Guilty Conscience over bad Peer Review?

A few days back, Sebastian and Jimbo, the latrine trench diggers at the Darwin Ranch, were in town buying shovels. Although they are unable to grasp the concept, they knew that the rest of the ranch hands were upset about recently retracted peer-reviewed paper.

Some jaspers insist that evidence for creation must be presented in "legitimate, peer-reviewed journals", meaning atheistic. It is a form of ad hominem, a genetic fallacy, a blatant falsehood — and a wrong assumption that peer review is a guarantee of truth.

Fight for the Water Hole / Frederic Remington, 1903

There are numerous retracted papers. (Apparently I misunderstood retraction, thinking that something was removed, but that isn't necessarily the case.) There's a reproducibility crisis, some pass peer review even though they are computer-generated nonsense, blatant fraud, and other problems exist. One was even retracted because delicate atheopaths were offended because it used the word "creator"! Tell me again that there's no agenda to protect the narrative of naturalism.

Some owlhoots wrote a about the evolution of religion, which was passed and published in Nature. It was about how moralizing gods that punish wrongdoers were invented as societies progressed. Have you ever read The Odyssey, Epic of Gilgamesh, or other ancient myths? Those false gods were capricious, greedy, irascible, and lusted after humans. Moral? Oh, please!

A posse caught up to them by writing a rebuttal to Nature, which caused the retraction. The gang that wrote the retracted paper wrote their own convoluted response, including partial apologies, a defense of their position, and insistence that they're right and everyone will see when they rewrite and resubmit their work. If you study in it, they are just being consistent with their naturalistic worldview. Only the biblical worldview, beginning from creation, has the necessary preconditions of human experience — and a consistent foundation for morality.

Passing through the Editor’s desk, this headline from Nature appeared on June 7:

Retraction Note: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

It made a splash on March 20: a paper that showed a connection between the evolutionary rise of complex societies and the invention of “moralizing gods” who punish non-cooperators. The “letter to Nature” paper was peer reviewed and written by 13 academics, with all the fanfare of the world’s leading science journal. Three of the lead authors, Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter François, and Patrick E. Savage, are from the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at Oxford University.

Well, you can forget about it. The paper has been retracted. Fifteen other scientists complained to Nature that the authors had played fast and loose with their data. They ended their detailed rebuttal,

Find out why all the hubbub, Bub, by reading "Retraction Note: “Evolution of Religion” Study Pulled".