Patrick Payette #fundie

Patrick Payette #fundie concordmonitor.com

Scientific truths often turn out to be false, PATRICK PAYETTE, Dunbarton - Letter

For the Monitor
August 28. 2006 8:00AM

M
r. Melander's letter regarding his faith in science as truth should probably result in him being awarded a lifetime subscription to NationalGeographic. However, let's look at some of the scientific truths that turned out to be anything but.

Archaeoraptor, the new missing link featured in NationalGeographic, later turned out to be a skeleton of different species of birds and dinosaurs struck together by man.

The following were all hoaxes: Java Man (1891), Piltdown Man (1912), Nebraska Man (1922), Peking Man (1926), Neanderthal Man (1929).

The following quote is from evolutionist D. Watson: "The theory of evolution is universally accepted not because it can be proven, but because the only alternative is special creation (by God), which is clearly incredible."

The explosion of Mount St. Helens left sediment layers that look just like the geologic sediments that evolutionists said took millions of years to form.
---ADVERTISEMENT---

Darwin expected that millions of transitional fossils would be found - animals changing into other animals, but they have never found one.

Living snails were dated by the Carbon 14 methods and said to be 2,300 years old.

Hawaiian lava only a few years old was dated by the potassium-argon method, which calculated their age to be 3 billion years old.

Conversely, a creationist view of the universe has not only never been disproved or found to be a hoax but rather continues to garner evidence that supports it. Do not dismiss the Bible in lieu of unproven theories that have been shoved down your throat since grade school.

Think about it. Does the human body with the brain and all its amazing functions scream intelligent design or random chance?

PATRICK PAYETTE

Dunbarton

30 comments

old comment by Klaus

I guess you can visit talk.origins.org and copy all the refutations' texts without the respective refutations, and you have a pretty large compendium of all fundie anti-evolution "arguments".
These are terrible pseudo-arguments, and I think there are websites online with a bunch of lies like those, consider AnswerInGenesis (although they are more sophisticated than this crap here). If I were God, I would make these guys have to prove their respective assertions and if they fail, bash their heads against the nearest wall (just enough to give them a good headache, mind you). That would make them think twice when they feel the urge to write on things they have no clue at all about.

old comment by jouster

Would you care to back that up with an example?
Are you repsonding to me? It's easier to know whether or not that's the case if you quote me. I'll assume you are. Don't take my view to be a defense of fundies. I find them as laughable as you doubtless do. However, the historicity of the OT is not in question. Only the degree to which it is correct is debated. As for examples, well, a quick web search will give you many. Some include: Assyrian and Babylonian history, legal codes and social structures. While there is controversy over the Exodus and conquest stories, Egyptian and Israeli history can also be found. Even those referred to as Biblical Minimalists - those who feel that there is liitle actual history in the OT - seldom feel that there is none at all. Most historians and theologians fall somewhere in the middle ground. Naturally, it's not easy to tease verifiable history out of the OT because of the weight of religious nonsense that has been added over the centuries. But it's still there, and the post to which I replied was inaccurate in claiming that there was no truth at all. No religious truth? Fine - I have no problem there; as I stated, I'm an atheist. But no historical truth? Incorrect.

old comment by Crosis

So many already-debunked arguments, so little time.

Archaeoraptor, the new missing link featured in NationalGeographic, later turned out to be a skeleton of different species of birds and dinosaurs struck together by man.

And guess who exposed that - SCIENTISTS! Not creationists, but other scientists.

The following were all hoaxes: Java Man (1891), Piltdown Man (1912), Nebraska Man (1922), Peking Man (1926), Neanderthal Man (1929).

See previous quote (at least regarding Piltdown and Nebraska ... I don't know anything about the others, which could very well be because once it's discredited, scientists don't use it anymore! Neanderthals have definitely been found, though I have no way of knowing whether this particular one was a hoax.)

The following quote is from evolutionist D. Watson: "The theory of evolution is universally accepted not because it can be proven, but because the only alternative is special creation (by God), which is clearly incredible."

Ah, good old quote mining. First, the quote is almost 80 years old by now, and a lot has happened since then. Second, it's horribly out of context.

The explosion of Mount St. Helens left sediment layers that look just like the geologic sediments that evolutionists said took millions of years to form.

Well, that's one that I can't find on the Creationist Lies and Blunders site. I suspect that it's equally stupid, but I must confess I don't know much about it. (Then again, massive volcanic eruptions on the scale of Mt. St. Helens are rare, particularly outside of the Ring of Fire, so it wouldn't really explain much of anything away from the Pacific anyway unless he were to claim that every single place on earth has had such volcanic activity in the past 6000 years.)

Darwin expected that millions of transitional fossils would be found - animals changing into other animals, but they have never found one.

And back to the site before for yet another already-refuted argument.

Living snails were dated by the Carbon 14 methods and said to be 2,300 years old.

1) Living organisms cannot be carbon-dated accurately - largely because the decay product (N-14) is such a large percentage of the atmosphere which they breathe. 2) Carbon-14 wouldn't be a problem for you at all if the universe were as young as you suggest, as under normal conditions it is quite accurate out to 50,000 years. (And it's not used for much of anything other than artifacts that appear to be from ancient civilizations, due to its relatively short half-life.)

Hawaiian lava only a few years old was dated by the potassium-argon method, which calculated their age to be 3 billion years old.

1) The rocks that were dated were xenoliths (bits of rock embedded in the lava flow), not the lava itself. 2) This particular attempt was done to see if the K-Ar dating method was reliable for xenoliths. It turned out not to be (due to excess argon). 3) The matrix rock (that is, the rock formed from the lava flow itself) dated to zero age within margin of experimental error (not surprising, given that the two centuries since the lava flow is approximately 0.00001% of one half-life). In other words, when they dated the lava itself, it gave an age consistent with the known date of eruption. 4) Ar-40/Ar-39 is now used in almost all cases where K-Ar would have been used in the past, because it has the capability of detecting and, in some cases, even correcting for the "excess argon" problem that sometimes affects K-Ar.

Conversely, a creationist view of the universe has not only never been disproved or found to be a hoax but rather continues to garner evidence that supports it.

*spit take* You seem fond of mentioning this "evidence". Mind sharing any with the scientific community? Any at all? You see, they don't seem to think very highly of any of the "evidence" they've seen for creation.

Think about it. Does the human body with the brain and all its amazing functions scream intelligent design or random chance?

Neither. The laws of physics preclude randomness on a scale larger than the size of a large molecule, and the design of our body has so many glaring flaws that the designer could not possibly be considered intelligent, much less omniscient and omnipotent. Why give us an organ which serves no useful purpose whatsoever, but occasionally gets infected with dire consequences for the unfortunate person involved unless they get immediate surgery? Why give our eyes a blind spot, particularly when the eyes of most invertebrates (such as squid) do not have such a blind spot? Why stick the esophagus and windpipe next to each other and allow the possibility of food going down the wrong one and you choking to death?

old comment by Mister Spak

"The following were all hoaxes: Java Man (1891), Piltdown Man (1912), Nebraska Man (1922), Peking Man (1926), Neanderthal Man (1929)."
Piltdown man was a hoax uncovered by dating methods developed by scientists. Nebraska man was not a hoax, it was a mistake, corrected by digging up more fossils (1923)and realising the mistake. Java man and peking man are different fossils of the same species found in different places. After several decades of new finds and some rethinking, they were renamed homo erectus. Fundies claim the finders of these fossils found a human bone here, a monkey bone a few miles away, combined them into one skeleton and called it a transitional form, thus it is in thier minds, a hoax. There is a particular neandertal skeleton that was used about a century ago to reconstruct what a neandertal looked like. This individual had several deformities and bone diseases that made the reconstruction invalid. The fundies have used this as "proof" that neandertal is merely one modern skeleton on a man with bone disease out of which an entire species, homo neandertal, was fabricated. Thus in fundies minds, neandertal man is a hoax.

old comment by Julian

@jouster

Are you repsonding to me? It's easier to know whether or not that's the case if you quote me. I'll assume you are.
Don't take my view to be a defense of fundies. I find them as laughable as you doubtless do. However, the historicity of the OT is not in question. Only the degree to which it is correct is debated. As for examples, well, a quick web search will give you many. Some include: Assyrian and Babylonian history, legal codes and social structures. While there is controversy over the Exodus and conquest stories, Egyptian and Israeli history can also be found. Even those referred to as Biblical Minimalists - those who feel that there is liitle actual history in the OT - seldom feel that there is none at all. Most historians and theologians fall somewhere in the middle ground. Naturally, it's not easy to tease verifiable history out of the OT because of the weight of religious nonsense that has been added over the centuries. But it's still there, and the post to which I replied was inaccurate in claiming that there was no truth at all. No religious truth? Fine - I have no problem there; as I stated, I'm an atheist. But no historical truth? Incorrect.

Good Lord. Yes I was responding to you. Have you read 1421, The year China discovered America.? It's the biggest load of subjecture and conjecture and baseless speculation and manufacturing of "evidence" and ignoring any evidence to the contrary. It's absolute rubbish Ron Wyatt would blanch at. But it mentions China and America, it even mentions the actual voyage between China, India and Arabia, but it's complete crap! And Harry Potter mentions London, it must be historically accurate too or based round historical truths. I hope you're aware, Babylon from the bible bears no resemblance to ancient Babylon or the Babylonian civilisation. Sure the first 11 chapters in Leviticus about how to butcher animals are accurate copies of their instructions, but they're not right or just or in any way fact - That they did this, maybe, but when you llook at why they did it and what it was meant to achieve, you're running in to the qualifiers of "they believed that...". The Laws in Exodus particularly, but to lesser extents Leviticus and Deuternomy had been edited many times. The stories of the Kings were not historically accurate, and were extraordinarily biased propaganda at best, but that is just another name for systematic lying and perversion of truth. THere is nothing in the bible that I have discovered that remains sufficiently reliable to be classed as truth - there's grains behind it - like the people of Judea are oppressed because God can't beat iron chariots, but the dates are wrong, the period is wrong, the conclusion is wrong and the deliverance had nothing to do with God. Archaological evidence undermines every claim made in the bible. Jerusalem was not a mighty city. David was not a builder King, the Samaritans to the north were not poor. It's complete crap - and there's no way all the "God said this" and "God said that" was added later. There may be grains behind the bible - but they're not in the bible. The bible is lies and superstition and misunderstanding and myth. It's like saying Jesus was crucifed by the Romans is a fact - it's not! * The Romans occupied Judea. FACT. * The Romans used crucifixion as a method of execution. FACT. * Jesus was crucifed in 33AD. NOT A FACT. * Astrological records do not match the accounts. FACT. * No historians at the time mentioned Jesus or any of the events that occurred that day. FACT. * Easter is a pagan fertility festival to the Germanic Goddess Ostara. FACT * All Gospels differ and contradict each other with the story. FACT * There were no Roman records of Jesus being crucifed (records of that sorts of thing were kept) - wait there was one, but it was discovered to be a forgery. FACT

old comment by John

"Archaeoraptor, the new missing link featured in NationalGeographic, later turned out to be a skeleton of different species of birds and dinosaurs struck together by man."
"Archaeoraptor" was a deliberate fraud put together in China for money. The fraud was discovered almost immediately by a paleontologist hired by the buyer. Unfortunately, the buyer had also contacted the National Geographic, which did an article on it by a journalist who never got proper peer review. The hoax was quickly discovered. Living snails were dated by the Carbon 14 methods and said to be 2,300 years old. Animals that ingest carbon from fossil sources and incorporate it into shells will have "old" carbon in their shells. Scientists are well aware of this effect.

old comment by NonHomogenized

Crosis responded effectively to most of the points, so I'll just comment on a couple.

The following were all hoaxes: Java Man (1891), Piltdown Man (1912), Nebraska Man (1922), Peking Man (1926), Neanderthal Man (1929).

Java man and Peking man were not hoaxes; they were reclassified as members of a single species. Neanderthal is also not a hoax; we uncover more recently discovered ones from time to time.

The explosion of Mount St. Helens left sediment layers that look just like the geologic sediments that evolutionists said took millions of years to form.

I've heard this one before. This is a claim that the sediment from Mount St. Helens had channels carved into it by excess run-off that look just like the Grand Canyon. There's just one problem; they don't look at all the same. The Toutle "canyon": The Grand Canyon: Notice how there are different layers of sediments which are aligned, in the Grand Canyon? Notice how the walls are very nearly vertical? Notice how there are loopbacks which could not possibly have formed from the flow of sediment?

Think about it. Does the human body with the brain and all its amazing functions scream intelligent design or random chance

Well, your brain just screams "random chance"...