph.html

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