Well, I don't see any merit in debating you on the theory as it would be applied to lower animals...that's a problem for biologists, if their theory is flawed; it's not a problem with theological weight. As I said, God could use any method He wished, as pertains to the lower animals, including gradualism, if He had wished.Scott Mayers wrote: ↑Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:56 am You are still not recognizing that ANY 'fossil' evidence itself is not the reason evolution is true including mankind. The KIND of PROOF of fossils is only used to show WHICH living things relate in comparison to other living things by which order and their connections.
It's only the "Ascent of Man" theory that has any theological import. And that theory, I think, dies not just on its own history of mendacity, but also on the dearth of current evidence for such a process having taken place, such as the universal grouping of mankind into one species, not the multitude of species one would expect if the "ascent" theory had any scientific value.
He certainly is, in one sense. In other, he's properly instructive that we are not always being told the truth...so he speaks from his grave.Piltdown man is also a DEAD issue
...and needs no apology by the theory nor the theorists who discovered the logic of evolution.
Well, in the case of Piltdown Man, their credulity manifestly had nothing to do with either science or logic. Here's the truth: they wanted there to be clear proof of the "ascent of man." They had their conclusions already decided before any data came in. Then they set about trying to patch up the "missing links" in their theory by filling them in with things like Java Man, Peking Man, Neanderthal Man and Piltdown Man.
In this process, they made not one fraud (Piltdown Man), but several. The entirety of "Nebraska Man" was based on a single tooth -- which was later revealed to belong to an exinct member of the pig family. "Java Man" was the product of mixing skeletons. "Neanderthal Man" turned out to be a modern human. And the famous "Lucy," the most famous "missing link," turned out to be an extinct quadruped, a pygmy chimpanzee.
So standing back and looking at that mess, one can see what happened. Scientists wanted the theory to be true: they assumed the conclusion, and then went looking to fill it in with data. So desperate were they to make their scientific reputations by closing up the many gaps in the theory that they failed to exercise skepticism or to use proper scientific methods to test. They rushed to judgment, and embarassed themselves, repeatedly.
But then they did something worse. They didn't retract. They didn't correct the scientific record. They just quietly shuffled aside each failing "specimen" and went right ahead as if the theory was true anyway. They allowed generations of children to be misled, and generations of biologists to bark up the wrong tree (so to speak) in the purely faith-based expectation that sooner or later all the "missing links" would fall out of that tree. And in so doing, they stalled science. It's made no progress on the "Ascent of Man" theory, because it's simply the wrong theory, but for ideological and reputational reasons, they now don't want to let it go.
So even if we excuse them for Piltdown Man -- which you know was a fraud -- how do we excuse them for their subsequent mendacity? And what does such dishonesty have to do with real science?
Sorry...I missed that bit. But it would be irrelevant anyway. Even if we were to suppose that there were religious frauds around, that wouldn't be a parallel to scientific frauds. For there are manifestly many erroneous religions, even if (as I believe) there is one that is not fraudulent. But science is supposed to be the pursuit if pure, objective truth by means of data and evidence, not of assuming conclusions and then trying to back-fill the theory for ideological reasons.religious frauds
And it is because science claims to be neutrally true (and in the ideal, would be) and has such high pretentions to purity of method that it owes us to explain why its proponents so often have failed to live up to its professed high standards...particularly in the case of things like the "Ascent of Man" theory.
The answer's obvious: the fault is not with science but with the ideologues who put on a quasi-scientific show in order to bolster their reputations. The failure is not in science, but in those scientists who choose, instead of promoting truth, to promote themselves; for like all of us, they are corruptible human beings, sensitive to reputation and prestige and reluctant to own their (now obvious) errors.
Prove counterscientifically that man is NOT included in evolution.
Easy.
We have above a list of some of the frauds and errors in the chain. But let us suppose that we excuse all that on the grounds that, say, "there could be a different 'ascent' paradigm," -- one without Piltdown, Java or Nebraska in it, say.
If that were true, we should expect the collecton of humanoids on the planet to be very diverse indeed. We should expect there to exist not just one or two or ten "links" in an evolutionary chain, but (given the millions or even billions of years posited by different theories) we should expect a vast range of humanoid forms, most of them not even interfertile with each other, and some transitioning into very different species.
Evolutionism is, after all, and unguided process of random mutation -- therefore, as time advances, animal groups should not narrow into species, but rather expand into a panoply of half-this-half-that mutant forms. We should be neck deep in Neanderthals, Pekings, Javas, or whatever other mutant forms are logically possible within such a random universe. For every successful such mutant, there ought to be a vast range of failed "transitional" forms, all of them abundantly available in the fossil record.
This is not what we observe. It is not what the data shows. If we are scientific, that fact should concern us.
It's not just politics, of course. Take Galileo. Sure, the Catholic Church picked on him. But if you go back and look at the history, you'll realize they did it on the information given them by the Aristotelian "scientific" community of the day. It was the Aristotelean paradigm that dominated those years, and it was the Aristotelians, jealous for their "scientific" reputations, who were Galileo's most ardent opponents.I already recognize how science could be influenced by politics.Immanual Can wrote:...
And we should all remember the lesson, which is simply this: not all that gets stamped "science" or "fact" really is. And we can't trust even our scientific "elites" to practice special honesty, when their reptuations are at stake. They're just not that honest all the time. So we should keep watching them carefully.
So there we have a case of an internal war within what was thought to be "science" of the day. We have one kind of "scientist" refusing to accept the prononcements of another, and mobilizing the clergy to silence him.
We have the same thing in the days of the invention of the marine chronometer, at the turn of the 18th Century, by James Harrison. Harrison, you see, was merely a carpenter and mechanic: and the existing scientific community could not stand the thought that such a man could have solved the problem of navigational longitude without even consulting them, and entirely outside of their approved, star-gazing alternative method. So they suppressed his invention and denied him the scientific prize he had earned, until 1773, when they finally admitted he had won it fair-and-square. IN other words, it took them half a century even to admit he was right...which he manifestly had been, all along, and which any honest test had already proved abundantly.
That's how the scientific community has sometimes operated: not like perfect, objective automatons yielding unimpeachable results every time, but as flawed human beings, sometimes caring more for reputation or established thought than for truth, and only sometimes being willing to look at the evidence at all.
Scientists are not angels. We shouldn't expect that they are. We should watch what they say, and measure it by truth. Science is very good when it is practiced genuinely scientifically: but it's not a good thing when the name of "science" is stolen by those who are being merely reputationally-concerned, clannish, traditional or ideologically possessed -- all of which certainly is sometimes the case.