Review of Forbidden Archeology Review

This post will be a continuation of the comments from yesterday's post, "Humans evolved in Asia?" Evolution is such a big topic that I thought for today's post I would just focus on Colin Groves review of Forbidden Archeology.

I read the interesting review of Forbidden Archeology by Colin Groves but was a little dissapointed. I think the author missed the whole point of the book.

He does give the book some credit, calling it "not outright trash like all the Christian creationist works" but he doesn't have an overall high impression of the book. Why not? Because it is written by fundamentalists. People who have a certain view of reality and then distort the evidence to fit their perspective.

He writes, "But this time we get nearly a thousand pages! Gish, Bowden and Lubenow, the Christian creationists, can't raise even half of this between them. The difference is that Cremo and Thompson have read much, much more of the original literature than the other creationists, and their survey is correspondingly more complete. Yet I can't really say that their understanding is much greater, for all that; their tone of argument is as perverse, they are just as biased. "

He accuses Cremo and Thompson of being biased without even considering the possibility of his own biases and the biases that might be acting as blinders on the entire scientific community. The blinders that limit what kinds of questions can even be asked.

That is really the whole point of the book. It is not advocating that there is some secret group of people control what archeological evidence is permitted to see the light of day, it is about what the authors call a knowledge filter. This knowledge filter determines what evidence we are allowed to accept and what must be rejected. It is an attempt to point out that scientists may be biased without having realizing it and in their bias they may have missed some important evidence.

This not something that most scientists are aware of, especially in recent time since the rise of the prevailing scientism worldview. Scientism is as much a metaphysical belief as any other religion. And it is often times just as dogmatic. It accepts certain premises without evidence, like the non-existence of God just for example.

Religious fundamentalists may see the world a certain way according to their belief systems and they may distort reality to fit their beliefs but is there anyone who doesn't do this. I'm not sure if it is just a lack of liberal arts education amongst scientists or if they are just in denial or what but they just don't see that they are just as apt to do this as anyone else.

A classic example is Stephen Jay Gould's theory of Punctuated Equalibrium. Darwin himself wrote,

“The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”

And since Darwin's time this problem was has not been solved. But instead of abandoning the theory, Gould assumes it must be true and comes up with a way to explain away the problem

That looks to me to be a classic example of scientific fundamentalism. A bias based on preconcieved assumptions.

At the very least one would have to admit that Gould's belief in evolution as fact influenced the way he looked at the evidence. If not one would have to show what evidence he found to prove his theory or better yet what experiment he performed to come to his conclusion.

Someone from a different cultural background might look at the fossil record and see something totally different. The fossil record shows different species existing at different times and they might see this as evidence of the different cycles of creation described in the Vedas.

Scientism or Scientific Atheism is just as much a religion as any other . It is based unproven and unprovable metaphysical claims and it has its fundamentalists just as much as any other religion. And they are just as blind to their own biases as anyone else.

Forbidden Archeology is extremely well researched as Groves admits. The authors have compiled almost a thousand pages documeting various cases that seem to casts a shadow of doubt over the prevailing scientific dogma. They are able to do this because they do have very different worldviews from most scientists doing research in this field, and maybe just maybe because of that they have been able to see things that others have not.

If for no other reason the book is interesting from a philosophical perspective, it shows clearly how often times evidence can be arranged to fit whatever we want to see.

At the very least this book is a valuable contribution to the debate.