God, I love a good fish story. Don’t you, my dear fundamentalist Christians? I mean the fish is “your symbol” from the early days of Christianity (check out that funerary stele above – pretty cool). I see it on the bumper stickers of your cars every day. But I digress. Shall I proceed? Thank you.
So. Evolution. Just a theory. Right? A theory that is either (1) Dead Wrong or (2) the greatest Evil ever inspired by Satan. The Bible is the only source of truth. It tells us that the earth was created in its entirety, including every animal on the planet, in six days. The dinosaurs all died in the Flood (no room in the Ark, I’m told). We’ve been here 6000 years give or take a few. Carbon 14 dating is a lie and geologists haven’t got a clue.
Isn’t that what you tell me all the time, all of you, devoted pure souls who have a personal relationship with Jesus and put a smile on your face when you tell me I’m going to hell unless I change my belief in the validity of science. I have to admit, I admire your persistence. So I can’t wait for you to explain the following fish story to me.
A deep-water fish found mostly off the coast of southern Africa has been found to have non-functional lungs, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
Latimeria chalumnae is no ordinary fish. Besides possessing vestigial lungs, the species is frequently called a “living fossil” for being part of the order coelacanth, which was long thought extinct.
L. chalumnae was discovered in a fisherman’s net in 1938, and it bore remarkable similarities to fossils of coelacanths, fish thought to have died with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Well, I’m sure there’s an answer for this conundrum. I mean why would an intelligent designer put vestigal lungs in a fish that lives at depths in the ocean that would crush most of us flat as a pancake? I mean, evolution does have an answer, even if it is one you don’t appreciate:
The presence of lungs, albeit seemingly useless ones, in the L. chalumnae may answer some questions about its relationship to its ancient cousins. Researchers say some coelacanths survived the Cretaceous/Palaeogene extinction event that killed off the land-dwelling dinosaurs because they had already adapted to deep water. This adaptation would have made lungs unnecessary organs for the fish.
The coelacanths that are only known in the fossil record appear to have calcified lungs. Perhaps, scientists say, those lungs were to help the fish live in shallower waters where lungs would have been more advantageous.
You know what else is really strange? The embryos of these fish (however old you believe their species to be) actually develop real, functioning lungs just like land animals. It is only as the fish grows to adult size that its lungs stop developing, becoming merely a vestigial organ.
Weird, right? Why would God do that? Seems sort of ridiculous for him to do that, but maybe that’s just me. It’s just one more mystery I’d love to ask him about (Father, Son or even the Ghost dude, I don’t care) after the Rapture. Damn shame you tell me I don’t have a ticket on that rocket ship because – science, no personal relationship with Jesus, et cetera. Oh well, maybe you can ask him for me. Because God has all the answers. Right?
I’ve actually heard this “argument” from biblical literalists, when the scientific stuff finally gets through their noggins: God has left this so-called evidence of an older earth just to help sort out the elect from the damned. It becomes a self-supporting assertion, damning people who trust their own eyes instead of some ancient text that doesn’t say what the literalists think it says.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when humans knew how to handle and treat the language of myth, allegory, legend, and polemic. Sometimes a story is told to express truths in a way that a straightforward account can’t accomplish. But it is a grave error to exchange the lesson of the story for its reality, or to make the lesson dependent on reality.
There are a lot of interesting insights to be gleaned from the creation accounts in Genesis. But mistaking those stories for reality isn’t edifying or proper.
Yep any disproof of the conspiracy is only more damning proof of the conspiracy.
Yahweh is a tricky bastard
…and on the seventh day he makith it appear very very old.
Steven, I understand your frustration. But really, it will do no good to your state of mind and mental health to try posing such questions or to expect rational answers to such mysteries from someone who believes the world was created in six 24 hour days or that the earth is 6000 years old. Because it will always come down to “faith” (believing without evidence) or “one can never truly know the mind of God”. Yes, these people believe a whole lot of wacky shit. Not one of them will ever be convinced by scientific evidence or the fact that their views have been disproven by the science. If anything, evidence contrary to their beliefs only causes them to harden their beliefs even more. It’s a lost cause, my friend.
I once imagined writing an alternative-reality novel where a man is instantly whisked into a world at first indistinguishable from his previous one, but it’s a reality where the Creationists have it all right.
The most interesting part would be where almost all the archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, and cosmologists are either dumb as a box of hammers — or minions of Satan.