Question from a YEC: What explains sedimentary rock other than a worldwide flood?

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@cewoldt

The Bible as it was originally written has not changed.

I didn’t claim that it had.

@cewoldt

I also have a biology textbook dating back to when I studied biology in high school. Much of what it teaches has been affirmed since then, but much of it has also been surpassed or modified or discarded and replaced and even repudiated.

OK so let’s get our facts straight about that.

The things that have been “surpassed or modified or discarded and replaced and even repudiated” all concern the fine details of evolution. It’s things such as, scientists used to believe that A evolved from B; now they have better evidence and know that A and B both evolved from C instead.

Sorry, but changes in the scientific consensus about the fine details does not falsify the bigger picture. To claim that they do is to exaggerate the extent and significance of the changes out of all proportion, which is a form of lying.

@cewoldt

So what I “learned” as evidences for evolution: peppered moths, embryonic recapitulation, the Nebraska and Piltdown man, the importance of Urey-Miller experiment, the drawings of ape to human evolution, Darwin’s finches, and even vestigial organs (despite objections to the contrary), are now known to not be valid evidences, and at times, even fraudulent.

I’m sorry Craig, but if you want to argue against evolution on the grounds of fraudulent evidence, you need to do a lot better than that.

Piltdown Man was recognised as a fraud in 1953. That is seventy years ago. Nebraska Man—which was an honest mistake, not a fraud—was retracted in 1927. That is ninety-six years ago.

If you want to argue against evolution on the grounds of fraudulent evidence, you need to show that all the evidence for evolution, right up to the present day, is fraudulent. And remember, you’re talking about millions of different lines of evidence, all of them fitting together to paint a very coherent picture, at times with a very high degree of mathematical precision.

That kind of scenario would require vast amounts of tightly coordinated scientific fraud to be going on behind the scenes on an industrial scale, involving millions of scientists, for more than a century and a half. A tiny handful of isolated instances of casual scientific fraud from nearly a century ago doesn’t come anywhere close to establishing the existence of a conspiracy on that scale, and to claim that it does is to blow the extent and significance of the fraud completely out of all proportion. Which, again, is a form of lying.

In any case, as @jpm points out, neither of them were ever presented by mainstream scientists as evidence for evolution, so if your textbook claims that they were, it must have been written by young earthists.

@cewoldt

So maybe you wouldn’t use the term “shifting sands” to describe the advance of scientific understanding, but the shoe still fits–so wear it rather than denying it.

Sorry Craig, but the shoe does not fit, and I’ve already explained why.

The term “shifting sands” would only fit if the scientific consensus changed arbitrarily, in response to whims and fashions. As I’ve pointed out already it does nothing of the sort: the scientific consensus only changes in tightly disciplined ways, according to strict rules, in response to new evidence or new and improved techniques for analysing the evidence.

As I said, to compare the scientific consensus to “shifting sands” is to misunderstand or misrepresent what scientists actually do and the strict rules and protocols that they have to follow. Which is at best wilful ignorance and at worst another form of lying.