God put the fossils in place to mislead the logical-minded into temptation, thus separating the true followers from the satanists.If this website was correct, why are there no kangaroo, polar bear or penguin fossils in Mesopotamia?
... and that opinion went so well for him.
God DID fake all of the evidence that the world is more than a few millennia old and the flood didn't happen, and it WAS to test for faith versus logic... but the religious have it backward; it's because he doesn't want gullible idiots like them in Heaven.
From my experience, you'er wrong. Creationists/ID advocates typically simply ignore the fossil record. This particularly holds true when discussing fossils the Creationist/ID advocate has never heard of--say, trilobites, or Articulata brachiopods, or the mammal-like reptiles (can't be haven' no transitional forms!), or the Cambrian Explosion stuff. There's also another category you missed: Dinosaurs still exist, like in Loch Ness or the Amazon.
Bad counter-argument, considering I ate the better part of a small therapod for lunch yesterday and my grandfather used the small counter-part to some Plio/Pleistocene monsters to plow his father's fields as a kid. Sloths and kin are much smaller today. No small brontosaurs, but small versions of extinct animals (remember, paleontology works on the morphospecies concept--it's entirely plausable that a species goes extinct and its decendants, which are a continuation of the same population, persist to today) are all around us. The real flaw in this is that most extinct animals are well and truly extinct--gone, never to return.
Well politics, personality (GG was an unpleasant person who alienated pretty much everyone and publicly called the pope a simpleton) and his inability to prove his statement of the Copernican hypothesis was correct (through his own opinionated intransigence and alienating those who had the observational proof) also helped.
