By Dave Couric

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)–When it was reported worldwide Dec. 9 that “Little
Foot,” a “3-million-year-old [bipedal] hominid skeleton,” had been uncovered in
South Africa, paleoanthropologists announced the almost-complete fossil would
force the rewrite of human evolutionary history.

Not so, writes Hal Ostrander of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the
February/March issue of SBC Life in an article titled, “The Colossal Fossil
Failure: What the Fossil ‘Experts’ Don’t Tell You.”

The so-called human evolutionary ancestor, an “ape-man,” is named “Little
Foot” because it is said to have a big toe “resembling the grasping toe of a
chimpanzee while the back portion of the foot is more explicitly human,” recounts
Ostrander, associate professor of Christian theology at Southern’s James P. Boyce
College of the Bible who specializes in science-faith issues.

According to the ancient bone specialists, “Little Foot,” much like the famed
find named “Lucy” from a quarter century ago, falls somewhere in between humans
and the common ancestor that African apes and humans supposedly shared several
million years before pre-human bipedal hominids appeared on the scene.

Rather than one more of the few-and-far-between “missing links,” or
transitional forms, evolutionists think “Little Foot” represents, Ostrander
suggests that fossils like the recent South African find are “nothing more than
the remains of a once alive but now extinct primate [ape] species, creatures once
as carefully wrought by God as any other vanished species from taxonomic families
other than hominidae [human].”

What Darwin himself called “extreme imperfection” in the fossil record, that
is, the lack of transitional forms, when he wrote “Origin of Species” a century
and a half ago, creationists have long called lack of evidence. Not surprisingly,
when evolutionists find a fossil that can by any stretch of the imagination be
interpreted as a missing link, the tendency is to overstate the case for
evolution, Ostrander writes.

Ostrander pinpoints the cause of this particular tendency not in the
objective evidence or data but in something much more fundamental: worldview. He
sees “the whole episode as a reflection of the tenets of a culturally entrenched
evolutionism … the ongoing clash of two titan worldviews — naturalism vs.
theism.”

The war of worldviews, Ostrander further asserts, must be engaged by
Christians at the level of the dual revelation of God in nature and Scripture.
Changing a worldview is not easy, but “at the level of God’s general revelation
to us, you take apart your opponent’s system piece by piece, demonstrating to
them in due course that it fails collectively with respect to at least four
worldview tests.” The tests are: logical consistency, empirical adequacy,
explanatory power and practical relevance.

“At the level of God’s special revelation to us, you continue to preach the
gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness, knowing that the Holy Spirit will work
infallibly and according to God’s good pleasure in the hearts and minds of your
various worldview opponents, naturalists, new-agers, or otherwise,” Ostrander
writes.

What the fossil finders fail to tell the public is called the “trade secret
of paleontology” by Harvard geologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould,
referring to the sparsity of transitional forms that have been unearthed since
Darwin’s day.

“In brief,” Ostrander notes, “the fossils [or lack thereof] tell one story,
and the ‘experts’ tell another.”

Some of the things that the public rarely hears about include:
paleoanthropological research is not considered as objective as many other forms
of scientific investigation; paleoanthropology’s overall achievements have been
questioned by documented cases of hoax and deceit; unmistakably human fossil
remains appear only suddenly in the fossil record; the wide genetic diversity
found in contemporary humans renders evidence for evolution inadequate when it
comes to the hypothesis of primitive-to-advanced contours of fossil skulls;
self-deception is always a possibility because of the influence of theory on the
collecting of facts; fossils identical to modern humans appear alongside
australopithecus africanus [Little Foot]; and homo erectus fossils do not appear
to have evolved over their conjectural 2-million-year history. Further reading on
these shortcomings, Ostrander notes, can found in the book “Bones of Contention”
by Marvin Lubenow.

Based on this suppression of evidence, the only conclusion to draw is that
“driven by a naturalistic worldview, evolutionary paleoanthropologists have
failed to account for these many items, either on the basis of sheer ignorance of
their chosen field, or willful misinterpretation for the sake of avoiding
religious implications,” Ostrander writes. “Either way, what they have on their
hands is a colossal fossil failure for all to observe.”