As most people are probably decently aware, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is currently airing a rebooting of Carl Sagan's famous Cosmos series. As someone who's very interested in science, loves learning about where we came from and how the universe works, I was very pleased to hear this and have been watching it and, for the most part, thoroughly enjoying it. If you haven't seen it yet, or Carl Sagan's original series, I highly recommend it. It's very educational, brings up a lot of very interesting science, and has a lot of interesting and deep thoughts on where we came from and our place in the cosmos.
Naturally though, seeing as a lot of the topic is the scientific understanding of our past, this made a lot of creationists, well, not very happy. Answers in Genesis has been posting a series with their reviews of the Cosmos series, so I want to take this time to look at their arguments, analyse them and, well, defend the Cosmos against them.
So! Let's begin!
Their first objection is an interesting one.
Ironically, despite the claim that this series is designed to advance science literacy, by adopting Sagan’s theme—“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”—the producers have hoisted a most unscientific flag above this “ship of the imagination.” Answers in Genesis astronomer Dr. Danny Faulkner comments as follows:
There is not a bit of science in that statement. When Sagan said it 34 years ago and then wrote it in his book, a lot of people were saying, “Wow! What a profound scientific statement,” but it’s actually a philosophical statement. It is denial of the supernatural, saying the only thing that exists is the physical world, the natural world. But to say that with any certainty Sagan had to get outside the physical universe and see that the physical universe is all that there is. And he would have had to do that in eternity past and in eternity future in order to say that. If he could really see that, then he would be god. It’s a very bold, metaphysical statement. It’s an assertion. But it’s not science. It’s not a scientific statement.
I can see why that statement bugged them. They see it as Sagan directly stating there is no God. Well... kinda. But you're missing the point. Yes, it is somewhat a philosophical statement, but the cosmos really does encompass everything that ever was or ever will be. But you're somewhat missing Sagan's beliefs about the nature of God. While he stated that he didn't believe in God as a sapient being, like what creationists especially do, he also claimed to be agnostic and stated that he "knows of no such compelling evidence [against the existence of God]." He saw science as being a source of great spirituality, and if you watch the episode about evolution, you can tell he takes great pleasure in the idea that all life on earth is part of a great, interconnected network.
In other words. He's not saying "There's no God! Just nature!" He's saying that everything in nature is part of the cosmos.
Tyson says in the program that the new Cosmos series will not only examine the origin and history of the universe from the dawn of time but also examine “the saga of how wandering bands of hunters and gatherers found their way to the stars.” Listing the steps in the scientific method, he says,
This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules:
- Test ideas by experiment and observation.
- Build on those ideas that pass the test.
- Reject the ones that fail.
- Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything. (Emphasis ours)
I find this statement somewhat ironic of AiG. They put emphasis on "question everything" but, by definition, refuse to ever question their interpretation of Genesis (I say their interpretation because, as I've stated elsewhere on this blog, I'm a Christian who accepts evolution and our scientific understanding of our origins and for that reason, cannot agree with a literal interpretation of Genesis).
But anyway. I mostly included this because it's an important point, and the most important part of science.
AiG then summarises the first half or so of the show. They've got few objections to anything there, but for the sake of completion, I'll summarise their summary.
First, Dr Tyson shows our "cosmic address", our place in the universe. Starting from Earth and moving out, we see our solar system, including the Oort Cloud (Which I'll address later because they don't raise any objections to it here for some reason), then the Milky Way galaxy, the local group of galaxies we inhabit, the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies, then the observable universe. It's pretty neat really. The show then tells the story of Giordano Bruno, someone I honestly had never heard of before, a pre-Galilean monk, and tells of how he theorised an infinite universe, and, expanding on Copernicus's ideas of a sun-centred solar system, theorised that the stars were also suns with their own planets. Dr Tyson does point out that Bruno's ideas were really lucky guesses. He wasn't a scientists, he didn't back his ideas up with much evidence, he just happened to be right.
It's an important point on the idea of free though and free expression though. In the original Cosmos, Dr Sagan points out how a Christians psychiatrist in the 50's theorised that Jupiter had somehow spit up a planet which flew towards Earth, caused the red sea to part for Moses and caused the earth and moon to stand still for a day to allow Joshua to continue battling, then rested in its current place as the planet Venus. As Sagan pointed out, the hugely worrying part of this was not how horribly, horribly wrong this idea was, it was that people tried to silence him for expressing controversial ideas.
No, no, no. You don't do that. If an idea is terrible, it will fail. Question everything, even where Venus came from, even if it makes no sense. Free expression and free thoughts are two of the single most important ideas of our modern society.
The show continues by showing the "cosmic calendar", compressing all 13.8 billion years of the history of the universe into a single calendar year to give a better idea of just how tiny the human race's place in history is. Aaaand this is where Answers in Genesis really starts to get annoyed at things.
First, Dr Tyson shows the big bang, happening at January 1st, the beginning of the cosmic calendar.
Maintaining that “observational science” supports the big bang theory of origins, Tyson says, “It’s as far back as we can see in time, for now. Our entire universe emerged from a point smaller than a single atom. Space itself exploded in a cosmic fire, launching the expansion of the universe and giving birth to all the energy and all the matter we know today. I know that sounds crazy, but there is strong observational evidence to support the big bang theory. And it includes the amount of helium in the cosmos and the glow of radio waves left over from the explosion” (emphasis ours).
The “observational evidence” to which Tyson refers is not, however, observations that confirm big bang cosmology but interpretations of scientific data that interpret observations within a big bang model of origins. The big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned. (Read more about these in other articles on this website, such as “Big Bang—The Evolution of a Theory,” “Universe by Design: Problems with the Big Bang,” and “The Big-Bang God or the God of Scripture?”) Astronomer Dr. Danny Faulkner points out that this is not “observational evidence” about our origins but rather “an interpretation of the data, data that could be interpreted a number of different ways apart from the big bang.”
The "interpretations of scientific data" is a common tactic of Answers in Genesis. If they actually directly rejected any data that refutes their conclusions, they'd be called out for being liars and frauds. So, instead, they just say that they "interpret data differently". Which is complete nonsense. Yes, some data can be interpreted in multiple ways, but there's only every going to be one true interpretation.
So, to understand why this objection to the big bang theory isn't valid, I'm going to firstly, briefly explain the big bang theory, where it came from and what we understand about it. You know. That strong observational evidence that Dr Tyson referred to.
During the early 20th century, the most prevailing idea of the state of the universe was that it was effectively unchanging. The universe had existed forever and things were pretty much not going anywhere. But, in 1912, Vesto Slipher noticed that some galaxies were moving away from us. He didn't quite grasp the implications of this at first, but soon, people, especially priest Georges Lemaître, considered the possibility that the universe was expanding. It wasn't until Edwin Hubble (The guy the Hubble space telescope is named after) carefully and meticulously measured the speed of many, many galaxies that we discovered that, not only is nearly every galaxy moving away from us, the further away they are, the faster they're moving. By questioning the prevailing opinion of a steady universe, we'd begun the first step to the big bang theory.
The implications from this are reasonably obvious. If the universe is getting bigger, then in the past, it was also much smaller. The idea was fairly quickly raised that the universe began as a small point that expanded rapidly. This is where the name "big bang" came from.
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| Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation |
Secular scientists, most notably Fred Hoyle, who'd come up with the "big bang" name, objected to this, wanting to stick to the steady state universe idea, mostly due to not liking the religious implications of the universe had a beginning. Hoyle suggested that new matter was continuously being created somehow to fill the voids where the universe is expanding. So, we needed more evidence to support the idea that the universe was once much, much smaller. Well, if everything was packed into a really, really tiny point, it would also have been much, much hotter. When things get hot, they tend to glow. So, we should still be able to see some of this afterglow, though by now, it would've cooled a lot. And, well, we did find that afterglow, in the cosmic microwave background radiation.
There were a few problems with the model though. One of the most notable is that the CMBR has the same temperature, well, pretty much in every direction. This is odd, because there isn't enough time for different points in space to reach thermal equilibrium. One of the ideas that was proposed was that, in the first fractions of a second of the universe, it inflated extremely rapidly before slowing to its current rate. Creationists liked to jump on this, saying "Aha! You're just making things up to try save your sinking ship of an idea!" Well... no, it seems that in January 2014, we've pretty much found extremely strong evidence for inflation. Score another point for the big bang theory over creationism.
That's not the only bits of observable evidence we have to back up the big bang theory either. If it's true, then when the universe was in its extremely hot, excited state, most matter was in the form of energy (This is linked with Einstein's famous e=mc² equation, which predicts that mass can be converted to energy and vice versa). As the universe cooled and energy condensed into matter, it would've been mostly in the form of hydrogen atoms, because it's the most simple atom. And that's what we see in the early universe. Mostly hydrogen atoms. Not only that, but while the universe was hot and these hydrogen atoms were jumping around, some would've collided to form helium atoms (The second simplest atom). The amount of helium in the early universe also matches predictions made by the big bang theory.
This isn't just how we "interpret" the data. This is what the data very clearly states. The big bang theory matches all of it, and creationism matches none of it. Creationists have no explanation for the cosmic microwave background radiation, and their only attack on it was based on inflation and now that's been effectively confirmed too. This is all, good, solid, observable science.
But in any case, I took a quick skim through the three AiG articles that they link. The first is basically "hey, the theory's changed since it first developed!" Well... yeah. That's what theories do in science. We question everything (remember that?) and if things are found to be wrong, we fix it. Yes, some bits have had to be tweaked, some ideas were thrown out and new ideas were added in where they fit. This isn't trying to save a sinking ship, it's good science, where we question what we thought to be true and change what we understand based on new data.
The second article talks about some unrelated stuff to do with quasars, then jumps on the "attacking inflation" bandwagon for a bit. Again, inflation wasn't just something scientists pulled out of their butts to explain things. It fit with what data we had, and now, we've got strong, observational data supporting it.
The third article amounts to "the big bang theory isn't exactly what the bible says, and the bible cannot be questioned so it must be wrong!" I've talked in a previous blog entry on my thoughts on the bible not matching up with what we see in nature (kinda), but I want to make another wee point here.
I was following twitter during the recent Ken Ham (the CEO of Answers in Genesis) and Bill Nye debate, and I just want to share one of the most profound tweets I saw during it: "To hold human mythology superior to observable reality is to blaspheme the creation itself."
Think about that for a bit. When you say that what we see in nature is wrong because it doesn't match the bible, you're insulting God. If you believe God created the universe, by definition, what we see in the universe cannot be rejected in favour of what men wrote in the bible. This is why creationists try to claim they don't reject evidence, they just "interpret" it differently. It exposes how flawed and how dishonest, and how anti-God their arguments are.
But let's get back to Cosmos now. Their next objection is to the Oort cloud. I'm not sure why they raise it here, not when the Oort cloud is actually mentioned in the show, but oh well.
The program also speaks of the Oort cloud—supposed birthplace of comets to explain how comets could still exist if billion-year-cosmologies were true—but explains the fact that it has never been observed by simply noting it’s too enormous and its components too far apart.
To summarise what the Oort cloud is, we know that long period comets can't really live for that long, only a few thousand years or so, because those big pretty tails? It's the comet losing part of itself. Eventually, they'll break away.
The current leading hypothesis is the Oort cloud, a spherical cloud of icy rocks surrounding our solar system, that occasionally fly into the inner solar system and form comets. AiG wants to paint this idea as scientists desperately trying to explain what they think can't be explained. While they're correct in stating that it's never been observed for those reasons, this is less of a problem than they think.
Consider Neptune. See, before Neptune was ever spotted (kinda, Galileo spotted it but didn't realise it was a planet), we knew it existed. Why? We knew Uranus was there, but its orbit did some kinda funny things. Doing some careful maths, Alexis Bouvard showed that it could be being tugged at by another planet. That planet was later confirmed to be Neptune.
Scientists don't pull ideas out of their butts and present them with no evidence, and while the evidence for the Oort cloud is much less than the evidence for Neptune, we've got a pretty good idea of what it should be like, based on our observations of comets. We've got a long way to go, but just dismissing an idea out of hand because we need more evidence is not science.
The other problem is that Answers in Genesis is trying to set up a false dichotomy. They're trying to claim there are only two options:
1: The Oort cloud exists and explains why comets still exist.
2: The Oort cloud doesn't exist and therefore, the Earth is only 6000 years old.
The obvious problem is this. The Oort cloud is obviously, not the only evidence for an old solar system. It isn't even that. We've got mountains and mountains of evidence showing that the solar system must be much, much older than 6000 years old, though, of course, AiG "interprets" it differently (I'm not gonna discuss it here though because I don't want to make this too long-winded). So there aren't two options. There's three, and they look a bit more like this.
1: The Oort cloud exists and explains why comets still exist.
2: The Oort cloud doesn't exist but there's another reason why comets still exist that we just haven't found yet.
3: The Oort cloud doesn't exist and also, the radiometric dating, cooling, astronomic and geological evidence that supports an old earth happens to be wrong in a way that coincidentally, all gives the same age for the solar system, and the Earth is actually only 6000 years old.
Personally, the first two seem far, far more likely than the third.
The repeated death and recycling of stars is presented as the origin for all elements, and Tyson recalls another famous Sagan-ism, “We are made of star stuff”
It links to another article which is fairly unrelated and is basically just "that idea doesn't match the bible, so it's wrong". But remember what I said earlier about how, in the early universe, we observe pretty much only hydrogen and helium? Well, we know that stars use fusion, we can observe that, we know that fusion forms new, higher elements, we can observe that too, so the question is, do our observations of the early universe match this? Well, yes. As we look into the more recent past, we see higher elements. When stars explode, they spread the elements they've forged in their hearts throughout space and this forms new stars and our observations match this. But, naturally, AiG has to reject this because that would be questioning the bible, and questioning everything does not include the bible.
Finally, Tyson, standing in a lovely setting surrounded by rocks and pools, deals with the origin of life. Abiogenesis—the origin of life from non-living elements through natural processes—is essential to naturalistic evolutionary dogma. Yet abiogenesis has never been observed in science.
This is true. We have yet to create life in the labs. But that's just because we haven't been studying it for that long. We're getting there though.
Moreover, abiogenesis violates the natural laws that govern everything known to chemical and biological science. Invoking blind faith in evolutionary principles, Tyson therefore says, “We still don’t know how life got started. For all we know it may have come from another part of the Milky Way. The origin of life is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science.”
Firstly, no it doesn't. There's a reason why they don't list which natural laws it violates. The only one I can think of that they might be thinking of is the second law of thermodynamics, but that's simply because creationists really, really don't understand what the second law actually states (Pro-tip: It isn't "everything is winding down into disorder" or some variation of that).
I'm a little disappointed in what Dr Tyson said though. He could've explained some of the processes behind it, though I suppose he didn't for time reasons. So, with that said, I highly recommend potholer54's video, the Origin of Life Made Easy. It explains much of processes behind what we understand of abiogenesis.
During our tour of the rest of evolutionary history, we meet Tiktaalik, “one of the first animals to venture onto land” bobbing its cute green face out of the water’s edge. We hear how the rise of mammals and eventually humans was only made possible by the chance occurrence of an asteroid bumped off course crashing into earth to destroy dinosaurs and let evolving mammals come into their own. Naturally we also see some footprints and hear that once animals learned to walk upright on two legs they evolved into humans, learned to make tools, paint on cave walls, study the stars, and finally send out spacecraft to explore them.
I've gotta say, Tiktaalik was bigger than I expected. But they don't really raise any objections to anything here, so I don't really have much to comment on. Obviously, they refuse to think tiktaalik might be a transitional form, but that's just their "interpretation".
In short, the opening of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey spends an hour (less with commercials) summarizing the naturalistic evolutionary view of the origin of life and all things, tricks out the story with colorful computer-generated graphics and photography, and dismisses any religious-based objections by echoing Bruno’s 16th century challenge that our view of God must simply be too small, thus inviting the theistic evolutionary view to become comfortable in the notion that God used a toolkit of star stuff to create us.
I don't think that was the point behind the story of Bruno. The point was to say "question everything" (And yes, AiG, that does include evolution, though evolution has more than passed every test thrown at it in the last 150 odd years), including religious dogma. And I should point out here, that most Christians, including the Pope, accept theistic evolution. I won't comment on theistic evolution here, because for one thing, I need to do more reading on it, and for another, it's a good topic for another day. I will, however, give you with the words of Russian Orthodox Christian, and evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, who believed God created the world over 10 billion years ago, as explained by science, and that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution".
The scientific method has led to the discoveries and technological leaps that shape our lives and our understanding of the universe. Unfortunately, when it comes to the topic of unobservable origins, mainstream scientists who believe big bang cosmology and molecules-to-man evolution think that the god-free framework they have invented is a factual reality that accurately and reliably describes a past they can never examine. They test their ideas about the past within their own concept of what the past was like, and they believe they are actually using the scientific method to make observations about the past.
That's because they are. Testing ideas does not just mean doing things to chemicals and stuff in labs. It also means wondering if we can find certain transitional fossils, such as Tiktaalik or archeopteryx in nature (Which we do), or if the genetic code shows common ancestry (it does) or that if the world is 4 billion years old, we shouldn't find any elements with half-lives much shorter than that in nature (We don't), or that if the universe began as in infinitesimal point, we should find microwave background radiation (we do). Creationists have offered no testable predictions, only "hey this might kinda match what the bible, depending on how we interpret the bible!" Science has made countless many predictions about the past and the ones that are confirmed are kept (Such as evolution, big bang theory and stellar formation) and the ones that do not, are rejected (Such as Kelvin's ideas about how young the earth should be based on its temperature, or the idea that fetuses go through their evolutionary history during development, proposed by Heikel). All science, historical or observational, is testable and the science regarding the past has passed every test.
Despite the admonition to “question everything” and to “reject” ideas that “don’t pass the test,” the fact that abiogenesis violates the fundamental laws of biology is ignored. Evolutionary blind faith in a “great mystery”—such as that invoked by Bill Nye in the recent Nye-Ham Debate—trumps the scientific method. Why? Because molecules-to-man evolution must have happened for Darwinian notions of origins to be true.
They're still not stating which fundamental laws of biology are ignored by abiogenesis, though I suspect they mean the law of biogenesis, which states that life comes from life, as opposed to the now-much discredited idea of spontaneous generation, which stated that maggots spontaneously appeared from dead meat, and crocodiles came from dead logs. I've highlighted in the past the difference between a theory and a law, and it's worth noting again that laws are not applicable in every situation. Newton's law of gravity doesn't explain Mercury's orbit, and his second law of motion only applies to velocities much less than the speed of light. Even the law of energy conservation can be violated provided you do it for a very short time. So yes, within the framework of biological evolution, life can indeed only come from other life, but abiogenesis is the study of where life first came from. It's an exception to the law, and those are valid if you can provide strong evidence. Question everything, even fundamental laws of science.
The article finishes by reminding us that question everything doesn't include AiG's interpretation of Genesis. Sorry guys, but in the realm of science, nothing is sacred. Every idea is tested and your claims that evolution is sacred is simply wrong. Key ideas of evolution are questioned all the time. Last year, a biologist raised the hypothesis that maybe humans came from chimps cross-breeding with pigs. The idea was pretty ridiculous, but she was questioning evolution. One of the key ideas of modern evolution is punctuated equilibrium, the idea that evolution doesn't happen as gradually as Darwin proposed, but tends to happen in faster periods, pushed by natural selection.
I'm going to try get a few more of these out in the next few days so I can catch up to the Cosmos show, but for now, I'm going to leave you with some more from Dobzhanksy:
Shiek bin Baz and his like refuse to accept the radiometric evidence, because it is a "mere theory." What is the alternative? One can suppose that the Creator saw fit to play deceitful tricks on geologists and biologists. He carefully arranged to have various rocks provided with isotope ratios just right to mislead us into thinking that certain rocks are 2 billion years old, others 2 million, which in fact they are only some 6,000 years old. This kind of pseudo-explanation is not very new. One of the early antievolutionists, P. H. Gosse, published a book entitled Omphalos ("the Navel"). The gist of this amazing book is that Adam, though he had no mother, was created with a navel, and that fossils were placed by the Creator where we find them now – a deliberate act on His part, to give the appearance of great antiquity and geologic upheaveals. It is easy to see the fatal flaw in all such notions. They are blasphemies, accusing God of absurd deceitfulness. This is as revolting as it is uncalled for.
These are your ideas, Answers in Genesis. You hold the bible above what God created and that's not only unscientific, it's against God.
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