Re: This thing is toast

I have to disagree with you here.

Unless you have historical evidence of the recent existence of all those fossilized creatures, then it's specious for you to claim that these creatures all existed within the last few thousand years, and that horizontal gene transfer proves it. The body of evidence that is the fossil record shows several mass extinctions occurring throughout what we assume is hundreds of millions of years. If we assume that the timing of the fossil record is off and that it really only spans several thousand years, then some of those severe extinction events should have occurred within the last few thousand years, too, and there should be historical records of these events, since humans have managed to survive these events.

Except that the historical record shows that humans didn't even exist until relatively recently, certainly much more recently than the last great extinction event. So if we theorize that man's history is only 6,000 years, as creationists insist, and we apply 6,000 years to the timespan wherein human or human-like remains can be found, that only really compacts the timespan by a factor of about, oh, 350. So instead of hundreds of millions of years of living creatures, we're still talking millions of years.

I can't argue with the idea that the dating of things is an imperfect science. I can't argue with the idea that the earth is younger (or, for that matter, older) than Science believes. The flaws in evolutionary theory, however, do not automatically make creationist beliefs correct. Those beliefs deserve just as much scrutiny as evoutionary beliefs. If the evidence does not support the belief, the belief must go.