Dawkin's Points

So Richard Dawkins makes a good point that when religion makes a scientific statement, it's only fair game for scientists to examine such claims and evaluate them.  Religion, in his view, is only a matter outside of science so long as religion makes no claims about science.

His example is as follows.

What would happen if archeologists found some sort of great scientific evidence, DNA or such, that pretty much conclusively showed Jesus not only lived, but really was born of a virgin.  And it gets published and peer reviewed and all that.  How many theologeans (at least christian ones) would hesitate and say, "Well, that's science, religion is a matter of faith."

They only use that excuse when science doesn't agree with them.  Again, we see religion has a big double standard.

>>9

Its actually not.
It may come as a shock to some, but fewer than 50 percent of the radiocarbon dates from geological and archaeological samples in northeastern North America have been adopted as `acceptable' by investigators."—*J. Ogden III, "The Use and Abuse of Radiocarbon," in Annals of the New York Academy of Science, Vol. 288, 1977, pp. 167-173.

In the Proceedings of the Symposium on Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology held at Uppsala in 1969, T. Säve-Söderbergh and I. U. Olsson introduce their report with these words:

 "C-14 dating was being discussed at a symposium on the prehistory of the Nile Valley. A famous American colleague, Professor Brew, briefly summarized a common attitude among archaeologists towards it, as follows: If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict  them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely out of date we just drop it. Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method. . ."