Oh, those wacky creationists!
When they talk astronomy, you can almost be sure they will trot out long-outdated ideas, ridiculous twists of logic, and outright lies. And now you can find all these and more in a series of videos pointed out by Sadly, No!
I lost track at seven dumbnesses. I love how they say that if science is right, the planets should all be made of the same materials (um, no, things have changed in the 4.55 billion years since the planets formed, and smaller ones have lost their lighter atmospheric elements like hydrogen and helium), planets should all spin the same way (um, no, collisions with large bodies can flip over a planet), there are no explanations for the Moon’s origin (um, no, actually we have a good one — a massive collision — that explains most of the bigger mysteries of the Moon), all the planets’ moons should orbit the same way (um, no, some planets have captured asteroids, and those can orbit retrograde), and that if the Universe were not formed in an explosion, it must have been created (um, no, there are at least two other alternate explanations that dovetail with the Big Bang).
I think my fave is when they say that young stars don’t have enough material orbiting them to make planets. Yeah, that’s because the material has already been used to make planets (or it’s been blown away by the young star’s solar wind)! It’s like eating a meal, looking at your empty plate, and saying "I can’t possibly have eaten anything, since there is nothing on my plate." You have to look at really young stars, and when you do, you see them enshrouded in material, and many of them have a disk of matter that is clearly forming planets.
How many dumbosities can you find? I may have to dig up the complete video. I’m sure it’s good from some schadenfreude.
December 11th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Wow! What a totally convincing argument this is…NOT.
I mean, if these people really want to convince people who think enough to ask the important questions, (Why are we here? Where are we going? What time is lunch?) then you’d think that they would have at least put an argument together that could not be dismissed by a four year old using Wikipedia.
December 11th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
That was actually a frightening video clip. As for dumbosities, every other sentence was idiocy. (Only the even sentences, because the odd sentences were the points they were “disproving.”) I’ve been aware that there is misinformation, ignorance and dishonesty running rampant out there, but this is a scary level of outright lies. (Either that or astounding idiocy - quick, stop them before they breed!)
December 11th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
“Apparently the concept of “gravity” eludes these people.”
Both coming and going. Relative gravity also explains the differential composition of the planets.
Interestingly, they try to make two contradictory claims simultaneously. It’d be hillarious if people didn’t actually believe this stuff.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
I wonder where they stole the video footage from.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
This video was amusing from the start. The idea that either the universe was either “created” or started through an explosion are the only two options is ludicrous. And in fact The Big Bang is perfectly consistent with a “created” universe (which is why the Catholic Church has accepted it since 1951) so long as you are willing to abandon any “young silliness.” This in the end is the root of the real problem, people who have to read the Bible literally and must twist logic into little pretzels rather than use their brain to justify their own narrow views.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
I hesitate to ask this as I know how these conversations can get out of hand. But, can someone with a lot of letters behind their name explain to me the nature of the Big Bang? I thought I read somewhere that it was never hypothesized that it was a giant explosion but rather a rapid expansion. Can you give me an analogy to illustrate the difference? And please keep in mind I don’t have any letters behind my name so keep the technical jargon to a minimum. I thank all of the next 192 commenters in advance.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Watching that made me want to cry. That was insane.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
The Jupiter thing was also pretty silly. They start out by saying that if the planets came from the same cloud of gas and dust that formed our sun, then they must be made of the same materials and then they say that scientists can’t explain how Jupiter forms — Jupiter and Saturn are the only two planets that fit their own criteria, because they’re made out of roughly the same combination of hydrogen and helium from which the sun is made.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
“Almost all scientists would like to come up with a mechanical explanation…”
Almost all? If they weren’t trying to come up with a mechanical explanation, then they wouldn’t really be scientists, would they? They would be philosophers, or postmen, or accountants, or preachers or something. Isn’t “trying to find a mechanical explanation” the very definition of what a scientist IS? If you hired a bunch of scientists, I think you would expect them to find a mechanical explanation of things. Or at least try to come up with one … even if it’s not perfect. Otherwise, what’s the difference between a scientist and a guy standing on the corner raving about how the moon is made of cheese?
December 11th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I… I… can’t even respond, let alone look at the other responses. I nearly skipped the BA’s response on the Blog itself! I am particularly outraged by even knowing about this. What the hell? If only I could pretend that reality was different and ignore this, but that would make me as bad, if not worse, than what is making me want to “escape.”
Rationaly be damned.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
I’ll make the animation if someone wants to do a proper version of a video like this.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
MORE!
The angular momentum thing, “all of the impacts would be self canceling.”
Wouldn’t all the asteroids in the nacent cloud be, um, ORBITING the same direction!? And doesn’t the cloud’s general direction have something to do with it’s “eddies” spin?
And, yeah, venus/uranus/pluto? Does pluto spin backward? Nothing can impact? But the “angular momentum” impact cancelation thing wasn’t just talked about? Oh, only small things can impact? I see.
Jeeze…
December 11th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Dennis, speaking as a layperson without a lot of letters behind his name, I don’t think that the concept of the Big Bang is that hard to understand so I’ll take my shot. Let’s think about how an explosion works. You take an unstable chemical compound like nitroglycerin or TNT and you “set it off” so that an uncontrolled chemical reaction causes it to destroy itself along with anything else in the blast radius.
Now the classic analogy of the Big Bang by comparison is an expanding balloon. Take a balloon with little polka dots on it and blow. Now each little polka dot represents a future galaxy. At first the polka dots are closely spaced but they move apart as you blow more air into the balloon. Nothing is being created or destroyed on this scale except for space itself which is constantly expanding and taking your polka dot galaxies with it.
That’s the big difference between the perception and reality of the Big Bang. The name implies that there is a huge violent reaction that is powering the expansion while the truth is that the expansion itself is driving the universe, not the other way around.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
I shut it off after a few seconds. That first line about “ALMOST all scientists would like to come up with a mechanical explanation” just made me mad. They’re deliberately trying to foster the idea that there is this persecuted minority of scientists who believe the universe is under 6000 years old but their “research” is being suppressed by the evil demons of rationality, despite all of their overwhelming scientific evidence for the existence of God and the perfect accuracy of the creation myth.
It’s weird, because it’s blurring the line between preacher and scientist, and in my mind it cheapens both. I mean, even hardcore rationalists like me think that many preachers are good at what they do - they help people in need, they minister to the sick and poor, they counsel people in dire times, and they help people who are rejected by society find a circle of fellow humans who they can socialize with. But this kind of rhetoric forces the preacher to become an astronomer, and a biologist, and a physicist, and a paleontologist … to be able to retort confidently and intelligently on subjects that take a lifetime to master. While they are good people who might benefit society, they are simply not qualified to discourse on these subjects, nor lay claim to their complete understanding, any more than an astronomer is qualified to argue with a geneticist about the true primordial origin of transfer-RNA (excepting, of course, the exemplary example we have in Mr. Plait, who could no doubt go head-to-head with the best geneticists with regard to pre-DNA replicator molecules). These creationist “hawks” are just making life very difficult for all the preachers who are out there trying to make society better, one soul at a time, which is their true calling. At the same time, they are wasting a lot of scientists’ time by attacking them FOR BEING SCIENTISTS.
Sheesh.
December 11th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
To Scott -
I graduated from college with a degree in Biology. It so happened that, right after my final exams, “Brother Jed” was on campus, so I joined in the fun heckling him with all kinds of fun stuff, like questioning his ability to interpret the bible due to his insufficient knowledge of Aramaic and Greek, the fact that I had actually seen evolution taking place through bacterial plasmid transfer, and the whole Canis familiaris evolution scenario. After I got tired of it, a guy stopped me. A bio major, I knew him well. This guy was briefly my lab partner during a developmental biology course. He grabbed me by the elbow as I was leaving, having overheard me arguing with Brother Jed, and asked “You don’t really believe any of that, do you?” “Believe what?” I replied. “That evolution stuff … you don’t really believe in evolution, do you?”
I stood there, considering the implications … this guy had just spent the last four years of his life studying biology at the same school as I. During this time, both of us had taken genetics, organic chemistry, evolutionary biology, ecology, calculus, developmental biology, etc. We both passed all the classes. We had done electrophoresis on DNA to create cladistic ancestry charts. He obviously understood the subject matter completely, but rejected all of it. I said “Yes” and he said “I feel sorry for you.”
I couldn’t believe it. This guy actually spent four years of his life taking biology classes and DIDN’T BELIEVE IN BIOLOGY. Nothing in biology makes sense or can be studied at all without evolutionary theory. It’s the sole reason we understand biology at all on this planet, and the sole reason we’re able to fight diseases and grow crops.
So, I went fishing and drank a lot of beer.
December 11th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Comments are sorting weirdly. Word to the wise.
December 11th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
That explosion in the opening of the video was in the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage.
Did they steal it?
December 11th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
“If the solar system evolved…”
Where did they get the strange idea that the solar system evolved? Has there been planetary selection? Do planets have genes?
“Growing a large, distant, gaseous, planet poses an insurmountable problem for evolutionists…”
I always thought that evolutionists were primarily biologists. Theorizing about growing large, distant, gaseous, planets sounds to me like work for astronomers and geologists.
Have I missed something in my education, meager as it is, or, are these guys IDiots?
December 11th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Perhaps the Intelligent Design people have a point worth exploring. We shouldn’t discard the opportunity to understand our creator. Let’s see… he has a penchant to create impossible things, in their view, such as planets and platypuses. Why would he do this? Since evolution can’t happen, then he must be also continually creating new organisms, such as drug resistant bacteria found in hospital acquired infections which kill even believers. Why would he do this?
I know you are already one step ahead of me. Fermented beverages. That’s why. And now we know that, if the universe was created, the creator must be…. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. It is the only deity that I know of that claims to have created the universe after drinking heavily. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Beliefs
And you know what… I’m pretty sure his noodleness won’t mind if we use science to figure out how he did it.
December 11th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Thanks, Bob Costillo
December 11th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Now THIS is exactly the type of article that I come to BA for. How do you come across videos like this anyway? Very amusing.
December 11th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
How did he manage to get the work “evolutionists” into an astronomy video?
December 11th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
The dictionary definition of “evolve” is “to develop gradually,” so it is okay to say that the solar system evolved from a cloud of gas to its present form.
December 11th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Well that’ll teach me to show up on time for class.
December 11th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
1:26
Since about 98% of the sun is H or He, Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury should have similar compositions. Instead, much less than 1% of these planets is H or He.
2:36
Growing a large, distant gaseous planet such as Jupiter or Saturn poses an insurmountable hurdle for evolutionists because gasses dissipate rapidly in the vacuum of outer space, and even young stars similar to our sun do not have enough orbiting H or He to form even one Jupiter.
I have nothing to add. Yes, I know this was alluded to earlier.
December 11th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
It’s burning me! It’s burning me! The stupid! Gyaaagh! The stupid is burning me!
December 11th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
The sad thing is that many non-creationists couldn’t refute some of this nonsense. As an econ major, I have only the vaguest idea of how the system formed the way it did, and couldn’t tell you how planets end up with spin and axial tilt. In this case, my belief in a mechanical explanation is just faith…
After the initial formation of the Sun, lighter elements spun to the outside like in a centrifuge, right? That explains why the gas giants are on the outside, but doesn’t explain their moons. Were they just picked up later?
December 11th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
I can prove that airplanes can’t fly. You see, it’s obvious that everything capable of flight can fly can flap its wings, right? Well, last time I looked at an airplane, I didn’t see any hinges on its wings. Thus I have proved my case.
I swear, most creationist arguments show precisely that much grasp of the discipline they are attacking.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I would like to believe that the people who produced this video are a bunch of dumbasses but unfortunately I can’t help but see this as a product of deliberate deception., cleverly designed to promote ignorance. Especially when we got to that last statement about the moon being dissimilar to the earth. This is just too much of a falsehood for me to see any of this as a product of simple ignorance.
Mark my words, these people are very deliberately lying in order to promote ignorance among their viewers.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Comments are sorting weirdly. Word to the wise.
Ack! A causality glitch! Agents are on their way! Get to a telephone!
I said “Yes” and he said “I feel sorry for you.”
Dawkins had it right. It’s memes, and they are as intractable as a bad virus.
I have a bad sore throat at the moment, so virii are sort of on my mind. When are we going to cure these damn things? Every couple of years someone seems to be on the brink with something that makes sense (such as ceragenins, which prevent a virus from invading new cells by attacking the viral membrane), but then you never hear anything again.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
I tried to explain “doublethink” and “newspeak” to my 13 year old son the other day, while we were discussing George Orwell’s 1984. This video may be a good example to use next time we speak on the subject.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
I’m surprised that creationists havn’t claimed that the big bang was catalyzed by some higher power. I wonder what these people would think if they went to a University that had no religious biases and took an introductory astronomy course. Their brains might even explode.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Wish I could have watched this over lunch. Oh well, it gives me something to do this evening for fun.
How many blatant “errors” are we up to now?
December 11th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Holy crap. I don’t even know where to start with the “WRONG WRONG WRONG” on that one. The first statement in the video is wrong. Jesus it’s so wrong it burns!
December 11th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
What a disgrace, to see 21st century technology used to disseminate this dark age folly. The people of the real Dark Ages had no real choice, those of today do; and many have chosen lies.
“My people perish for lack of knowledge” Hosea 4:6
December 11th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
“What a disgrace, to see 21st century technology used to disseminate this dark age folly. The people of the real Dark Ages had no real choice, those of today do; and many have chosen lies.”
Knowledge is power, chief. And the quickest, easiest way to get it is to make your own.
December 11th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Bruce:
“Do witches sink in water?”
“No, they float”
“What also floats?”
“Wood!”
“And?”
“A duck!”
“Therefore, logically, if she weighs the same as a duck, she must be made of wood - and therefore……A WITCH!”
MP&tHG much abridged
December 11th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
I just love the way they point out that “science is inaducate” and because of that it HAS to be created… i mean… if I cant explain it… it couldn´t possibly exist!!! hmm… what other thing or being cant be explained?
Oh i know!!! how about GOD! but nooooo… we dont need to explain him/her/it
oh well… im just happy i live in a contry where we dont have to put up with stuff like this =)
December 11th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
So life on Jupiter doesn’t change over time? Those stoopid evilutionists! Buncha elitists…
December 11th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Yet another choice bit of stupidity: the “insurmountable hurdle” of growing a gaseous planet because “gases dissipate rapidly in the vacuum of space”. Apparently the concept of “gravity” eludes these people.
December 11th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
I attended an astronomy class at the SRJC not long ago (okay, I crashed it). One fellow was looking distinctly uncomfortable. When the teacher started talking about “millions of years” he suddenly and loudly started packing his things and left in a huff.
I understand he made quite a scene in the admissions office later about dropping the class.
December 11th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
There is one central contradiction in the argument that directly conflicts with their argument from design. The video is saying that science requires an orderly solar system, and that BECAUSE the solar system makes no sense and is completely chaotic (according to them), that it MUST be designed. Huh? This is the exact OPPOSITE of the argument they use against evolution, which is that order proves God. Now they are saying that disorder proves God.
The only thing they’ve proven definitively is that they are a bunch of dishonest purveyors of huxterism and superstition.
December 11th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
It’s beyond dumb. Ignorance can sometimes be excused. But this is outright dishonesty, and deliberate, crafted lying is much harder to pardon.
My favorite argument is the one they make right out of the chute: if the unverse wasn’t formed in an explosion, then it must have been created. Claiming a win by default and by posing false dichotomies is how science always operates, isn’t it?
December 11th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
The stupidity in that video astounds me… it’s so frustrating to see people out there purposely trying to disinform people about basic astrophysics… I mean, how stupid do you have to be to believe that all planets should have the same composition? Is there no chemistry in their view of the world? And the moon having a circular orbit? Its orbit is actually elliptical, like all orbiting bodies such as Earth or a satellite. Gee… grow a brain creationists!
December 12th, 2007 at 12:07 am
And rings… No one has mentioned rings. Scientists can’t explain rings, therefore they don’t exist and should be burned like witches (who burn well since they, like ducks, are made of wood.) Ergo, rings are made of wood. OOOH! My brain hurts! It will have to come out.
P.S. There seems to be a spell-checker now! (Or is that the new version of Safari?)
December 12th, 2007 at 12:09 am
It was more dumbness than I could bear. I cut it off about half way through. I no longer get any pleasure out of Schadenfreude.
But the shadow guy has a British accent, so we have to take him seriously, right?
December 12th, 2007 at 12:16 am
The thing is, even if everything we know about modern astrophysics and astronomy turned out to be wrong (a stupendously improbable situation), I _still_ wouldn’t accept “A Magic Man Did It” as the alternative.
December 12th, 2007 at 12:45 am
Bruce, once the Sun starts burning hydrogen and “turns on” as a star, the lighter elements will heat up and escape the gravitational pull of the inner planets like steam escaping from a pot of boiling water. Then they get blown away from the inner solar system by the solar wind. The gas giants form beyond the sun’s “snow line” where it’s a lot colder and otherwise volatile elements rain down on the future gas giants as ice and snow which make them bigger and give them more gravity which sucks up even lighter elements which is what turns the gas giants into giants.
As for the rocky moons that the gas giants all have, remember that the sun and planets all act like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking up everything within their gravitational domain. Now the sun accounts for 99% of the solar system’s mass — basically, the solar system is the sun, Jupiter, and debris. This story is repeated with every planet. Each planet grows as big as it can get and any material lucky enough to escape being sucked up by the planet coalesces to become that planet’s moon or moons. So most of the bigger moons form along with their planets.
As for smaller moons, well there is some junk that didn’t get sucked up by a planet or its moon(s) and these become asteroids and comets. Sometimes an asteroid or comet wanders too close to a planet and either gets captured or crashes into it. The former happens fairly often to gas giants like Jupiter and fairly rarely to rocky worlds like Mars. Sometimes the latter can happen with fairly spectacular results as when a Mars-sized asteroid hit the Earth and knocked enough material off of it to form the Moon.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:06 am
mmm, not only is most of the things stupid, the whole thing about forming planets has recently been observationally disproven observationally.
Even if our theories about formation of planets are slightly off, they are slightly off to the ‘we got too much material’ since we cannot explain ‘Hot Jupiters’ (Planets with the mass of Jupiter or more and orbiting around their parent star as close as Mercury, way closer to the star than the ’snow-line’)
In addition,
There are now two systems known with planets INSIDE a gap within a circumstellar disk around a YSO (Young Stellar Object). Both stars are very young and planets are both bigger than Jupiter, while the stars are actually smaller than our sun.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:58 am
I get worried when I see things like this, because to the layman, it all sounds so plausible, and yet it is based on such attrocious science!
Most of the problems in the video have been addressed. I particularly liked the bit about how “the moon must have been created in its current orbit”.
Of course, in 1969, the Apollo astronauts left the laser ranging equipment on the moon, and have shown experimentally that the moon is receding. It is around one and a half metres further away now than it was when Neil and Buzz walked on it (if you believe that they did…. (j/k!)). At the “beginning of the universe” (6000 years ago), it would have been around 230m closer. So clearly it was not created in its current orbit!
But as I say, to the person who knows nothing about astronomy (or any other science for that matter), and who is not really interested enough to go look the information up, there’s a good chance that they will be taken in by the scientifically sounding BS! I had the same problem trying to convince one of my friends that the moon landings were NOT hoaxed!
December 12th, 2007 at 4:13 am
I think the shrouded “British” guy is actually the lost, little Aussie creationist, Ken Ham. He built the Temple of the Burning Stupid in Kentucky.
December 12th, 2007 at 5:10 am
Yeees… Well, *lots* of assertions, but none of ‘em backed up by a single iota of proof, so far as I could tell. ::sigh::
Oh, and the “British” guy? I guess that is proof of a kind. Eny fule knoh that the actor with the English accent is *always* the baddie…
–
December 12th, 2007 at 5:19 am
Thanks for the video, Phil!
I needed something to cheer me up after finding out I have to retake a course in my school, which really bites.
I felt bad about myself until I saw this. Least my mistakes were honest ones!
To think that the makers of this video are so uninformed about REAL science! Then again, they probably don’t let little things like facts get in their way, do they?
December 12th, 2007 at 5:25 am
“Only the Sith Think in Absolutes” - Obi-Wan McGregor
Well, the Sith and Creationists, it appears…
The prosecution rests, M’Lord.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:27 am
TravisM: Does pluto spin backward?
In a sense. It’s closer to spinning “horizontally” than backward.
What I think they’re driving at (poorly) is the conservation of angular momentum. Unfortunately for them, all it guarantees is that the sum of angular momentums in a system will remain constant. Individual bodies can spin faster, stop, flip, or even reverse direction — but other bodies in the system will compensate. Conservation of angular momentum does not mean that all the spinning bodies will end up always spinning the same way.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:50 am
Matt, it becomes even more complex than the creos are able to comprehend, isn’t it? When you add in the vectors of the collisions, and the relative velocities, and masses, you can get local chaos, while still preserving the overall order. And it is possible to imagine a situation in which a wandering planet becomes captured by the Sun, but in retrograde motion, WRT the rest of the system. (Highly improbable, of course, but in statistics, anything that is not physically impossible WILL eventually occur). I showed a YEC how using statistics can result in ‘going wrong with confidence’. I performed a time study at a manufacturing facility I was working in a couple of years ago: I observed an operator performing a given task, and used a stopwatch to record the time it took. The stopwatch measured 1/100 second accuracy. I would start the time when the operator picked up the piece, and stop it (without looking at the watch) when she put it into the bin. In this case, the probability of stopping the time when the display read XX.00 is 1:100. The probability of getting a reading of XX.00 seconds twice in a row is 1:10,000. I got XX.00 twice in a row in 1/2 an hour, or 30 iterations. (approximately 1 minute cycle time). According to probability, I should not have seen XX.00 twice in a row for almost 7 days of continuous attempts- according to creationist ‘math’.
December 12th, 2007 at 7:46 am
I’d love to turn these videos into a drinking game. (For every blatantly false statement about science, take one drink. For every glaring generalization that could be shown to be false by a six-year-old, take one drink. And so on.) Only I think all participants would be dead of alcohol poisoning halfway through.
December 12th, 2007 at 8:15 am
As an aside…
> “Only the Sith Think in Absolutes” - Obi-Wan McGregor
That is an absolute statement! GAH! Do Jedis ever stop lying? Ever? GRAAAAHHHHH CENTIPEDE POISON.
Still, we can’t say we’re surprised that the Creationists abuse cosmology so. They start with their fundamental assertion and conclusion (Creation) and accept only evidence or its illegitimate brother vague assertion that support that conclusion. It’s Soviet social science methodology applied to cosmology: everything has to support the conclusion that the New Communist Man is superior, historical evidence be damned.
See, here’s the problem as far as I read it. I was rereading some [i]Thus Spake Zarathrustra[/i] again (Nietzsche is an angry hyperbolic German, yes, but he has some good points about him) and what we have here is a bunch of people to whom God is not dead [in terms of being a spiritual motivator and concentration for their actions and the core explanation for everyday natural events]. They are attempting to hold a debate–to put it politely–with people to whom God is philosophically dead and because of this no communication can be achieved. There are two major reasons behind the communications breakdown: first, the creationists do not wish to let go of their God-centric explanation for everything, as that would be an admission in part that God as a dominating influence in their lives is dead; second, the non-creationists do not wish to bend an iota half because of creationist ‘aggression’ against science and half because the non-creationists believe they are Right: while God is dead to them as a concept, the need of the human animal to adhere to an absolutist doctrine that defines everything hasn’t gone away.
Science, to its credit, as a superorganism does correct its own mistakes much faster than religions tend to. However, it’s obvious by inspection of the history of science that those who hold science dear build into it a sort of sub-society with its own institutional inertia and hierarchal structures that make it resistant to change. This resistance is both good, in that it prevents the Crazy Hypothesis Of The Week from becoming dominant, and bad in that it slows advance by establishing some things almost as canon and hardly tolerating investigation against them (Newtonian mechanics, for the longest time; relativity until now, so on and so forth). Ideally, science is skeptical until the evidence clearly indicates that one hypothesis supplants another, and remains skeptical even after that; as science is made of people, however (say that in your best Heston voice!), science lauds its current Truth, is skeptical in the first stage of supplanting probably longer than it needs to be, then swaps out one Truth with a new Truth. There is, of course, internal arguments and hold-outs and additional such things that turn the black and white grey, but you can consider now how, for example, non-Big Bang cosmologies are hardly given the time of day today and a skeptical doubt in the Big Bang is immediately attacked as “wrong” (even by the good Doctor here).
The optimal formulation of scientific knowledge is “given our current state of ignorance, we believe what we observe is best modeled by…” and then the theory goes. Unfortunately, though, an almost cringing statement of ignorance isn’t absolute enough for what most humans seem to need as a philosophy (as opposed to a methodology, like true science). God is dead, and some people see this, but very few people if any have any idea what exactly this means, and hence absolutism is alive and well.
December 12th, 2007 at 11:30 am
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog has already given some hints at the dumbness. See if you can find more. […]
December 13th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
“That is an absolute statement! GAH! Do Jedis ever stop lying? Ever?”
I feel your pain.
December 13th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
I’d like to gently point out to the dear posters here that the video was NOT wrong.
Yes, you heard me correctly. That video is NOT WRONG.
You can learn from being wrong. This video does not rate nearly as highly as “wrong”.
This video is a deliberate and considered lie.
December 14th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Darth Robo:
It is rather curious how the OMG TEH EVIL SITH are the only ones who consistently tell the truth. “Oh, we use the Dark Side of the Force. We think it can be controlled. Oh, by the way, anger and fear and hate are useful on occasion.”
The you look at the Jedi. “I’m going to lie about your father. The Dark Side is BAD and once you go black, you never go back. Fear is BAD because it inevitably leads to anger and anger is BAD because it inevitably leads to hate and hate is BAD because it leads to the Dark Side, which is BAD.” Actually, the Jedi are the ones who think in absolutes. All absolutes, all the bloody time.
Then again, we’re talking about late Doc Smith Galactic Patrolmen (you know, the Omega-level hereditary psychics) who can be existentially threatened by two, count them, TWO Dark Siders at any given point in time (because there’s only two Sith ever? Leaving out EU apologetics, what?) and a numbered general order. You know. The kind you find printed in manuals.
Ah, it becomes clear. Jedi are illiterate.
November 9th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Regardless of the field of astronomy, evolution cannot be scientifically sustained as an explanation for the origin or development of life. The addition of an unregulated catalyst to a functioning cell is, by very definition, poison, that will always result in death of the cell. There can never even be so much as a single random occurrence where a cell survives the addition of an unregulated new catalyst. This leaves only one option: regulatory mechanisms had to develop before the very things that they regulated. First of all this is horribly illogical and probabilistic. It relies completely on random chance and not at all on any deterministic pressure. Thus, before we even start analyzing it, we can expect that, on average, such a process will hurt you at least as often as it helps you and that the expected value of the genetic change in such a situation is zero. It’s Conway’s game of life with completely randomly seeded initial conditions. You never expect it to work out.
But even if it did, you’d be claiming that an organism that was wasting tons of extra energy and cellular resources to accommodate useless regulatory mechanisms would somehow be naturally selected to out-survive its competitors and then later develop the cellular function that the previously unused regulatory mechanisms were regulating. This, once again, is impossible, because by the very definition of natural selection, any cell that is wasting energy maintaining unnecessary regulatory mechanisms will not have the cellular resources available to outlive its competitors.
In either case, this is a direct contradiction and simply cannot be supported by science. Now, don’t put words in my mouth. I am not advocating Creationism as an alternate explanation. However, it seems that many of the above posters don’t understand one of the simple facts about science: while you can never prove that one particular conjecture is absolutely true, you can prove a given conjecture is absolutely false.
I think that one service which the Creationist community has inadvertently provided us is that evolution is a scientifically weak and flawed idea. It is not scientifically tenable. Any rational thinking person of science can see right through the idea of evolution and immediately see that there is no way it can be an accurate explanation. It’s quite simply wrong, and some clever scientist in the future is going to propose a thesis more deserving of the endorsement of the scientific community.
But for now, try to avoid being so condescending. Many of you posters make it sound as if you know it all, when, judging by your posts, you know very little about advanced mathematics and probability, logic, and microbiology (the only three domains that bear relevance to the issues between evolution and creationism).
It doesn’t matter how old the universe is. You can run this monte carlo experiment infintely-many times and you’ll see that the proposed mechanisms of evolution are actually pure contradictions. From a priori analysis we can see that they are not even possible. Hence, astronomy plays absolutely no role in evolution or creation. The universe could be any age and it would make no difference.