Please let me respond to your post by first of all saying that I am not ‘anti-science’. Neither do I approach any subject with the paramount criterion of whether I like or dislike other peoples scientific findings. What I do believe is that real ‘science’ as ‘science’ has its limitations. Limitations which are often overlooked.
Are the illegitimate debates merely the ones that you don’t like? Your statement obviously depends on your definition of what you view to be ‘legitimate debate’ whereas others, including scientists, obviously have have a view of legitimacy different to your own. If this wasn’t the case then there would not be differences of opinion between scientists who hold to different views in a whole host of different subject areas. Such as:
Abiogenesis
Common descent
The actual mechanism which drives evolution
Missing transitions of human origins in the fossil record
The origin of moral consciousness…
etc. etc.
The list goes on. Not to mention other categories concerning Uniformitarianism and the philosophical basis of naturalism. So your above statement is simply not true.
The fact that there are so many shades of opinion by scientists even only this site discounts your basic proposition.
If you re-read my post I said ‘Peer review procedures can only be tentatively relied upon if there is no apparent corruption within the system. I have read articles by ‘insiders’ who would argue that this is not always the case.’
I have not said that the whole system is completely corrupt or as corrupt as it could possibly be.
Chris Shaw (PhD, Queen’s University, Belfast) is professor of drug discovery in the school of pharmacy at Queen’s University in Belfast. He is the author of hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and the co-founder of a biomarker discovery company.
He says this in his article ‘Pressure to conform leads to bias in science’:
'For many, science has become a new religion, endowed with an infallibility extending even to answering fundamental questions about our origins and the purpose of our existence- questions that once were the subject matter of philosophers and religious scholars. As a consequence of this new role, The scientific process has been increasingly departing from its objective basis to one of crass subjectivity, with regular highly speculative claims being made by renowned scientists in the popular media and even in the scientific press.
Phrases such as 'I/We believe that…" have become common among some scientists particularly in the fields of evolutionary biology and cosmology. The ‘high priests’ of this new religion- we’ll call it ‘scientism’ are the worst offenders…
But there are also a largely unknown dark side to this new religion: control of the freedom of thought:
As acknowledged by the major scientists, the allocation of research and the peer review system of scientific publications are both seriously flawed and serve to maintain the 'status quo within the establishment by filtering out perceived intellectual heretics.
New thoughts, ideas and insights are often viewed with suspicion and require evaluation not only of their worth but also, increasingly, of their potential to challenge widely accepted dogma. Indeed, this has been an almost universal experience in the early, ridicule-fraught careers of most Nobel laureates in the sciences. New recruits to the system must obey the rules if they wish to obtain training positions, tenure and career progression’. (end quote)
I have seen of situations where hoax papers have been submitted and actually published by peer reviewers who did not even recognise that the paper was intentional nonsense.
Your link to the article how old is the earth? is not is an issue with me as I have already stated.
Corruption within the peer review system does not depend upon your 'mother of all conspiracies. It simply depends on the fact that it is always subject to the flawed and often corrupt processes of human beings.
Here is a scholarly article about the downside of peer review: