Posted: Oct 21, 2016 6:19 am
Wortfish wrote:I need some help which is why I have come to this site. I have tried explaining to a creationist that the fossil record does not comport with the notion that all species (or "kinds") disembarked Noah's Ark - presumably somewhere in the Middle East - and then migrated to all corners of the earth. The obvious example to draw is the kangaroo whose fossils are found only in Australia.
The creationist has responded to me by claiming that orangutans living in Sumatra and other places in SE Asia have no fossil record in Africa where the other great apes live. He asserts that orangutans were never related to chimps and gorillas and did not originate in Africa at all. Rather, when the waters from Noah's Flood receded, some apes headed towards Africa through the Sinai while others headed deep into Asia. He notes that in India fossils have been found of putative ancestors (pongids) of the orangutan who may have taken such a route on their migration from Ararat (the resting place of the Ark) to Sumatra.
I am a little stuck. If chimps, gorilllas and orangutans share a common ancestor where did it live? And why are orangutans so far removed in physical distance from their evolutionary cousins in Africa?
If your creationist accepts that fossils are evidence for previous life at all, then presumably that creationist also accepts that the world has been around for much longer than 4000 years? Or is this not a young earth creationist?
The natural processes which turn organic structures into rock take far too long for the biblical account to be correct, unless the god is supposed to have created the fossils along with everything else, which could have happened last Thursday for all we know. If God did everything by magic, then no evidence counts for anything. If the ancestors of orangutans were in India so long ago that their bones have fossilised, then this in itself is evidence that the biblical timescale is completely wrong. Would this argument help?