I've never been impressed with "data anomaly soup" presentations to overthrow a prevailing viewpoint. Before I had spent much time arguing with creationists, I had a buddy who was a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist. He still sometimes helps a U. MD professor research books on the subject. I have read that stuff realized these guys have no story and no theory, only a list of things they offer as "problems."
There's a bullet that didn't deform enough. (How do we really know we have the right bullet, or that one particular bullet out of N fired had to do exactly this and that?) There's a picture of a guy in a parking lot in Mexico who supposedly ought to look like Oswald but looks more like Dick Butkus. (Are we sure it's even the right picture?)
The same buddy of mine likes the theory that aliens built the Gaza complex in 10,000 BC. The main evidence for that one is that we apparently can't explain the amount of water erosion visible on the Sphinx if we are limited to just 5,000 years.
It has turned out over the decades that he likes anything that overthrows everything we think we know in a given area. He likes Velikovsky. He likes Ancient Mapmakers who knew modern geography. All of these fringe "theories" operate on the idea that you can build a new theory by compiling lists of things the other theory does not explain, all the while loudly proclaiming your own persecution. I'm thus pretty sure the only thing which has steered him clear of creationism is that he's too radically liberal. (Liberalism being just another militant nutcase thing he's bought into.) Otherwise, he's the stereotypical creationist. But then, creationists are that anomaly, conservatives who "reason" like liberals, which is to say, very little.
You see, creationism is a cancer within conservatism only. If I could find a way to give it to the liberals, I would. It would make it that much more obvious that liberals are the problem in our society. Let's put all the idiot relativists in one barrel and shoot it!
Now, for all I really know, there may actually be something fishy in the JFK murder and the Warren Commission investigation. That's where my buddy--we're indeed still buddies after all this--has the best chance of vindication. However, all he and his fellow conspiracy nuts have done is stomp all over the evidence trail and generally discredit further inquiry as a tinfoil hat activity. Most of them consider themselves engaged in war with the CIA. If you have to keep appealing to the actions of a conspiracy of evil dumb people trying to stop you, you don't have a theory. You have a delusional system.
Note that creationism has the same problem. Cheap and easy evasions to dismiss 146 years of accumulated evidence. "Fakes and lies by the evil dumb materialist Marxist Satanist atheist evolutionists!"
There are no alternate Egyptologies that offer 1/1,000th the enriching information content of the real thing. While it is theoretically possible to tear down the real thing while having nothing with which to replace it, the odds are against. It's hard to have an "irrefutable refutation" of a history while having no clue what did happen.
Evolution has made tons of successful predictions and there's an enormous body of evidence for it. A bunch of religious hysterics trying to wish it all away by cataloging every dispute, uncertainty, unexpected result, or gap in the detailed history has no hope ever of influencing the progress of science. They can only go after the teaching of same, and that is what they are doing. If you can't lie to the peer-reviewed journals, lie to the ninth-graders.
It's quite a sad little lying science, this Creation Science. It even has to lie about its name these days. I'm always catching it using the alias of "Intelligent Design."
Ding, ding, ding!! One of your finest posts. You might consider using that little bit for a tagline.
I woke up this morning and the PC's on
Logged onto FR to start my day
I got wrapped up in a crevo thread
A paradigm shifts and it slips my way.
It's more for the Lurkers (more for the Lurkers)
Hear the old canards the creos say (more for the Lurkers)
I begin posting (more for the Lurkers)
Till I feel a paradigm shift my way
I feel a paradigm shifting my way.
So many threads have come and gone
So many more await their turn;
Yet I recall as I battle on,
We do it so the lurker's learn.
Chorus
[Guitar Solo]
When the creo's canards are getting old
I grab some links and post away,
And think of a lurker reading this.
A paradigm shifts and it slips my way.
It slips my way.
Chorus
What?!?
There is no such thing as a Liberal Creationist?
I find that hard to believe!