My question here is: the Wikipedia page talks about the stones being artificially aged by baking them in cow dung. Were any tests done on controls which had been treated in this way? The paper makes no mention of it as far as I can see.
1 Like
Another good point. Maybe the tests were done and didn’t give the desired answer.
As opposed to supernatural oxidation, I suppose. Like maybe a burning bush?
So, articles should have their conclusions examined to make sure they make sense.
This may or may not be the case. However, regular scientists would be able to refute such a suggestion by making their lab notes available for inspection.
But the red flag is that the conclusions were put in a results section. This is wrong regardless of the validity of the conclusion.
1 Like
In practice, it doesn’t work that way. Regular scientists who reviewed the manuscript would demand such results, not lab notes.
Hi Jonathan. Just out of curiosity, which BioLogos articles in particular did you find helpful on this topic?
Just one post off topic…Then I need to address some logical fallacies of others…I didn’t really read any ARTICLES about this, just by participating in the forum led these difficulties to come to light. However… I will admit that I know little or nothing about cosmology, and until I have learned A LOT more about it, I would not consider myself worthy to discuss it on this forum. Furthermore, I am most certainly not going to give up my YEC views over what is, to me, a shapeless form of big words and advanced math.
Well, that’s why I started this topic on dinosaurs, which (as you can see), is…going over well.
Do you see how that post might be a bit confusing to readers? You state that the two men confessed to fraud and forgery. Then you claim to understand their motives for making such a confession. Then you object to my calling them “admitted hoaxes” even though that is what the men admitted.
As to your claiming to know their motives, if they wanted to avoid taking the blame for plundering artifacts, why did they choose to lie by saying that they defrauded the public instead of the many much safer and more convenient lies? They could have said “My grandfather had kept them as treasured heirlooms and I inherited them when he died” or even “I bought them from a guy who said that they had been in his family for years. It never occurred to me that the guy was a grave robber or an artifact thief.” Yet again your conclusions perplex me, especially when you appear to favor the least likely of all possible explanations.
You’ve made several bold assertions about scientists ignoring contrary evidence and allowing their biases to interfere with good science and scholarship. Have you considered the possibility that that is exactly what you are doing with the cherry-picked Ica stone evidence? (Based on your article and its citations, I’m not even entirely comfortable using the word “evidence” in this context but this is an informal discussion, not an academic journal. The gentleman you cited in your article did little more than make unsupported assertions.)
Also, when dealing with the Ica stones, what is the nul hypothesis? What position has the burden of proof? It sounds like you are saying that these stones of unknown provenance, which have already been discredited by confessions of forgery, should be accepted as compelling evidence for relatively recent dinosaur populations in Peru until someone can prove otherwise. Yet, the scientific method and standard logic would consider the Ica stones nothing more than interesting oddities _until someone discovers compelling evidence for them (1) being the product of an ancient, or nearly ancient, culture; and (2) demonstrates that they were intended to depict real animals observed by the artist or by someone else within that culture and not just meant to reference the culture’s mythological stories. Without a known provenance, those are enormous encumbrances to what is always a challenging burden of proof in science and other scholarship.
Of course, even if those hurdles could be overcome, one can’t simply dismiss or ignore the enormous volumes of weighty evidence for established geological/paleontological timelines. And considering the enormous climate and habitat changes over time, it is very difficult to imagine that Cretaceous and Jurassic era dinosaurs would have remained relatively unchanged anatomically/morphologically speaking until not all that many centuries ago. (In other words, if a population of what we would generally define as dinosaurs somehow survived until recent times, we wouldn’t expect them to look like residents of Jurassic Park. Indeed, the dinosaurian descendants which actually have survived and live among us today as birds look quite different.)
There are a significant number of curious objects in the world today of unknown or sketchy provenance which scholars have studied for many years without being able to reach any unambiguous conclusions. Such oddities get lots of attention on Internet websites and in books written by imaginative non-academic authors. It’s fun to think about mysterious objects and their possible implications.Yet, we can’t let ourselves go way beyond the available evidence just because we want something to be true.
Perhaps you could explain why you appear to cherry-pick the data and want to believe the fanciful interpretations of the Ica stones.
I do think that this entire topic is an interesting and very instructive exercise. And who doesn’t love dinosaurs?
@benkirk
Thanks to “piling on” I have my refutation work cut out for me.
As it turns out, it was Taq who started that by seriously misinterpreting and then quote mined, (yes, I know what that is. I looked it up to make sure, and as it turns out, I was correct) a very sarcastic post of mine that I put up in response to having to discuss the Wikipedia article AGAIN. The whole deal was rather a misunderstanding, so let us return to the topic, shall we?
And I would not expect or want you to do so. However, I would encourage you to learn how be be discerning in what you read. As Paul said to Timothy, we too can take his advice:
“These are the things you are to teach and insist on. 3 If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, 4 they are conceited and understand nothing. They have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions 5 and constant friction between people of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.”
Perhaps we all fall into that trap at times, but the goal is value truth. OK, I’m through preaching now, and I know it is largely to the choir, but it is something I reflect on often.
A very interesting observation…one that I myself made a couple years back. After researching patina, I determined that baking the stones in cow dung would not have had the desired effect.
@pevaquark
The “loads of dinosaur bones” are probably buried in the Altacama desert, or the Amazon jungle somewhere, waiting to be discovered. I’ll make sure to tell you if Mr. Woetzel finds anything. It doesn’t surprise me that the bones aren’t buried with humans…but hey, there are a lot of undiscovered tombs out there!
Another thing: You say that the stones are admitted fakes by the original forger. You already write them off. And (@Socratic.Fanatic, this is for you too) it is important to remember that, when Basilio and Irma were interrogated, they said that the stones that they had carved for Dr. Cabrera were all about the size of an orange…now remember this: a lot (maybe even most) of Cabrera’s stones were MUCH larger than the size of an orange! Including some that depict dinosaurs. I have SEEN dinosaur stones that are the size of a large loaf of bread.
YES YES YES YES YES! THANK YOU @jpm FOR SAYING THIS!
Excitement aside, it has occurred to me that, while you will shoot holes in a fairly reputable AIG article until it looks like Swiss cheese, most of you seem willing to accept a WIKIPEDIA article as gospel truth if it supports your worldview. I have researched the Ica stones. I have read a great deal of the books AND articles. From both sides! Here were my conclusions:
-
The articles AGAINST usually relied heavily on the anecdotal evidence from the confessions of Basilio and Irma, and used the very poor argument: “since dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, and we have ancient artifacts that accurately depict them, the artifacts must be fake since dinosaurs died out millions of years ago.”
-
The articles FOR (with the exception of the AIG one, which I didn’t think was terribly well researched) seemed to have much more edge, since they put in more evidence (and yes, I would consider comparing scientific knowledge from time to time evidence). And, after all, what can beat reading Dr. Dennis Swift’s book on the stones, as he has probably studied them more than maybe even Dr. Cabrera!
Another way to evaluate scientific evidence is reproducibility: That is, can an independent researcher get the same results. Can you show that an independent researcher has found these stones? If this guy has found a thousand, they must be common, so why has no credible authority found any and why have none been found in place? Is it any wonder that the truthfulness of the findings are questioned?
In scientific research, while a new finding may be interesting and exciting, no one gets too worked up about it until it can be confirmed. In science, this is often done by the people competing for research grants etc so it is decidedly not a place where mistakes are ignored.
1 Like
@jpm
The sad truth is: No “credible” authority seems to be interested. The other sad truth is, when a “credible” authority gets involved in something like this, they often cease to be regarded as a credible authority.
Also…
I am quite disappointed by Wikipedia’s “mysterious artifacts” section. They approach almost all of them (and I have no problem with some of them being treated this way) as fakes. Even though some (the KENSINGTON RUNESTONE to my surprise) are generally regarded as real.
I have been saying for some time that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by ecological change and not by genetic Darwinian change.
Keep in mind that finding dinosaurs bones alongside human bones is not the only “absent evidence.” We don’t find dinosaur bones alongside modern mammals of any sort. And there’s many varieties of modern angiosperms (i.e., the flowering plants of more recent strata) that we don’t find alongside dinosaur bones. [Of course, if dinosaurs had lived only a few thousand years ago, we would find dinosaurs bones and not just permineralized fossil “bones.”]
There are many reasons why I abandoned my Young Earth Creationist position years ago. I noticed how vast quantities of scientific evidence were entirely ignored or dismissed—and often ministries like Answers in Genesis and ICR were virtually obsessing on the most obscure kinds of “evidence”, such as entire articles on what they claimed was a stegosaurus engraving at a Cambodian temple, and old drawings of dragons and claiming that the only possible explanation was that dragons were the dinosaurs that lived contemporaneously with the people. The misrepresentations of Dr. Mary Schweitzer’s research into “soft tissue” residues (she’s an evangelical Christian) also bothered me a lot. The fact that such ministries almost never honestly discuss the most important types of evidence for evolution and billions of years strikes me as harmful to our witness for Christ and the scriptural warnings about producing stumbling blocks. Resorting to the most obscure, desperate, and blatantly illogical arguments tells me that even they are aware of their predicament of last resort cherry-picking. It doesn’t really bother me that they don’t find the evidence for the Theory of Evolution compelling or that they doubt what textbooks explain about the age of the earth. No, I’m bothered far more about the dishonesty and misrepresentations—and how rarely they will abandon a terribly silly and long ago debunked argument.
In other words, whatever our personal position on science topics, the world is going to be more concerned about how we reflect Jesus Christ in terms of love and truth. That is where I have personally failed most in my younger years.
3 Likes