Is evolution a fraud?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Hi, Bo! And welcome to the forum.

As I think you will agree, it is important to maintain a devotion toward truth, and the accurate handling of God’s word to us. And so there are claims you make which you will no-doubt wish to correct since they have been revealed to be false - all of them addressed in this very forum at multiple points. The claim about Mary Schweitzer finding red blood cells in the dinosaur tissue is one example of those false claims.

You should also be interested to learn that dating methods are not the weak and merely assumption-based processes that you’ve been led to believe. They involve actual measurements, and we believe that the Bible commands us to be honest about our weights and measures. The fact that some creationists try to dismiss this imperative towards integrity and truth as only applying to other contexts is itself very revealing. Truth seekers here believe that truth is a more comprehensive calling for us all.

We hope that all can join in the exploration of both God’s Word and works with open eyes and revealing light with the acknowledgement that God is a God of truth.

And as you acknowledge - we all need the Spirit to guide us. I pray that Spirit continues to guide all of us as well.

I’m curious about the new data from genetics, geological formations, etc. that you mentioned. Feel free to share more about that.

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That’s a pretty bold claim, given that the scientific community consists of millions of professionals, many of whom have to apply their scientific knowledge in situations where getting it wrong has consequences. For example, conventional old-earth geology with its multi-million year timescale is used to find oil. In situations such as that, their incentives are to be as honest and accurate with the data as possible. If petroleum geologists were hiding, distorting and outright manipulating the data, they’d get sued out of their insurances by the rich oil companies who employ their services because they’d end up drilling in all the wrong places.

Sorry to burst your bubble here, but researching scientific topics by watching YouTube videos is like trying to learn to rollerblade by watching YouTube videos. There are plenty of YouTubers who make it look easy and cool, but without a lot of practice you’ll just end up looking like a drunk giraffe.

No, if you’re going to try to challenge scientific theories, you need to understand how science works properly first. And that means spending time in a laboratory or out in the field. And that’s assuming that the YouTube videos you’re watching are even getting their facts straight in the first place. A lot of the time, they aren’t.

Again, sorry to burst your bubble, but Mary Schweitzer didn’t find red blood cells. What she found were the breakdown products of red blood cells. Haemoglobin decays to heme molecules which then break down even further to heme products that can last basically forever, and that is what she found. To claim that scientists have found actual dinosaur red blood cells, when all they found was the breakdown products of red blood cells, is simply not getting your facts straight.

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The levels of carbon-14 found in ancient coals and diamonds are too low to rule out contamination. Yet YECs dismiss contamination as a “rescuing device.” It is nothing of the sort: one of the most basic and fundamental rules of science is that you must rule out all forms of error (such as contamination) before you try to claim anything significant. By dismissing contamination as a “rescuing device,” they are basically demanding a free pass to claim whatever they like. In fact, in any other area of science, if you dismissed contamination as a “rescuing device,” you would kill people.

There’s something important that you need to understand here. You can’t just hand-wave measurements away because they are “inaccurate.” Inaccuracy must be quantified.

Let’s say that you had a set of bathroom scales that gave a reading of 0.3kg when nobody was standing on them. If you then stood on a completely different set of bathroom scales and got a reading of 90kg, would you conclude that you weighed nothing? Of course not! Yet that is exactly what YECs do with their attempts to debunk radiometric dating. They make a song and a dance about K-Ar readings of 2 million years from places such as Mount St Helens, but what they don’t tell you is that the oldest dated minerals on Earth were measured to be two thousand times as old as that by a completely different method. And about 95% of the time, rock strata give ages that are in close agreement with each other by several different methods.

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Amen
Thanks for sharing, Olin

The Bible is so accurate on dates and events that explain what has transpired. The Big Bang and evolution have become a Religion for many in the scientific community and therein lies the difficulty in getting truth and facts exposed, debated and published. Not all questions can be answered yet, but you can find comfort in the Bible being accurate. Example: creation days are 24 hr periods. God created man’s time clock. God is outside of time. God doesn’t need millions of years to do anything.

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No. Those theories have earned their way into accepted science based on the criteria of science. The Big Bang and evolution have no place in the Bible and accepting their rightful empirical status had nothing to do with giving them religious status. No religious beliefs which have received broad acceptance in Christian theology are based on science. Never were and never will be. They are separate domains.

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I appreciate the responses and will respond to each rebuttal. It will take me a little while to gather all the info needed but I like a good challenge. See ya soon!

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May I suggest that the original poster has already stated that he is OEC, and he is looking for fellowship and engagement with others of similar outlook rather than an apologetic for YEC. For focused discussions on the topics you raised, it might be appropriate to initiate new threads.

Real research is done with instruments in labs, facilities, and observatories - none of which is found at Answers in Genesis. Reading can broadly be considered research of a survey nature; most welcome are discussions of actual journal published scientific papers. If you use the search function for this forum, you will find that the claims of Jeanson, Snelling, and other YEC spokes persons are already familiar - very very familiar - here. In general, the case for YEC fails as the misrepresentation of the data and science is exposed.

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You are right–He doesn’t. Yet, the signs are that He did. Why do you think that is? I don’t think He purposely lied.

The argument is that God created things mature. My own pastor used that argument. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.
The type of age isn’t that kind that shows maturity. It’s sort of like finding signs of an appendectomy scar, a broken bone that has been healed, and healed acne pits on Adam, and realizing that that wasn’t necessary for age.

Does that help?

I was a young earth creationist for years, and was enthusiastic (what I thought) was defending the Bible. When I realized my interpretation of the Bible was wrong, I had to acknowledge that God was bigger than me. Admitting I was wrong was not easy. It was not from a desire to fit in–I was quite outspoken in my college geology class.

It was kind, gracious teachers that listened to my questions, ignored the other students protesting against my obstruction, and answered them as best as they could, who convinced me not only to consider the evidence.

I can now be grateful to God for an even more wonderful understanding of His marvelous creation.

If you like videos, you may like this one series. The Haarsmas also found that science made them praise God more. I would be really interested in what you have to think.
Origins - Faith Alive Christian Resources (faithaliveresources.org)
Thanks.

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To be fair, most - as in nearly all of us around here probably do little more than Googling our way to needed responses, and your point is well-taken that this is not real research (much less actual science). And there is a difference between blindly accepting what a partisan site feeds you, and having enough education to recognize the plausible validity of some information or being able to vet the probably reliability of a source. But all that said, let’s not be hard on @Olin, especially given that he is pretty outnumbered here in terms of what and who all he has responding back to him. So if you want to bring up any AIG answers here, Olin, to see if or how they might fly - don’t hesitate. There are a few professional scientists here, but the majority of us happily lean on their published work - and later references back to such work, just as most people in the world do who are obliged to work at things other than science.

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Much of what modern Christians take literally the disciples understood symbolically or as a type where the actual meaning was in the anti-type found in Jesus. An example is that the exodus from Egypt is symbolic of our salvation is Christ. As modern people we start with the assumption that what we read is meant to be taken literally. The ancient Hebrews and those when Jesus appeared were more amenable to figurative language and the use of symbols. They did not live in a scientific world where there was a scientific explanation for things.

The Genesis account of “creation” and the first eleven (11) chapters of Genesis sets the stage explaining why there is the rest of the Bible and why Jesus was sent by the Father. The Genesis account of “creation” is not science. Science as we understand science didn’t start to exist until about A.D. 1600. Most people living in America and Europe didn’t know they lived on a planet that orbited the Sun even as late as about 1800. Cosmological science was not taught in the early American public schools which begin after 1870. Public school science classes begin in the 20th century. The point is that those ancient Hebrews who wrote Genesis didn’t know anything about science or cosmology as we know them today. They would not have understood either OEC or YEC as we understand those ideas. The purpose of Genesis chapters 1-11 explains what is wrong with the world and since there are very serious things that are wrong, why did God create?

You will come across some other things in the Bible about which you will have questions related to science. Always remember, the Bible is a book about God and our relationship to Him. It is not a science textbook. It is a spiritual textbook. Everybody who stumbles over science in the Bible, like over YEC and OEC, are mental prisoners of being modern people who think literally and have not learned to think like the ancient authors of scripture. The authority of the Bible resides in the truth that Christ is our Lord and not in proving or disproving things about the Bible. OEC and YEC are both way off the mark in that these are attempts to understand the creation story in the Bible as science when science didn’t even exist when the story was recorded. These OEC and YEC people have a wrong belief about how the Bible was written, that is, a belief the Bible was written using all the knowledge that God possess. How could humans understand that?

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Let me correct what I posted. The contrast was made between a science textbook and a spiritual textbook. Referring to the Bible as a textbook is wrong, but the purpose was to make the point that the Bible is not about science by contrasting it with a science textbook. Science does not investigate the meaning of things. The Bible is spiritual or religious literature and as such is concerned about meaning. Specifically, in the case of the creation narrative in Genesis, the purpose is about what is the meaning in God creating rather than a description of how the cosmos came to be. Simply stated as “Why did God Create?” The narratives in Genesis are not about how God created but why God created.

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I should clarify. Most of the scientist that are pushing evolution as scientific fact are the ones I’m referring to. I’m not saying they are bad people but are caught up in this lie. I like science and scientist but evolution is only wishful thinking. Evolution is not even a scientific hypothesis, since there is no conceivable way in which it can be tested. Science is knowledge, it is that which can be demonstrated and observed and repeated. Evolution cannot be proved, it can only be believed. Evolution is imagination and a lot of art. It has in a sense become a scientific religion and many are prepared to bend their observations to fit in with it.
Examples: Piltdown Man(Eanthropus) a complete fraud and was taught as fact for 40 years. Greatest Hoax of all times in secular science teaching. Nebraska Man(Hesperopithecus) For 5 years it was said to be an Ape- Man. Nope, another fraud. It was a pigs tooth. (Ramapithecus) touted as a hominid transitioning from ape to man- Time Magazine Nov. 7, 1977. Quote “Ramapithecus is ideally structured to be an ancestor of hominids. If he isn’t we don’t have anything else that is”. Supposedly 14MYO. It is just an ape similar to Ethiopian Baboon. Boxgrove Man, from one shin bone we get an exquisite artist rendering of a hominid, upright with human hands and feet. Lucy(Australopithecus) Found 1974 by Donald Johansan found 25% of skeleton, 75% reconstructed by artist conveniently with human hands feet and eyes. Also there were no hand or foot bones found but they gave her human ones. Lucy is all over the world and looks different everywhere but human like. Truth is, she’s a knuckle walker. BBC Documentary1981 Richard Leaky, “Making of Mankind”. He said” we can now say Australopithecus DEFINITELY walked upright”. London Royal Institute 1982 when questioned by a reporter Leaky stated that Paleontologist do not know whether Australopithecus walked upright, “nobody has found an associated skeleton with a skull” he says. Richard Leaky had to comment on his two positions and said “I am staggered to believe that as little as a year ago I made the statement I made”. He revealed that the conventional wisdom he recently espoused in his BBC series was probably wrong in a number of CRUCIAL areas. How many people continue to watch these shows and never hear an different? I’m tired of typing and it goes on an on so I will finish with this. Evolutionist don’t teach that apes today are evolving, what they teach is that all primates evolved in parallel at the same time in the unseen past. All primates came from one ancestor and branched off into apes, monkeys,baboons, chimps etc…but the problem is they cannot use apes today or apes in the fossil record as evidence for Evolution. What they have to have is some sort of half- man half- ape creature or something thy call a hominid human. That is why ape- men are so important to Evolution and hence all the lying and artwork.

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Alas, you should read a little about these other than what is presented by creationist organizations. You would see that the scientific community was skeptical almost immediately, and ultimately was responsible for proving it false when technology caught up enough to do so in 1953. Lots as happened since then.And Nebraska man was a wrong conclusion, but not an intentional fraud, and it was cleared up with in a few years with the paper retracted in1927 again by the scientific community, and hardly a blip in the history or science of evolution. The only ones who make a big deal over it are again the creationist organizations. Ironic isn’t it, considering the multiple deceptions present in the YEC literature.

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I think you’ve been completely misinformed about what science is and how it works.

The first thing you need to understand here is that the “were you there?” argument is a lie. There are ways in which things can be demonstrated and observed and repeated that do not require you to have been there to see it happen and that do not require you to make blind assumptions about the past. In particular, scientists can do two things in this respect:

  1. They can cross-check measurements against each other. If two different techniques for determining ages of things give the same result despite making different assumptions, that is pretty strong evidence that these methods work as intended.
  2. They can make predictions about what they expect to see in future discoveries. If new evidence comes to light that was predicted by A but not B, then that is pretty strong evidence that it is A rather than B that is correct.

You really need to get some more up to date information. Piltdown Man was dismissed sixty-nine years ago and Nebraska Man was retracted ninety-five years ago. In any case, they were just two data points out of many. In order to dismiss evolution as a fraud, you have to show that all the evidence for it is fraudulent. Given that the number of data points runs into the hundreds of thousands if not the millions, and now includes much more comprehensive and detailed lines of evidence such as comparative genomics, a tiny handful of hoaxes from nearly a century ago simply isn’t going to cut it.

As for the other examples you cite, such as Australopithecus, the conclusions drawn by paleontologists aren’t based on single one-off findings but on many different samples. Yes, some of the individual findings may have been fragmentary, but they are combined with many other findings to build up a coherent picture. It’s also important to understand that scientists build up this picture and see where the individual findings fit into the whole by taking careful measurements. They don’t just “eyeball it.”

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Hello Olin,

Thank you for taking the time to explain more.

I am interested in what evidence you have for evolution:

  • not being a scientific hypothesis
  • being untestable
  • and that it can’t observed and repeated.

These statements sound very much like claims that it can’t be proven that I am faithful to my husband.

Evolution is imagination and a lot of art. It has in a sense become a scientific religion and many are prepared to bend their observations to fit in with it.

Again, I am interested in the evidence you have for making this statement.

Evolutionist don’t teach that apes today are evolving,

Yet, again, I wonder what evidence you have for this statement. Clearly, a bacteriologist or a virologist would not be talking about evolution in apes, unless it were a side-hobby. But it’s hard to say that NO “evolutionist” is looking into how current species continue to evolve.

Thanks,
Kendel

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Actually no one was allowed access to study the Piltdown bones till after the perpetrators has deceased. It was a mixture of bones purposely put together for deception and that is a fact.
Nebraska man was resurrected from one tooth, come on!
Every supposed missing missing link that is found is just conjecture. Evolution is an industry not facts.

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I’m not aware of any scientists who are engaged with the questions which evolution addresses who think about whether evolution is a scientific fact or not. The main question evolution addresses is: how has life become as we find it today? What accounts for the proliferation of species which are so different from those we find in the fossil record? There is no scientific court which rules on what are or are not facts as far as I know.

Evolution is the theory which has emerged and received by far the greatest acceptance by those pursuing those questions empirically and publish their findings in accredited journals where others interested in those questions can benefit from or challenge them. The theories which receive consensus agreement by experts in their field represent the best answers we have to the questions science addresses.

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You are missing the point. It is a pattern of smoke and mirrors. There is a long line of fraud and misinformation that continues today and if you really want to go down the genome trail you will be disappointed. The chances of this entire diversity of life to have by chance developed on its own like evolution says, is one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion ! You have a lot of faith.

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And yet when it comes to whales being descended from a long line of creatures who originally lived on land it isn’t the length of the lines but the gaps in it which young earth creationists object to. Piltdown man and other such examples of experts being fooled in the past are exceedingly rare and yet you are quick to condemn them all and the eary field as liars and lies. You are inconsistent in how you apply your standards. If there is a day of judgement let’s hope that is done more fairly than what you are demonstrating here. Please try harder.

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No, Olin, you are missing the point. There is a massive difference between isolated instances of fraud by individual scientists on the one hand, and pervasive patterns of deception across entire scientific disciplines on the other.

If there really were a “long line of fraud and misinformation that continues today,” it would have to be systematic, pervasive, consistent and concerted, across multiple scientific disciplines, and carried out by millions of different scientists over a period of more than one hundred and fifty years. They would all have to be discussing and planning their deceptions behind the scenes to make sure that they all agreed with each other and presented a consistent narrative right down to the fine details.

If such a thing were happening, it would be the mother of all conspiracy theories. NASA faking the moon landings, chemtrails, alien spacecraft in Area 51, 9/11 being an inside job, and the US Navy covering up the existence of mermaids would be child’s play by comparison. I’m sorry, but conspiracies on that scale simply do not happen.

Seriously, this is the kind of thing that I see all the time coming from science deniers. They latch onto every discrepancy, every unanswered question, every isolated instance of fraud, and blow it up out of all proportion to give it a significance far, far beyond anything that could be reasonably justified. If anything is “a pattern of smoke and mirrors,” it is that.

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And likewise, God didn’t need 6 days to create everything. He created by command and it should have taken place instantly. Why do just dribbles and drabs over 144 hours? Incidentally this is why some of the early church fathers didn’t think the 6 days were literal.

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