CSA Fraud

The article on the web site titled “What Is Science? How Does It Apply To Discussions of Origins?” By Tom Willis (on the web page http://www.csama.org/csanews/nws199509.pdf )betrays a rather complete misunderstanding of what science is and what religion is.

“The birth of first life, the first fish, a fish giving birth to a salamander millions of years ago is simply not testable by this method because you cannot repeat the birth of the first of anything.”

That’s clearly a silly, juvenile comment. Even things that happened in the past can often be expected to leave evidence that can be predicted to be found in the future. Ironically one of the very best examples of this is found in the predictions of fish evolving into salamanders.

(I hope, of course, that the comment about a “fish giving birth to a salamander” is hyperbole. No person on Earth believes that such a thing ever happened. In fact IF a fish DID give birth directly to a salamander that would falsify mainstream evolutionary theory. Instead the descendents of fish can evolve into salamanders – and then into land animals – over many, many generations.)

I suggest that you investigate the fossil called “tiktaalik”. An excellent, quite detailed, description of that fossil and how it was found can be read in the book “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shubin – one of the scientists who discovered the fossil.

It turns out that there fossils of fish beginning to have the characteristics of “salamanders” (such as Panderichtys) that were known to have lived about 380 million years ago. There were also early tetrapod fossils (four-legged land animals) such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega) that lives about 365 million years ago.

It made sense, that there should be a fossil of a “salamander” (half-fish and half-tetrapod) that could be found in rocks about 375 – 360 million years old.

It was also known that Greenland and Northern Canada had exposed rocks that were 375 – 360 million years old

Therefore, if evolution is true, we would expect to find fossils of such a “salamander” in those rocks.

So some scientists looked for such fossils in those rocks.

Guess what they found?

They found “tiktaalik” – the fossil of an organism that was basically a salamander.

Clearly this Tom Willis person has no idea what he is talking about.