@tomr,
Quote:What is the probability that God would make a monkey so close in form to a human being?
If any living creature created by God takes up somewhere between 0 and 10 cubic meters of atoms specifically arranged. Where is His creativity? Why does He essentially replicate forms?
I can only tell you what the evidence suggests. Our entire living world is driven by information and a fantastically complex information code called RNA/DNA. RNA/DNA is similar to C++ or Java and any particular living creature is similar to a very complex application written in one of those languages.
Information codes do not just sort of happen for no reason. The evidence indicates that the RNA/DNA code is the work of a single pair of hands, the owner of which we call God.
Now, once you get to some sort of a point 5000 - 20,000 years back on this particular planet, that picture changes sharply. There is no rational way to think that a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient God would need to go through 100 species of horses or elephants to get to the one he wanted, or for that matter to think that a supposedly well-meaning God would create biting flies, ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, the funnel web, and the myriad other creatures of Pandora's box.
The evidence indicates that by the time you had the various horse species walking around, the engineering and re-engineering of complex life forms had become a sort of a cottage industry on this planet with multiple pairs of hands involved, the owner of at least one of which was not well-meaning.
Other than that, any similarity between humans and monkeys/apes/hominids is via similar design only. There is no possibility of us being descended from any of those creatures via any process resembling evolution. The Neanderthal has been ruled out as a plausible human ancestor precisely because the genetic gap is too wide and all other hominids were further removed from us THAN the Neanderthal; that doesn't leave anything on this planet which we could be descended from.