GYC 2008: For This Purpose

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Sean Pitman ~ The Emperor Has No Clothes: Creation vs. Evolution

Sean Pitman

Early Man

The Geologic Record

The Fossil Record

Theologians for Darwin

Darwin vs. God

The Best Arguments Against Intelligent Design

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this opportunity to bring us all here together, this youth conference, where thousands of young people are seriously interested in learning about you and what you have planned for our lives.

Please be with us today, especially in this topic that's becoming more problematic for your church these days.

I must not stumble over all these chords.

Early man is a fascinating topic because we're human and we want to know where we came from.

And the popular concept is that we came from apes, of course.

There's all these hominids that can gradually, stepwise, evolve higher and higher, more humanoid features until finally we showed up as Homo sapiens.

And so I just like to look at the story and see how scientific.

Or is it more what I call just-so stories, so that where people make up legends and they pass them on?

And let's just see how concrete these stories are.

Ernest Houghton, he's a Harvard professor of anthropology, he writes, you can with equal facility model on Neanderthal or Neanderthoid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the liniments of a philosopher.

These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public.

So put not your trust in reconstructions." So if you don't believe the reconstruction, upon what, And he's an evolutionist.

So then on what basis do you believe this?

Here's William Howells, Harvard professor also of anthropology.

A great legend has grown up to plague both paleontologists and anthropologists that a man can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone, gaze at it, pass his hand over his forehead, like Johnny Carson, you know, once or twice, and then take a sheet of paper and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like as it tramped in the tertiary terrain.

If this were quite true, an anthropologist would make FBI look like a troop of Boy Scouts.

Why is anthropology so problematic when it comes to interpreting the meaning of bones?

Are many mainstream beliefs based on real science or blind faith in fairy tale stories that have grown into legends?

It started out basically with the famous Piltdown Man find.

This Piltdown Man or Dawn Man was discovered by Charles Dawson in 1912, and this is Dawson over here.

It was an ape-like mandible, so this part of the skull, combined with the top piece, which was human-like.

And then It was revealed as a hoax in 1953.

It was deliberately produced as a hoax, because everybody thought that this is what the ape man would look like or should look like.

Because obviously, if you combine an ape jaw with a human-like skull, that's kind of a missing link.

But what's interesting about this is that the hoax was not discovered for 40 years.

This was the ape man in science, mainstream science, for 40 years.

And no 1 discovered that it was a hoax, because no 1 looked or investigated scientifically very carefully.

Because if it already matches what you believe to be true, why investigate it?

Nebraska Man is the next man or missing link that came along.

See, here's Nebraska Man, nice drawing and his beautiful wife there.

And then from that tooth, they waved it over their forehead, and then they drew Nebraska Man based on this, and This is the missing link.

And Nebraska Man, this tooth was attempted to be used as evidence in the Scopes Monkey trial, but it wasn't allowed by the judge, thank goodness, because later on, it was pretty embarrassing.

You can see, isn't that incredible, what those anthropologists can do with a tooth?

He's a mainstream scientist back in the early 1900s.

And his discussion about this tooth around the time of the Scopes Monkey trial.

Osborne chided Nebraska native William Jennings Bryan in the press, who was a prosecutor in the case.

He said, the earth spoke to Bryan from his own state of Nebraska.

The Hesperopithecus tooth is like the still small voice.

This little tooth speaks volumes of truth in that it affords evidence of man's descent from the ape." So he also went on to say that such drawings or reconstructions would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no scientific value and undoubtedly inaccurate.

Okay, so he thinks this drawing is probably not quite true to form, but he still thinks it's a missing link, right, between apes and man.

But then they went back a little bit later.

They dug around where they found the tooth, and they found the rest of the skeleton, and it was a pig.

So He was just a little bit off in his...

And, you know, if that had become known ahead of time for the Scopes Monkey Trial, I just wonder if that would have made any difference in the outcome of the historical outcome of the trial.

Java man is a combination between this skullcap and this femur.

This femur is a modern human femur in structure, and this skullcap is from a gibbon, which is a type of monkey.

So they were found in the same level, layer of sediment, about 12 meters apart in the sediment.

And because they were so close together, they must have belonged to the same animal.

So they put them together, and they built Java Man.

Missing link, because you got an ape skullcap combined with a human femur, so it must be a missing link.

Eventually, they showed that this was a...

They realized that this was a false association, and they removed Java Man from the Museum of Natural History in the 1980s.

It took them a long time to figure out that this was a false association, that they weren't really the same creature.

So now let's look at creatures that aren't actually combinations of other creatures or outright hoaxes.

Here, lots of hominins have been found that seem to show sort of an evolutionary sequence in morphology.

You can start out with, from left to right, the bush baby.

And it kind of, kind of, you know, if you kind of use your imagination, you can kind of have an evolutionary sequence in morphology that gradually gets up into the modern human form.

You know, The gibbons hold their hands above their heads and they go bouncing along.

And then you got the orangutan and the chimp and the gorilla and then humans.

And you notice they're all kind of hunched over a little bit.

So obviously, if you can find a chimp or something that walks upright and holds its head upright, then that would be a missing link, clearly.

And then humans is more of a parabolic shape.

So if you can find jaws that are more parabolic in shape, then that's obviously a missing link.

So Ramipithecus was found in 1932 by a famous anthropologist, Louis Leakey.

So he put the fragments back together kind of in that parabolic U shape, right?

And then later, this is what, the full jaw was found, the mandible was discovered in 1977, And it was more of the U shape.

So obviously, the previous reconstruction was mistaken.

Series

Sean Pitman ~ The Emperor Has No Clothes: Creation vs. Evolution

Early Man

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Breakout Sessions B

Ghost in Your Genes OR God in Your Genes

50m

How to Use Science-Based Creation to Win Confidence- Part 2

1h 24m

Talking Points 2nd Quarter 2022 Genesis: The Creation

13 Israel in Egypt

29m

Last Generation for Christ 2019 Weekend

New Books, Old Error

56m

Atheism, Apatheism, or Adventism

3. Has Science Replaced the Need for Faith?

1h 15m

Creation and Evolution - Which Faith Will You Choose?

6. Did Darwin Murder God?

1h

Breakout Session B

Life Commandments for Daily Living

56m

Creation and Evolution - Which Faith Will You Choose?

5. Textbook Deceptions

59m

The Two Image Makers

The Two Image Makers Part 3: The Omega Deception and the Omega Truth

1h

Baptizing the Devil: Evolution and the Seduction of Christianity

5. Evolution and Last Day Events

1h 3m

Apologetics

03 Come, Search With Me

1h 43m

Creation and Evolution - Which Faith Will You Choose?

1. Thinking Skeptics and Ignorant Christians

58m

Sound Doctrine