But I thought scientists can never be wrong.
[[But I thought scientists can never be wrong.]]
They can be and often are wrong- however, they never admit it- especially when they are so heavily invested in an ideological suipernatural, scientifically impossible BELIEF such as evolution
Then you thought wrong. I don’t know of any scientist that thinks that, in fact, scientists love to prove others wrong.
They can be wrong, but will also fight for a groupthink paradigm harder than any other group of people. If a new theory comes about, they will fight against it very hard, destroying careers and lives if they feel they have to, but then ultimately give in and adopt the new theory later, after enough critical mass of information appears. Then they will pretend it has always been like that. I love science and scientists, but there are a boatload of pathologies in how science is debated in real life, which is far from the ideal benign portrayal.
Where did you get that idea? The whole design of research in the natural (i.e., “real”) sciences is to prove a hypothesis wrong. The allegations of group-think among scientists (as opposed to, say, the IPCC, which was a collection of government activists, presstitutes and Delphi masters) is often very misplaced.
Yes, it can be hard to convince scientists that very-well accepted theories are wrong, but that’s usually when numerous corollaries have taken root: If a scientific theory has accepted, and five hundred corollaries have been accepted, you need to do more than refute what you may perceive as the root theory. If you do that, the 500 other corollaries will lead most scientists to think you’ve discovered an exception or an ancillary phenomenon. An out-of-place dinosaur is hardly going to make a scientists accept the Young-Earth Hypothesis. Rather, he’s going to look for how the dinosaur may have been misplaced. If you want to demonstrate the Young-Earth hypothesis, you also have to refute continental drift, the incredible distance of stars (or the speed of light), radioactive decay rates, and about 1,000 other explanations for natural phenomenon.
And if you try to do that all at once, you’ll convince scientists that you’re not being a scientist, but an apologist. A scientist might spend his whole life working on suggesting an alternate explanation for half-lives, or the mechanics of wearing away the Grand Canyon in a fairly short timespan. You can’t hold so many theories so contrary to science at once and be considered a scientist, because you can’t be that much of an expert to confidently refute so much scientific work in so many fields.
I, personally, question that the Earth is so old, by the way, but from an epistemological perspective, not a scientific one. I firmly believe the Earth legitimately seems old. Adam was formed as a man, not a blastocyst or a baby. He probably looked 20 years old. Maybe 30. But he didn’t look 1 day old, because one day-olds don’t tend gardens very well. (And of course, even then, a one-day-old looks like one who has spent 9 months maturing already!) Why should not the Earth and the universe have been formed in a mature-seeming state? In fact, what is the alternative? What does an Earth that shows no signs of aging processes even look?