How Science Works (And Why Creationism Doesn't) - The Peer Review Process Explained

What exactly is peer review?

Flickr/AJ Cann, CC BY-SA

10 Stages of the Peer Review Process: A Step-by-Step Guide for Authors | The International journal of Innovative Research & Development

Creationist frauds tell their dupes that the scientific process of peer review, is a device to ensure conformity to scientific dogma and to prevent unorthodox (i.e., creationist) opinions from being published in respected journals.

This helps maintain the delusion that there is real scientific support for creationism and that many more scientists are really creationists than is apparent from the scientific literature.

It also plays to conspiracism, which is a normal component of creationism, caused by the same childish teleological thinking defect in an adult, by helping to maintain the delusion that scientists and publishers of scientific journals, periodicals and books, and their staff, are all part of a gigantic international Satanic conspiracy to turn people away from God and destroy people's trust in the church and the Bible.

The truth is that peer review is simply a device to ensure the research was conducted with sufficient rigor and proper controls, that the authors have provided the required standard of evidence to support their claims and that their conclusions are indeed supported by the evidence. It also helps insure against plagiarism since the expert reviewers will very likely be aware of the work of others in their field of expertise.

Here, for example is the peer-review process as outlined in a blog by the International Journal of Innovative Research and Development (IJIRD):

How Science Works - Changing Minds When the Evidence Changes

How Science Works

Changing Minds When the Evidence Changes

Auditorium Cave near Bhopal, India

Credit: Joe Meert

Mistaken fossil rewrites history of Indian subcontinent for second time - News - University of Florida

It's a source of embarrassment to the scientists concerned, and no doubt a small crumb of comfort to those anti-science extremist propagandists trying to fool scientifically illiterate simpletons into thinking science is unreliable, that scientists have discovered a major mistake.

To those who understand science and how scientific opinion is always contingent and subject to revision and where nothing is ever cast in tablets of stone; where the only certainty is that there are no certainties, it is always rewarding and reassuring when mistakes are discovered and corrected because this shows the scientific method is working.

Just such an example came to light recently when scientists revisited the site where a fossil, thought at the time it was first discovered to be highly significant, had been found. What they discovered was that the ‘’ not only was nothing of the sort, but was actually in an advanced state of decay and peeling off the wall of the cave in which it had been found about a year earlier - things no self-respecting fossil should be doing.

It turned out that the 'fossil' was the recent remains of a wild honeybee (Apis dorsata) hive which, when discovered, bore a remarkable resemblance to an Ediacaran fossil, Dickinsonia tenuis, only previously known from South Australia. The implications for the age of the rock formation in which it was appeared to solve the problem of accurate dating of the rock formation and its origins in the ancient supercontinent, Gondwanaland, some 550 million years ago.

Eric Hovind's Very Silly Questions

I'm not sure who they're aimed at - not people of normal intelligence, that's for sure - but these astoundingly facile questions are what Eric Hovind believes are killer knock-down questions for non-Christians. (Apparently Eric is either genuinely unaware that other religions offer answers to all these, or is feigning ignorance and relying on his target audience's ignorance to get away with it).

Eric is the son and chief acolyte of his father, the notorious liar and grifter, Kent Hovind, and was caretaker of the family 'business' while Kent was serving jail time for tax fraud and again for a violent assault on his former wife. Little Eric seems to be very much a chip off the old block-head

He is ignorant of, or is feigning ignorance of, the answers to several of these questions which can be found by a moment's search on the Internet, or by going to a decent reference library or any good bookshop.

The originals can be seen here: http://www.drdino.com/questions-science-cant-answer/. In the best traditions of the snake-oil peddler, they are nothing more than the God of the Gaps, gotcha! questions where the target marks are expected to not realise they are nothing more than the argument from ignorant incredulity combined with the false dichotomy fallacy. Eric assumes the targets can be relied on to assume, if science hasn't answered something, science won't ever answer it, so, since the only alternative is "God did it!", that wins by default. This saves the fraud the trouble of producing any evidence to support his/her contention, and taps into the parochial ignorance, scientific illiteracy and cultural chauvinism of his target audience.

This is the hallmark of the dishonest, intellectually bankrupt creationist apologist.
Let's take a look at them (in red)