Wednesday, October 20, 2010

"In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to be scientific."

So that is a quote from G.K. Chesterton, and I read it the same day as I watched something else that made me realize that virtually nothing has changed in the 100 years since he wrote.

I've been watching too much of a show called MonsterQuest, mostly because some of the episodes have the potential to be cool. They go searching for legendary creatures and monsters, and unfortunately, since the show is a History Channel special, you already know that they don't find the creature--otherwise it would be on the evening news, and not on MonsterQuest. Still, the quest is usually enjoyable.

I was having fun watching the episode on the possible sauropod that lives in the jungles of Camaroon and Congo. They spent the first 20 minutes showing the locals--who are completely isolated from modern media--identifying dinosaurs, describing dinosaurs, pointing to pictures of dinosaurs. Then they cut to the "scientific expert." He was a paleontologist at Big University who stated that all this was a "complete evolutionary impossibility." When faced with eyewitness testimony, he could only assert, "in their culture, they don't understand the difference between things that are real and things that aren't." Wow. I always knew evolutionism was racist...but there you go. So much for science being about exploration and discovery, that was about as close-minded as you can get. I've known my fair share of paleontologists, who have called me close-minded for my Creationism, but every theory will leave you open-minded to some things, and close-minded to others--the question really is, which hypothesis fits the evidence better?

As Chesterton might say (had he lived another 100 years)--experts are wrong, and the locals who see this thing while they're fishing every day are right. Unfortunately, those ignorant tribesman know nothing of evolutionary impossibilities; but let's not tell them, at least they understand reality better than a paleontologist.