An Example of Circular Reasoning

The fossil record on earth is amazingly rich, painting a vivid picture of the rise and fall of various species. Over 99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct.

Actually this record is more like a record of the effects of sin and the Fall when the Flood demolished the vast majority of life on earth, creating massive fossil graveyards. Of course, species is a man made term used to describe many variations of the same kind. There are several species of dog, but really they are all part of the same kind. Please see “Zonkeys, Ligers, and Wolphins, Oh My!”

The presence of this fossil record not only supports the evolutionary picture of the change of speciation with time,

Here is a classic example of how evolutionists confuse an observable phenomena, such as speciation, with an unobservable hypothesis, such as molecules-to-man evolution. Of course, there is evidence of variation within the kind in the fossil layers. But they obviously didn’t change into each other, since the vast majority of the fossils in the fossil record died together. Imagine this illustration of bad science:

In 300 years, people began digging in a human graveyard that was from a battle in WWII and find human bodies. They began lining them up by arm length and say that over long periods of time, the arms of people began to get longer!

But this is what evolutionists are doing: they are finding generally from the same burial ground (Flood, some post flood fossils though), and are pretending it goes back millions of years and is a record of change, ignoring that any depth or layering can be due to an alternate and more plausible explanation than long ages!

but it also provides an independent tool to determine the age of various systems by what is called biostratigraphy.

In other words, they use the fossils to date the rocks. There is a predetermined age for certain fossils (once again based on assumption), and when they are found in a certain rock layer, that rock layer is given that age. Interestingly enough, the fossils are dated by the rock layers they are in, an example of circular reasoning.

Fossils such as ammonites and trilobites exist all around the world and reveal not only the changing nature of life,

What source of information was used to determine that ammonites and trilobites “reveal [...] the changing nature of life”? None.

but also provide an independent confirmation of geological ages, at least for life forms that existed many millions of years ago.

So, they’re using the rock layers to date the fossils and, in turn, using the fossils to confirm the geologic ages of the layers they’re in. Besides, they have made the assumption that if something isn’t found in a particular fossil layer, then it didn’t exist at that time. This, however, is a fallacy, as evidenced by many living fossils from coelacanths to ginkgo trees!

Dinosaurs, for which there is great interest and great misinformation in the Creation museum,

And what “misinformation” would that be? We’ll assume he is referring to the fact that dinosaurs and humans lived together only a few thousand (maybe even hundred) years ago. The Bible supports this; God and Job were both witnesses to this (Job 40:15–24; 41).

For a person to make the claim that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist, they would have to be able to see all history at exactly the same time, which would make that person omniscient and omnipresent, qualities of God. So, when someone says emphatically that humans and dinosaurs did not exist together in the past, that person is claiming to be a god, while calling God Himself a liar, or, at best, deceptive.

lived during the period ranging from 250 million years ago until about 65.5 million years ago, when they rapidly died off in an event that is known as the K-T extinction event. During this period, evidence from geological strata obtained all over the world overwhelmingly demonstrate a global disruption of vegetation. The K-T geological boundary layer contains an abundance of iridium that is hundreds of times larger than normal, and is consistent with the iridium abundance measured in meteorites and asteroids. The idea that this mass extinction was associated with a large meteorite impact is supported by the existence of a 100 mile wide crater at Chicxulub on the coast of Yucutan Mexico.

Of course they assume dating methods are reliable, which the RATE team has shown as false. For more information, see the Dinosaurs topic page.

Many fossils of hominid species predating Homo Sapiens exist going back millions of years. Until recently one of the most complete skeletons belonged to a young female, named “Lucy” by her discovers. Found in Ethiopia in 1974, Lucy dates back 3.2 million years and is one of the earlier of the transitional fossils common to both chimpanzees and modern humans.

More blind faith in unreliable dating methods! Interesting that Lucy is used as a evidence, considering the fossils reveal that it was a male, as anatomist Dr. David Menton points out.1 [Ed. note: See also this article for recent developments in the Lucy saga.]