Why does science intimidate the religious community?

<First, it stated that the remains were the oldest found in Europe, not the oldest ever found. Second, it was only part of a jaw bone, with a few teeth on it. The article explained where in the line of evolution this human belonged (I don’t remember the details). I kept wondering how someone could get so much information from part of a jaw bone, and a couple of teeth. At the end of the article, was a few lines from another researcher stating that many of the conclusions were premature. My point is simply that I’m open to revising my understanding when given sufficient evidence. Otherwise, we’re just discussing various beliefs and theories. None of us knows for certain where or how human life began. All we know is how people interpret what has been discovered to date.>

Peter,

The problem here is not the science involved. There are literally thousands of fossils of human remains available to compare and to contrast. One new fossil is going to give an entire team of researchers from several universities and museums something to do for the next decade or so. The problem is getting your information from a popular news source from a writer who is not himself an archaeologist or paleontologist and written on a very basic level.

So when you ask how do they know, the answer is quite honestly that they do not know. They have a working hypothesis, but years of research on that single fossil needs to be done before the hypothesis can become a theory. Now if they had a whole skull, that would be different.

>>>I did not write that no transitional fossils have been found.<<<

No, you didn't. You referred to the necessity of thousands of these transitional fossils, with the clear implication (whether intended or not) that they had not been found in sufficient numbers to satisfy your doubts about evolution. My response was to let you know that this level of support had already been met. Now you respond with a fresh demand (not mentioned previously) that you (and/or Darwin) are calling for thousands of transitional fossils for each species. This is absurd. It is the equivalent of saying we cannot play the child's game of "connect the dots" until someone draws in the lines for us, so we can see the picture clearly. I thought you had more intelligence than that, Peter. You have fallen into the Christianoid trap of always demanding more and more evidence for anything you have decided not to believe, which leaves it very plain that no amount of evidence will ever be thought sufficient to prove the case even beyond a reasonable doubt. Nothing can ever be proven beyond an UNreasonable doubt, and it is intellectually dishonest to demand such an impossible burden of proof. If available evidence will never be sufficient, you are forever safe from having to change your mind or having to understand the Bible a little better than you are now comfortable with. This is the ostrich approach to faith and it suggests a faith too weak to allow modification or to stand up to new evidence. I am disappointed.

>>>I did not write that no transitional fossils have been found.<<<

I have noticed that it is useless to get your news and/or scientific information from headlines in newspapers or popular magaszines or online sites. Reporters, whether professional or amateur, are not out to give the complete facts of a story in a brief headline. Often they fail to get the more intricate details anywhere in the body of the article. What they are aiming for is to get people to read the story be making the headline dramatic, eye-catching and as interesting as possible. Often the reporters delivering news about the sciences have very little training in any sciences, if any. That they get anything right at all is often a minor miracle. It is naive to judge the truth of any science news based on what the reporter says about it. That's why, when I see a headline that interests me, I read the whole article; then if I have any questions about what it means, I search out the most accurate website I can find that covers the topic--or go to my local library and look for a book that covers the subject in detail. These snap judgments are of no value in scientific study, Peter. Try to get the whole story before you make up your mind; you might surprise yourself and actually learn something.

>>>I kept wondering how someone could get so much information from part of a jaw bone, and a couple of teeth.<<<

If you really want to know this, try reading a popular book by a forensic anthropologist on the methods and technologies involved in his work. Where you look at "part of a jaw bone and a couple of teeth" and see no more than that and are incapable of drawing intelligent conclusions from such skimpy data, a paleontologist looks at the same and sees those few fragments, comparing them to thousands of others he has studied so that he can tell from such trivial data as the wear on the teeth and the exact nature of that wear, what kind of food the creature ate, what that meant in terms of its lifestyle, its feeding habits, its probable size and mode of locomotion, even such esoterica as its hunting behavior. The only reason these things seem so mysterious and unlikely to you is that you have no idea of the amount of study specialists put in to learn their specialities; you would do well to educate yourself a bit more on these things before you try to make judgments about how much information can be gleaned from even a small sample of remains. You are assuming that your own ignorance applies equally to everyone else, even to people that have devoted years and decades to the study of their field of expertise. Don't you think that if you were to apply yourself to the study of one narrowly defined subject for thirty or forty years, you might learn more about it than the average man on the street, much more than you know about it now, in fact--or do you claim that no one can learn things that you don't yet understand? If so, you are being foolish.

I know you claim to have had no more than a high school education, Peter; there is nothing to be ashamed of in that unless you let it limit you to only what can be understood in the light of a high school education. If you have access to a library in any major city or even one in a good university, you can learn just about anything you like with a bit of reading and some serious application to the subject. The habit of reading will never leave you helpless to understand things you have not yet learned. Your attempts to learn what modern science is about are handicapped by your unfamiliarity with the methods and the philosophy of science, just as your attempts to find your way around Paris would be handicapped by an ignorance of French. Once you speak the language it is easy to communicate, but if you refuse to learn the language, it is no good to say that the people in Paris must be crazy because they speak nonsense that you can't understand and that must not have any meaning.

With love under will,

Bob, Adastra,
The Wizzard of Jacksonville