Sophomoric* “... they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imagination, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, ... Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, ...” (Romans 1:20-22, 24)

One of the last week’s “big new items” was the (latest) claim of the (supposed) discovery of Australopithecus sediba, another of man’s supposed (non-human) ancestors—the missing piece that finally completes the confusing puzzle of evolutionism and (supposedly) establishes (at last!) the unquestionable truth of such nonsense.

Over here in Europe, such “news” gets even more publicity than in the U.S. Much of that publicity is superficial and weak, illustrating the sad truth of Romans 1:28-24 (see above). Evolutionists in these “last days” are “proud, blasphemers, ... unholy, ... false accusers ... despisers of those that are good, ... laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” ( 2 Timothy 3:1-7).

The reported claims regarding Australopithecus sediba (or A. sediba) perfectly illustrate evolutionists inability to even SEE (much less KNOW) the truth. For example, last Thursday (April 8) the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) News website unintentionally exposed the newest evolutionary “fact” as nothing more than guesswork. In just three paragraphs (142 words) of its report “South African Fossils Could Be New Hominid Species” (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8609i92.htm), “Science Correpondent” Jonathan Amos makes EIGHT declarations of uncertainty:

“The bones were located within a metre or so of each other, suggesting ..... It is entirely possible .... At the very least, it seems reasonable to assume .... The scientists speculate .... It is likely ..., perhaps .... ‘We think that there must have been ....’”
Ah! There’s nothing like “scientific certainty” to settle the question of evolution, is there? Evolutionists scoff at the Bible and then accept suggestions, supposed possibilities, assumptions, speculations, thoughts, and unsubstantiated claims (“entirely possible,”

“seems reasonable,” “likely,” “perhaps,” and “must have been”) as EVIDENCE and PROOF. They are so desperate to support their nonsensical position that they grasp at anything no matter how ridiculous it is. As the Bible says, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

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The Wicked Heart of Evolutionism

The BBC News report also unintentionally exposes the wicked heart condition of foolish professors who devote their lives to changing the glory of the incorruptible God to the corruptible image of men and animals. In video footage that provided a “sound bite” for numerous printed accounts, BBC News reported,
“The first discovery of A. sediba remains was made in August 2008. The very first bone was picked up by Professor Berger’s nine-year-old son, Matthew.
“‘I turned the rock over and I saw the clavicle sticking out—that’s the collar bone. I didn’t know what it was at first; I thought it was just an antelope,’ the youngster told BBC News.
“‘So I called my dad over and about five metres away he started swearing, and I was like “what did I do wrong?” and he’s like, “nothing, nothing—you found a hominid.”’”

Notice that an evolutionist’s first response to the discovery of these fossils was to start swearing—cursing—using profane language—apparently virulently enough that his own son thought that the evolutionist was angry at him.

The Lord Jesus Christ said that “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” (Matthew 12:34; compare Luke 6:45). Profane language indicates a profane heart that abounds with profanity: “But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies:” (Matthew 15:18-19). Long before this foul-mouthed evolutionist was even born, God had already exposed his heart condition and the language that proceeds from it:

“The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts. ... He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved: .... His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud: under his tongue is mischief and vanity.” (Psalm 10:4, 6-7)

“As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood: Destruction and misery are in their ways: And the way of peace have they not known: There is no fear of God before their eyes.” (Romans 3:10-18)

Ironically, the BBC News report also inadvertently mentions the actual origin of the newly discovered fossils:
... It is likely their bodies were then swept into an underground lake or pool, perhaps during a rainstorm.

Their bones were laid down with the remains of other dead animals [at least 25, accoring to other reports], including a sabre-toothed cat, antelope, mice and rabbits. The fact that none of the bodies appear to have been scavenged indicates that all died suddenly and were entombed rapidly.

“We think that there must have been some sort of calamity taking place at the time that caused all of these fossils to come down together into the cave where they got trapped and ultimately buried,” said team-member Professor Paul Dirks from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.

All were preserved in the hard calcified clastic sediment that formed at the bottom of a pool of water.

Okay, let’s see if I understand this: in the deserts of modern South African, the bodies of nearly 30 creatures (ranging from mice and rabbits to a saber-toothed cat, an antelope, and two “hominids”) were suddenly killed and rapidly buried by a calamitous rainstorm. (The Random House Dictionary defines “calamity” this way: “a great misfortune or disaster, as a flood or serious injury”!) I seem to remember reading about a calamitous rainstorm (lasting forty days and forty nights) that fell at a rate of about 6 inches (15 centimeters) per minute and produced a flood that not only covered desert regions of Africa but the tops of mountains. Oh, that’s right: I read about it in THE BIBLE—and I didn’t have to make a government-funded months-long excavation trip to do so.

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The Rest of the Story

To their credit (even though it probably was done only to soothe the ruffled feathers of prideful evolutionists whose own reputations were at stake), other news reports have pointed out other problems in the newest evolutionary claims. The report at the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) News website notes that according to evolutionists’ unreliable dating methods, the newly discovered fossils are “too young” to be those of a human ancestor. The solution to this problem is ingenious:
“But Dr Herries says Australopithecus sediba may have evolved a lot earlier than the specimen found at Malapa.”

After all, why let something as insignificant as “facts” stand in the way of a theory? What is one more “may have” in a collection of fantasy evidence? Evolutionists certainly have a wild imagination, but the Bible describes it as VAIN.

The ABC News report (www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/09/2868005.htm?section=world) further notes that other evolutionists dispute the classification of the recently discovered fossils. One anthropologist at the Australian National University in Canberra says, “It was a very strange decision to assign [the fossils] to Australopithecus. Except for its cranial capacity—and I have my doubts about the way they estimated that—all its characteristics are those of Homo.”

(Even though I’m tempted to comment on the double standard that allows evolutionists to doubt the evolutionary interpretation of fossils but does NOT allow non-evolutionists the same liberty, I’ll merely point out that fossils in and of themselves are NOT evidence of evolution. Fossils are viewed and interpreted from a world view. Evolutionists are biased in their assessment of fossils: they see what they want to see in them—sometimes even to the point of embarrassing other evolutionists.)

More problems with the recent discovery are pointed out in the report found at the Nature News website (www.naturenews.com/news/2010/100408/full/news.2010.171.html). While the headline at BBC News says only “South African Fossils Could Be New Hominid Species,” the headline at Nature News shows that a number of evolutionists disagree with the supposed significance of the discovery:
“Claim over ‘Human Ancestor’ Causes Furor: Researchers Dispute That Hominid Fossil Is a New Species.”

Amazing! The Nature News headline says that the discovery is not a fact but a merely a claim—casts doubt on the claim by placing “human ancestor” in quotation marks—and suggests a rage on the part of evolutionists who disagree with the claim. (A furor is “a fury, rage, uproar, frenzy, commotion.”

There’s nothing like “neutral, objective science,” is there?)

Nature News reports further,
“The researchers’ suggestion [!] that the fossils represent a transitional species in human evolution, sitting between Australopithecus and Homo species, has been criticized by other researchers as overstated.”

Because the basic claim of evolutionism is that EVERY living thing on our planet—EVERY plant, EVERY animal, EVERY microbe and virus, EVERY person—descended from a common ancestor, it is very amusing to see evolutionists accusing anyone (especially one of their own) of overstating something!

According to the Nature News report, Another evolutionist calls the new claim “fossil free-speculation” (not that a lack of fossil evidence has EVER stopped evolutionists from speculating; Charles Darwin based his theory of natural selection on his observations of LIVING BIRDS, NOT on fossils). He also accuses the new claim of being media-fodder: that is, something for the media to digest and pass on to “the masses.”

Still another evolutionist says that the discovers of the contested fossils have “not undertaken any competent analysis ... something I do not undertand in the context that three further skeletons have been found by the same team at [the same place].”

Now that IS interesting. Why do almost all of the news reports focus on TWO sets of remains instead of FIVE? Sounds like somebody is being rather selective about which evidence to analyze—and even then, coming up with the wrong answers: as this evolutionist noted, the researchers’ “analysis raises questions” and is “at odds with their conclusions.”

Other evolutionists also cite the newly discovered fossils’ age (they’re “perhaps” half a million years too young!) and question how much information can truly come from the incomplete fossil of a juvenile creature. From the responses to these critiques we again see how the vivid imagination of evolutionists works to defend their position:
Supposedly the juvenile creature “is nearly an adult in terms of the development of key characteristics.”

(How this can be determined in a “new species”—especially in the absence of a fully mature adult skeleton with which to compare it—is never explained.)

The supposed age of the fossils is no problem because the discovers “have not established over what period of time the species existed.”

(This is a cop-out of the worst sort, and there is no logical or empirical way to establish such a time frame. If or when such a “time period” IS established, it will be established on the basis of nothing more than idle speculation and guesswork.)

And the absence of fossils is also explained away with the suggestion “that earlier Homo fossils from a similar period may have been misclassified because they are incomplete. ‘Fossils from that period are very fragmentary,’ ...”

(In other words, the absence of hard physical evidence is not a problem, because evolutionists can claim that either
(1) “it does exist but we haven’t yet found it,” or that
(2) “it exists, but we didn’t recognize it and thus misclassified it.” No matter how much evolutionists talk about “the fossil evidence,” ALL major evolutionary claims of the past 50 years—including the constant current claims about the evolution of birds and asteroid-caused extinctions—are based on “very fragmentary” fossils or no fossils at all.)

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Comparing Themselves Among Themselves

What is meant by “incomplete” and “very fragmentary”? In critiquing the claims about the newly discovered fossil remains, one evolutionist (apparently in all seriousness!) says that

“The earliest fossil evidence for Homo—a maxilla or upper jaw bone [sic] from the Hadar formation in Ethiopia that is attributable to the species H. habilis—is 2.3 million years old.”

AN UPPER JAWBONE is the ONLY “EVIDENCE” for the supposed existence of a creature that supposedly lived millions of years ago! Such nonsense is passed off as “OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE” and used to mock those who believe what God said in the words of His Holy Bible.

Many of last week’s news reports marveled at the “completeness” of the newly discovered fossils—but the fact that some evolutionists have critiqued an analysis that was based almost entirely on only a juvenile skeleton exposes the fact that at least one of the skeletons was not very complete at all. In a sidebar, the Nature News report describes the newly discovered fossils as “very complete in comparison with some other finds.”

How complete is “very complete”?

The Nature News report includes photographs of both skeletons.
The juvenile skeleton contains
an incomplete skull;
two toe bones;
a lower leg bone;
portions of the hips and pelvis and a thigh bone;
portions of a finger and a wrist bone;
portions of an elbow bone;
an upper arm (and a fragment of the other);
one or two vertebrae;
a handful of fragments of the rib cage; and
part of a collar bone.
The “adult mother” skeleton contains even fewer bones:
a “nearly complete” right arm and shoulder blade;
a fragment of the left shoulder;
a few vertebrae;
fragments of the pelvis, both knees, and both ankles; and
barely a dozen fragments of fingers, a toe, and the jawbones.

Only in “comparison with some other finds” (such as an upper jawbone or a single tooth) could such a minuscule assortment of bones be described as “very complete.” But that truth didn’t stop the discovers of the fossils from announcing the find of a “new species” and claiming that said “new species” was a human ancestor that was equally at home in the trees and on two legs on the ground. The Bible’s assessment of such shenanigans is clear: “... but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.” (2 Corinthians 10:12).

The world at large might foolishly “turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Timothy 4:4), but the Bible-believing child of God can rest in full assurance that unlike the “cunningly devised fables” of evolutionism (2 Peter 1:16), the words of God are true from the beginning and will endure forever (Psalm 119:160). The entrance of those words into the human earth gives light and understanding (Psalm 119:130) and enables believers to recognize the fables of evolution for what they actually are: FOOLISHNESS.
—Daryl R. Coats
14 April 2010

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*A word of explanation regarding the title:
 
The adjective “sophomoric” is an early 19th-century “Americanism” (a word or phrase originating in American English instead of British English). The Random House dictionary defines it as “intellectually pretentious, overconfident, conceited, etc., but immature.”
“Sophomoric” derives from “sophomore,” which literally means “one who argues.” Prior to the mid-17th century, the word was spelled “sophumer,” coming from “sophume,” an “archaic variant form” of the word “sophism.”

A sophism is ANY false argument, especially a deceptive argument that looks wise and good but is actually false. (The falsity of the argument is hidden by the supposed beauty and wisdom of its presentation. The Random House Dictionary calls it “a specious argument for displaying ingenuity in reasoning or deceiving someone.”) The word comes to English from the Greek “sophizesthai,” which means “to become wise.”

The first sophism in human history appears in Genesis 3:1-6, and with it Satan deceived the first woman and took advantage of her desire for something that would “make one wise.”The American Heritage Dictionary adds that the Greek “sophizesthai” can also mean “to be subtle.” Thus we read in Genesis 3:1 that “the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made.” The VERY FIRST sophism in human history not only came from the devil but also touched on God’s role as Creator of all things.

(Interestingly, many dictionaries include the word “specious” in their definitions of “sophism,” as in “Sophists were very famous for their clever, specious arguments.” “Specious” means “good looking but lacking merit or substance.” It comes from the Latin word “speciosus” [“good-looking, beautiful”], which in turn derives from the Latin “species” [appearance]. The fact that “specious” comes from the same root as the word “species” adds humor to specious evolutionary claims about supposed newly discovered “species of human ancestors.” And don’t forget that almost all contemporary specious arguments of evolutionists have their roots in a book by Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.)

According to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary, in the late 17th century the spelling of “sophumer” was altered to “sophomore,” “probably by influence of folk etymology derivation from Gk. sophos “wise” + moros “foolish, dull.” Apparently “folk etymology” regarded sophistry as foolish wisdom (as in “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God,” 1 Corinthians 3:9). The fools of Romans 1:20 who profess their own wisdom are “sophomores” and their arguments and lack of reasoning “sophomoric.”