Is the fossil evidence modified?

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@cewoldt

Scientists have for good reason dismissed centuries of science before them. Galileo–do I need to say more?

It’s funny how science deniers keep bringing up Galileo time and time again as justification for their claim that “science changes” or “scientists are always changing their minds.”

There are just two problems with this argument.

1. What Galileo was dismissing from the centuries before him was not science. It was a bunch of hypotheses and assumptions that were widely believed at the time but that nobody had bothered to test up until that point. If it hasn’t been tested, it isn’t science.
2. In any case, Galileo lived four hundred years ago. To bring up something that happened four hundred years ago, when modern science was in its infancy, as the basis for questioning anything in twenty-first century science when we have lasers and mass spectrometers and interferometers and genome sequencers and radio telescopes and satellites and interplanetary space probes and cloud computing and all sorts of other tools and techniques that he could only dream of, is simply patent nonsense.

@cewoldt

Again, what is your point? That millions of people have died as a result of Young Earth Creationism or denial of deep time?

No, the point is that if you applied the kind of reasoning that you see in young Earth arguments to any other area of science, millions of people would die.

@cewoldt

Specifically, what about creation science endangers people and lives. Don’t go on with generalities, like “creationists do bad science.”

Specifically, that they demand that we lower our standards of rigour, quality control, and attention to detail, in order to accommodate their approach. Once people start lowering their standards in one area of science, as sure as eggs are eggs they will start lowering their standards in other areas of science as well.

And I’m sorry, but YECs do do bad science. When you dismiss contamination as a “rescuing device,” that is bad science. When you cite tiny samples with huge error bars as “overwhelming” evidence for accelerated nuclear decay on a scale that would have raised the Earth’s temperature to 22,000°C if it had actually happened, that is bad science. When you cite errors of 10-15% in a minority of results as evidence that hundreds of thousands of other results are consistently out by factors of a million, that is bad science. And when you claim that rock formations are not fractured when such a claim is clearly contradicted by your own photographs, that is bad science.