You really think that never happens. Scientists are incorruptible,
Of course not. They are humans.
Newton didn't cheat a little bit on his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Paul? Maybe just a little? You think maybe as president of the Royal Society he didn't review Leibniz's work anonymously in a review in the Philosophical Transactions - just a little . . . Dr. Arnold S. Relman, an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine: “What kind of protection against fraud does peer review offer? Little or none. Fraudulent work was published in peer-reviewed journals, some with very exacting standards. In the case of the two papers we published, no suggestion of dishonesty was raised by any of the referees or editors.”
Sure, such things happen. People on these fora will be familiar with the name of Andrew Wakefield or Fleischmann and Pons.
But the important part is: these guys got caught.
They didn't get caught in the peer review process, that's true, because this process is here to detect and eliminate design flaws not willing dishonesty.
But they got caught later.
You see, when somebody produce an important finding, people will try to replicate it and they will use it in their own research. When their experiment fail, they will try to find why and discover that one of their starting hypothesis was flawed and will correct this mistake.
Science 83: “The history of science is replete with personal prejudices, misleading philosophical themes, miscast players. . . . I suspect all scientists have been guilty of prejudice at times in their research.”
Sure, why not, scientist are humans. But their job is to confront these prejudices to the facts, which should correct them.
Sure, this might not be enough, people can be quite entrenched in their prejudices, but within a decade, a new generation of scientists will rise that started their career knowing these new facts.
The scientific community, in other words, march on following the evidences even if, sometime, it leaves a handful of its member behind...
The danger in science making the assumption that it is incorruptible is exactly the same one religion is susceptible to and being blissfully ignorant to it or insisting it doesn't happen is equally as dangerous. It isn't about "science" or "religion" or "politics," it is about people.
The difference is that science does not assume its incorruptible. It actively seek out and try to correct its own mistakes. In science, individual greatness is reserved to people that overthrow the status quo and plow through new fields of investigation, not to the people that cling on the old knowledge...
Is or is not Pluto a planet? How many hundreds of years in between Isaac Newton and Einstein's relativity. When you state, quite emphatically that the Bible can't possibly be right because science says it is wrong it is the same nonsense as religion saying science can't be right because the Bible says it is wrong. It is interpretation. Nothing more. No amount of certainty, smugness or polemic pontification can change that.
Well, see, here is one example of science correcting itself.
You are quite right, science does not, should not take anything for granted (which is, by the way) the exact opposite of what you stated in your previous post.
You are also right, it is abusive to say that science will never support the idea of a deluge. The possibility still exist that facts will one day be uncover that challenge our understanding.
The possibility, however, is incredibly, vanishingly, nanoscopically small. It would require the wide span of our knowledge, literally hundred of thousands lifetime of scientific investigations in areas as diverse as (biology, geology,chemistry, radiology, archaeology, paleontology...) to not only be wrong, but be wrong in such a precise way that all these mistakes, independently, ends up painting the same picture.
