Claim 3 of 8 · Case 05 · Relativism
Confident, mainstream scientific consensus has been badly wrong and then corrected by evidence.
One claim from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
For a long time educated people were sure disease came from bad air. They were wrong, and the correction came from evidence, not from a vote or a change of mood. That is checkable history. This is an analogy for moral truth: the point is that reality is discovered rather than created by belief. An analogy can illustrate a point, but it cannot prove one.
Backed by 2 pieces of evidence
The germ theory of disease
This is the clearest single case of a confident consensus overturned by evidence. It models the gap between what is believed and what is real, which is the whole objection to the idea that truth is whatever a person or a culture says it is.
John Snow and the Broad Street pump, London, 1854
This is a concrete, physical version of the same point, a real pump and a real map, which helps the abstract idea land. Close attention to reality corrected a widely held belief.