See, your comment is a clear sympthon of why a debunking of the ABUSE of constructivist thinking and constructivist concepts is desperately needed. Not that there´s anything necessarily wrong with constructivism per se, you understand.

Without a rigorous evidence standard there´s no reasonable competition among “worldviews” or “paradigms”. That´s not critical thinking you´re putting forward, but something else.

Apparently, there is a fairly well documented history of objects left near coal deposits being trapped in coal over time because coal clumps together. The article I found said objects like Coke bottles and stuff from WWII have been found in coal a number of times.  Thinking that something you found in coal is as old as the coal itself isn’t really thinking at all.

Note: for a laugh visit the Russian site listed as the source on Unexplained Things Are Out There.  I can’t read a word of it, but the pictures tell me that it’s not a site that should be trusted for any sort of scientific information.

Evidence is that which should cause us to update our probability estimates of current and proposed theories, and when the current theory is well established and the new one is very unlikely, then it needs to take a *lot* of evidence to even be worth *considering* a specific new theory. If a theory has a one in a million chance of being right, there are hundreds of thousands of equally likely contenders, so why are you proposing that particular one and not the others? What large amount of evidence elevated it to your attention?

If you don’t demand that of your beliefs, regardless of where you acquired them, you’re going to end up believing a lot of ridiculous things. I’m sure I do. See, scientists *know* that all their theories are in some sense ‘wrong’ – that is, flawed. But they use evidence to update theories in the direction of truth. That is the basic philosophy behind science

Also, I’ve seen weird stuff out in the forest that you’d swear man did it, but it’s nature.  Trees falling over from a wind storm, but the trunk sheared flat, as if it had been sawed.  Trees splitting into shards, some of which were as square as posts.  Falling trees puncturing one another.  Stones embedded high in tree crotches.  All kinds of weird stuff that humans didn’t do.

But it’s amusing to imagine what would happen if a number of these popped up here and there, and if they could be dated. Kind of like early meteorites: clearly people were either lying  or nuts to believe that stone could fall from the sky.