Creationist Dishonesty

One of the more disturbing elements of the Creation Science phenomenon is dishonesty.Take this site for an example - No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.rinconhosting.net/users/bibletest/evolution.htmLook under "Piltdown Chicken".According to this site, how was the hoax uncovered? (5 marks)Is this actually a true record of the events? (1 mark)My point behind this thread is two-fold - to collect a corpus of evidence that creationist sources are - erm - economical with the truth, and also to chart my success or lack thereof in getting this particular dishonesty removed from the Creationist site.I have today sent the following Email. I will keep you posted on responses:

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You state, under "Piltdown Chicken" that: "Although a few months later one of the Chinese co-conspirators came clean, one wonders how long the fake would have persisted had he not voluntarily gone public"

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The truth of the matter is very different. As the site in your own footnote states:

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"Just a few months later, Xu Xing, a collaborator in the research announced the bad news, and confirmed what a few others had quietly suspected: The fossil was a composite. "

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In other words, the hoax was discovered by mainstream "evolutionist" scientists, not by the hoaxer coming forward.

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I trust you will amend your page to remove this potentially misleading error.

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In Christ

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Karl Thornley, Sheffield UK

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[This message has been edited by Karl, 08-07-2003]

I dunno Karl. I'm not sure you've got much of a leg to stand on. Oh, you can probably quibble over the price paid and a couple of other minor details, but the story is essentially correct. A Chinese farmer hoaxed up a "missing link" a la Piltdown (although I'd never heard it called that before, it certainly is appropriate). Nat Geo rushed to print before anyone had done a decent examination. Once paleontologists got a good look at it, it was pretty obviously a fake. Nat Geo published a humiliating retraction and cautionary story in the Jan 2000 issue.There are plenty of standard creationist lies on that site it would be better (and easier) to go after. Archeoraptor really was a fake. However, it doesn't say squat about evolution. It DOES say a lot about journalism, though.

Quetzal - I think you're missing the point. Of course it was a fake. My beef is that the site states that it was the hoaxer who revealed the fact it was a fake, whereas in fact it was mainstream palaeontologists.This is important - their thrust is "You (i.e. "evolutionists") 'd have gone on touting this hoax as true if the hoaxer hadn't admitted it was false", which is of course not the case. "Evolutionists" discovered the fake themselves.

I see your point. However, he makes the same statements about Nebraska Man, Boule's fossils, even Piltdown itself (which is the only one that he could kinda make that claim on). He flat out lies about heidelburgensis, 2dLOT, the whole bit about evolution = accident, misquotes Patterson out of context (as usual), etc etc. The entire thing is a tissue of lies, half truths, missing context, misrepresentation, distortion, and misunderstanding of the basics. IOW, a pretty typical creationist website.If you want to go after him about Archeoraptor be my guest. I wasn't arguing against you. I just feel there are so many MORE egregious lies on that site that it might make more sense to go after one of them instead...

But maybe it is a good tactic to try to see if a comparitively small error gets corrected. If that isn't going to be fixed it tells us something about the sites interest in the "truth" even when it is no problem to correct something small. As you say the fact that there was fraud is still there for them.

What about these supposedly damning quotes? Anyone have refutations for them, because I am sure they are either misrepresented, lies, or simply out of context:Question #10: Why Aren't Evolutionists Being Honest with the Public?Evolution Expert Colin Patterson, the world's foremost Fossil Expert-directly affiliated with the British Museum of Natural History in London-delivered the following stunning discourse before a startled audience of fellow-evolutionists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (reported in 1985 by Tom Bethell of Harper's magazine):One reason I started taking [an] anti-evolutionary viewwas that last year I had a sudden realizationOne morning I woke up and...it struck me that I had been working on this stuff [macroevolution] for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be misled so long."Evolution Expert Sir Arthur Keith: "Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We [evolutionists] believe it because the only alternative is special creation [God], and that is unthinkable."Professor D.M.S. Watson of the University of London bodaciously echoed the same troubling truths: "Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists, not because it has been observed to occur or can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." (12)Not quite what we hear from our Biology teachers, is it?

Well, DMS Watson is quote out of context, and from a 74 years old article(!) well before much of the modern evidence was established, link here: http://members.cox.net/ardipithecus/evol/lies/lie031.htmlSir Arthur Keith died in 1955, although I haven't found an source for the quote. According to many creationist's it's from the introduction to the 100th edition (pity only 6 were published) of the Origin of Species, although another claims it comes from an address before his colleagues (convienently unverifiable). Another claims it comes from the foreward he wrote to the centenary edition (neat trick, that's 4 years after his death...). This page http://www.picknowl.com.au/...es/rlister/sermons/ape/ape.htm attributes it to a comment made to a journalist in 1935.

I dealt with the quotes on the debate where the page was raised (different forum) - Where are the Monkeymen?? | Page 7 | Christian ForumsThe Patterson quote is particularly disingenuous, because the central word - "anti-evolution" - has a totally different intention to what it's made out to mean when Creationists use this particular quote.

Oh yeah, good ol' christianforums.net. I'd forgotten about that place. I see lucaspa is still rational and holding forth as well as ever. Good on him. So is pudmuddle the author of that screed, or just a copy-paster?

Pudmuddle was just the copy and paste merchant.In response to my Email, and credit as is due, the falsehood has now been removed from the page. The text now reads:

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True to form, they put their boundless imaginations to work and dubbed the "new species" Archaeoraptor liaoningensis.

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Although a few months later a scientist had the decency to expose the fossil as a hoax, once again the incident showcased the "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality of evidence-starved evolutionists.

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We can dispute the accuracy of the commentary - I'd say "The incident showcased the mistakenly market-led actions of National Geographic, and the value of the peer-review process", but at least the actual re-invention of history has been removed.

Well done Karl. I take it all back...