Creationists say dinosaur fossils back up their beliefs
By Jim Stratoon -- The Orlando Sentinel
Sunday, January 8, 2005----
CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. - Most paleontologists look into the mouth of an allosaurus and see a prehistoric eating machine with a jaw full of flesh-tearing teeth.
Peter DeRosa peers into that mouth and sees the hand of God.
Working from a business park about 80 miles north of Tampa, Fla., DeRosa and his family are hammering away at two bedrock principles of modern science: evolution and the notion that the Earth is about 4 billion years old.
The DeRosas are part of a small but growing band of creationists using dinosaurs, the icons of an ancient Earth, to argue that the world is only 6000 years old.
The DeRosas' tool of choice? The fossilized bones of Ebenezer the allosaurus and other creatures cramming their makeshift laboratory. "It's very clear in Scripture. God's word is true," said DeRosa, 22. "Everything we've found supports that."
The DeRosas run Creation Expeditions, a ministry that relies on dinosaurs to spread what they say is the infallible word of the Bible. The family operation includes Peter, brother Mark, sister Leah and parents Pete and Linda.
The DeRosas have no formal training but have studied dinosaurs and fossils for more than a decade.
They lecture at private schools, churches and anywhere else that will have them. Several times a year, they conduct digs in Florida and out West, serving as guides for others, usually Christians, interested in dinosaurs. They charge $500 per person for five-day excavations. They also take in contributions from religious groups and other sponsors.
The DeRosas' digs have produced impressive results. They have uncovered a 22-foot-long allosaurus, a smaller relative of the T. rex, and a 15-foot-tall edmontosaurus, a plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur.
The DeRosas and their movement, in essence, are trying to turn science against itself. By digging up fossils and interpreting their finds, some creationists hope to convince others that evolution and a 4-billion-year-old Earth are nonsensical notions unsupported by the data.
They maintain, for example, that they've found organic plant matter buried with fossils indicating the animals died only a few thousand years ago. Some say they've found human footprints next to dinosaur tracks, a claim the vast majority of paleontologists consider preposterous.
Organisms didn't evolve, they say, they were created by God largely as they appear today.
The vast majority of scientists consider the movement badly misguided, or worse, intellectually dishonest. Creationists, scientists say, aren't doing real science.
They are starting with a conclusion, that the Bible is 100 percent accurate, and gathering evidence to support that idea. True science, they say, actively looks for problems with a hypothesis.* And over the years, a tremendous amount of research has been conducted specifically to find major flaws in the theories about evolution and the age of the Earth. The fundamental principles of both have held up.
"The evidence is overwhelming," said Skip Pierce, chairman of the biology department at the University of South Florida. "These theories are essentially established fact."
(...)
If erosion has been a force for millions of years, they ask, how is it that fossils still are being found just below the surface? After millions of years of erosion, Mark DeRosa said, those fossils should have disappeared long ago.
"At that rate," he said, "there shouldn't even be any continents left."
They point to a lack of so-called transitional fossils, organisms that clearly demonstrate one species turning into another. They reject any suggestion that inorganic material can be transformed into even the simplest life forms.
And citing the second law of thermodynamics, they insist that all systems tend to break down.
Organisms, they say, devolve, not evolve, into more-complicated creatures.**
Most scientists have heard the criticisms and, by now, are almost weary of addressing them. They say there are many transitional fossils and plenty of instances of organisms growing more complicated. A seed, for example, becomes a flower.
(....)
Early this year, young-Earth creationists jumped on an announcement that researchers had found soft tissue in the thigh bone of a T. rex. This proved, they said, the animal could not have been 68 million years old because soft tissue wouldn't last that long.
But the scientist who discovered the tissue said it shows no such thing.
Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist with North Carolina State University, said it's unclear whether the material is original tissue. Even if it is, Schweitzer said, that doesn't mean the leg bone is only 8,000 years old. Far more likely, she said in an e-mail to the Sentinel, is that scientists don't yet fully understand how tissue is preserved.
"It is very, very obvious that the Earth and the solar system are very, very old - billions of years," she wrote. "It is far more likely we are wrong about how molecules degrade, than that we are wrong about the age of dinosaurs."Meanwhile, the DeRosas push ahead with their ministry, chipping at evolution as patiently as they chip stone off the skull of Ezekiel, the duck-billed dinosaur they uncovered out West.
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Read the rest
here.
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*The
scientific method. This
has been accepted for hundreds of years.
**There is no such thing as
devolution.
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