Facebook is a funny place. Like most people these days, I often scroll through my timeline when I have a few minutes to kill. Recently, I noticed a huge uptick in pro-Evolution posts. For seemingly no reason, meme after article after video was recommended to me, purporting to show "new discoveries" that tell us about Evolution. I was thrilled when I saw the comments sections of these articles. While there were the usual trolls and numbskulls on both sides, there were also large portions of critical comments.
More recently, however, I came across a meme that appeared not once, but twice. This meme displays a child, and presumably his parents, standing before a gorilla exhibit at a zoo. The child gestures to them and asks "If people came from apes, why are there still apes?"
My heart sank as I read the comments sections of both posts. It was an endless chorus of "amen". Much unlike the Evolutionist posts, there did not appear to be a single critical thinker. "That a great question", said one man. "I've been asking that forever", announced another. One of them even claimed he had asked his Evolutionist friend, and he had no answer.
But you don't need to be an Evolutionist to answer! It should be beyond obvious that descent does not erase one's ancestors. To put it in simple terms, consider human beings in general. We live in a wonderful time. Our technology allows us to travel around the world with relative ease, and more civilised nations even have a high tolerance for foreigners staying there. As a result, you may have blood from a wide range of nationalities flowing through your own veins.
As an example, I find a lot of my American friends have German ancestors. Now, how much sense would it be for them to ask "if I came from Germans, why are there still Germans?" It would make no sense at all! In much the same way, even in the Evolutionist religion, the Evolution of new kinds does not require the ancestral group to go extinct. Such a concept would even make it entirely impossible for more than one species to exist at any given time, as Evolutionists believe in Universal Common Descent.
What this means is that the original argument is a straw man. It is the misrepresentation of the Evolutionist religion, giving it the appearance of having been refuted, but leaving it untouched. As a result, any competent Evolutionist will not only be able to answer the question, but will also have a brand new excuse to maintain his faith in Evolution. People in general tend to focus on the weakest case against their beliefs. If you make 9 strong arguments against Evolution, then make one really weak one, they will focus on the one weak argument. Thus, this horrendously weak argument, rather than freeing Evolutionists, adds one more padlock to their jail cells.
Rather than asking "why do we have apes?", we should instead ask "why don't we have the missing links between apes and us?" This question is so devastating to Evolution that Darwin himself called it "...the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory."
See, Evolution doesn't happen in one generation. Even according to the religion, a group of apes did not give birth to a group of humans. Rather, each generation changed gradually, at the same rate as each of us differs from our parents. This is actually why Evolutionists will take any and all change as "Evolution happening before our eyes".
But obviously, such a process would leave a lot of evidence. We have many fossils, both of man and ape. Even today, we have 8 billion humans, and a great many apes of various species. Yet, the gaps between us are astronomical. We do not find Darwin's "innumerable transitional forms". We don't even have one concrete example.
Of course, that doesn't mean no one tries. The aforementioned Neanderthal, for example. By all sound reasoning, Neanderthals are 100% human. So indistinguishable is the Neanderthal from the rest of the human race that one could be considered a racist for claiming them as a separate species. By contrast, "Lucy", a.k.a. Australopithecus afarensis, is also considered transitional. The problem with this is, anatomically, she is nothing like humans. Evolutionists may chisel at her bones, add a tonne of plaster, and even model her with white sclera, but no amount of intentional "reconstruction" will make Australopithecines anything other than what they really are: Apes, with an entirely separate ancestral line to human beings.
The complete absence of concrete transitional forms is a vastly more powerful argument against Evolution than the existence of modern apes. The latter is entirely consistent with the Evolutionary fairy tale, but the former is an elephant Evolutionists have failed to remove from their room since before Darwin ever put pen to paper. Thus, this is what we should focus on.