Have the Darwinian faithful ever been so optimistic about their theory that they stretched the evidence dishonestly? Well, yes, there have been instances of “hiding the decline” in the biological sciences.
Tuesday is the centennial of the grossest fraud of 20th-century science: Piltdown man. It is a case worth remembering.
On Dec. 18, 1912, amateur geologist Charles Dawson presented to the Geological Society of London a partial skull. It was purported to be a human ancestor 500,000 to 1 million years old, an age scientists now assign to Homo erectus. Dawson said he had found the fossils in a gravel pit near Piltdown Common, south of London.
Dawson had no scientific credentials, but his friend Arthur Smith Woodward did. Woodward was the keeper of the geological department at the British Museum. He had been at the dig and had seen the jawbone “fly out” of the ground under the blow of Dawson’s pick.
There was a problem with the jawbone. It was from an orangutan only a few hundred years old. It was fitted with two fossilized chimpanzee teeth, filed down to make them look more like human teeth. The cranium fragments were human, from the Middle Ages. All had been treated with an iron solution and acid to make them look older.
Scientists didn’t have many fossil skulls in 1912, but none of them looked like a human cranium with an ape jaw.
Several scientists, including one from the Smithsonian Institution, argued that the jaw and cranium did not match. It took 40 years for them to be proved right, and even longer for Dawson to be confirmed as the con man responsible.
The surprising thing is that this is not the only time that this has happened with Darwinists and global warmists.
J.W. Wartick reviewed the book a while back, and called it “the best introductory apologetics book in regards to the historicity of the Gospels I have ever read“.
How is Christianity a “cold case”? When detectives investigate cold cases, they’re investigating events (murders) from the distant past for which there are often no living eyewitnesses and little, if any, direct or forensic evidence to make the case. Detectives learn how to evaluate and employ circumstantial evidence to demonstrate what happened at the scene of the crime. In a similar way, Christianity makes a claim about an event in the distant past for which there are no living eyewitnesses and little, if any, direct or forensic evidence.
What is your background as a detective? I’ve been working murders in Los Angeles County for 15 years and cold cases for the past 12. Many of these cases have drawn national attention and have been featured on FOX News, Court TV and Dateline NBC. Along the way, I came to appreciate the nature of circumstantial evidence and recognized the skills I developed as a cold-case detective would serve me well in my investigation of the claims of the New Testament Gospels.
What are some of the principles of investigation used in Cold-Case Christianity to evaluate the claims of the New Testament? I’ve identified 10 principles of investigation I believe will assist believers and skeptics as they evaluate the Gospel accounts. Cold-Case Christianity will help people to understand the importance of investigative presuppositions, the role of abductive reasoning, the power and nature of circumstantial evidence, the value of word choice in eyewitness statements and much more. The techniques we use as detectives are appropriate and relevant to the study of the claims of Christianity.
What made you change from a self-described “angry atheist” to a passionate defender of the gospel? When I first read through the Gospels, I observed “unintended eyewitness support” from one Gospel account to another. Like eyewitnesses I had interviewed at crime scenes, one Gospel writer would describe an event in a way that raised as many questions as it answered. The parallel testimony of another Gospel writer would then inadvertently answer the questions raised by the first account. This “eyewitness attribute” I observed in the Gospels intrigued me as an investigator. I eventually decided to use the tools of Forensic Statement Analysis to evaluate the Gospel of Mark. My conclusions forced me to take Mark’s account seriously. My journey toward Jesus began with this investigative approach to the Gospels.
This book makes me think of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ” book. He brought a journalist’s perspective to the historical Jesus. What could be more interesting than a journalist? A cold case homicide detective who has to make cases to juries all the time. Like Strobel, Wallace is coming from a skeptical background, too. So he knows how to talk to skeptics in a way that many Christians who have always been on the inside don’t know. I think it helps that he has an outside-the-ivory-tower career and has to deal with non-Christians and even criminals all the time. He’s rooted in real-life, and knows how to talk about spiritual things in ways that are interesting to ordinary people.
By the way, there is a Kindle edition of it, although I will want a hard copy to lend. I’m pretty sure that this book will be easy to lend to my co-workers – there is just something about detectives that people find interesting. Think of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, for example.
Investors Business Daily does the math on the GM bailout.
Excerpt:
Sale of the U.S. government’s stake in General Motors Corp. ends a sorry saga. Not only were Americans lied to about the costs, but the bailout underscores why replacing market forces with federal bailouts doesn’t work.
The Obama administration says it will unload 200 million shares — or about 40% of its holdings — back to GM right away. The rest, 300 million shares, are to be sold by March 2014.
[…]Well, GM on Wednesday said it will buy back the 200 million share government stake for $5.5 billion, or $27.50 a share.
The break-even point on the government’s total holdings was $53 a share. But now, with $20.9 billion in taxpayer funds left to pay off from 300 million shares, the break-even point has risen to $69.72 a share.
In other words, at current prices, taxpayers are sitting with a loss of 61%, or nearly $15 billion, on their investment.
So where did the money go, then?
According to a study last summer by the Heritage Foundation, the $80 billion auto bailout gave the UAW and its members nearly $27 billion due to the fact that GM couldn’t shed its outrageously expensive labor contracts, something it could have done in a normal bankruptcy.
As such, Obama didn’t bail out the auto industry; he bailed out the unions. Without the unions’ added costs, taxpayers would have owed nothing.
It’s not hard to see how this happened. The UAW and its affiliates give tens of millions of dollars each election cycle, almost entirely to Democrats.
This union influence explains why Obama’s auto czars, Steve Rattner and Ron Bloom, arranged a government bankruptcy for GM that flew in the face of hundreds of years of bankruptcy law and violated investor rights.
Bondholders took huge losses, while unions got a big chunk of ownership in GM stock that they weren’t legally entitled to.
In a shocking display of favoritism and blatant unfairness, GM’s union workers kept their pensions, while nonunion workers at GM spin-off Delphi lost theirs.
Those unions paid Obama back by working hard to get him re-elected. That’s how socialism works.
