By Les Sherlock, posted April 2021, but originally posted December 2018
The old grandfather of a wealthy family, who had lived alone in his mansion for many years, finally died. So, in his memory, the family decided to light a single candle on a candlestick in the lounge of his home, and then shut up the entire house with the declaration that no-one should enter under any circumstances, for a whole year.
When the year was over, they ceremonially gathered around the front door and unlocked it; but to their astonishment, when they went into the lounge, there was a candle burning on the candlestick. “That is amazing,” they all agreed. “A candle that can normally only burn for a single day, is still burning after a whole year!”
Ridiculous? Of course it is! The obvious answer is that someone entered the place within the last 24 hours before the ceremonial opening and put a new candle in the candlestick. Either that, or the candle was extinguished soon after the building was closed up and someone went in to relight it again shortly before the official opening. No-one in their right mind would try to claim that a 24-hour candle could burn for 365 days.
Yet evolutionists, when confronted with an identical situation, choose to pretend otherwise.
Soft tissue, along with DNA, has been found in dinosaur bones. More details can be found here, and here is a list of 41 scientific publications of the findings of soft tissues found in fossils. Dinosaurs are supposed to have become extinct 55 million years ago; yet this paper which is not a creationist document, declares in Table One at the bottom of the second page that even if kept at zero degrees centigrade, 125,000 years is the absolute maximum length of time it could survive. This is 440 times less than the supposed time of extinction.
440 x 125,000 = 55,000,000
When evolutionists consider the recently found remains of an ichthyosaur that they claim became extinct 180 million years ago, with skin on it that was still flexible, when this kind of soft tissue has scientifically been proved could only last 10's of thousands of years at best under the most favourable of conditions, they say,
"This specimen has given us more evidence that these tissues and molecules can preserve for extremely long periods…"
(Report in 'Nature' in the above link)
Sure it has - in the same way the burning candle shows they can burn for a whole year! The candle would have had to burn 365 times longer than its observed rate, but the ichthyosaur skin needed to last 1,800 times longer than its observed rate of deterioration, even if we assume 100,000 years possible.
1,800 x 100,000 = 180,000,000
To change the analogy, it is like expecting an all-electric car with a normal range of 100 miles to travel 180,000 miles on a single charge!
Just as the only answer to the candle in my fictional illustration is that a new one was lit within the previous 24 hours, or that the original one went out soon after being lit and was relit a year later, so there can only be one logical explanation to the ichthyosaur skin and all the other soft tissue findings: the creatures died no more than a few thousand years ago. This destroys the entire evolutionary timetable; but the evolutionist would rather ignore scientific evidence and believe the equivalent of a candle burning for a whole year than abandon faith in Darwin's excuse for ignoring our Creator.