Answering Genesis: Interpreting the Evidence

One of the main position's held by Answers in Genesis is that they don't have different evidence, they just view the evidence through their own world view, while "evolutionists" view evidence through a different world view. As I've said before, this is really just so that, when evidence contradicting their position is given to them, especially transitional forms, they can claim to just be interpreting it differently.

That guy on the right looks like a porn star. Just sayin'.

And so, I wanna take a look at this view. See if it stands up to scrutiny. Because, of course, it doesn't.

Answering Genesis: "Hiding in the Light"

This is another very "observational science" based episode of Cosmos, so Answers in Genesis really didn't have a huge amount of material to whine about. So, instead they went for their usual fall-back strategy of whining about abiogenesis, whining about the big bang theory, playing the victim and, of course, "it's just historical science! That means I can reject it out of hand and ignore any evidence supporting it!"

I was honestly expecting to not have a lot of a fun with this, but hey, let's have some fun!

Answering Genesis: "A Sky Full of Ghosts"

Yay! Finally caught up with the Cosmos series! And the latest episode was great for a simple reason: It presented a pretty simple and obvious reason why the universe cannot be only 6000 years old, as predicted by biblical creationists, giving Cosmos its first direct attack on young earth Creationists. And boy, did it get Answers in Genesis mad.

The episode itself was pretty interesting, though I'd hoped it had talked more about relativity. Relativity is pretty awesome, but the stuff about black holes was also pretty interesting, though I'd hoped it would talk about Hawking radiation a bit too. But oh well. One of the slightly disappointing things about the new Cosmos series is that the episodes themselves are only 45 minutes long without ads, while the original series had hour long episodes. So there's a wee bit that needs to be trimmed and it does show sometimes.

But that's beside the point. Let's talk about creationists!

Answering Genesis: "When Knowledge Conquered Fear"

I have to admit, the first time I saw this episode, I really didn't see much in there that would object creationists. It pretty much just talks about how comets were originally seen as harbingers of destruction, then explains how Halley, Newton and a few others discovered what they are, how gravity works and some other really cool science. I forgot though, creationists are offended by pretty much any science that doesn't apparently confirm their interpretation of Genesis. So naturally, they got pretty annoyed at this one too.

Why?

Please note: there are several instances of objectionable language in this episode of Cosmos.

... Oh. Wait, what?

Answering Genesis: "Some of the Things That Molecules Do"

The second episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos was considered almost entirely with the subject of biological evolution; naturally, this is not a subject that creationists are happy with, and Answers in Genesis's review of the episode shows that. But, despite everything, Darwin's theory is one of the most well understood and well tested theory in all of science. The only reason people don't accept it, as far as I'm aware, is because they either don't actually understand what the theory is (hence my earlier blog post on it), or they simply refuse to, usually for religious reasons, and can only do this by "interpreting" evidence differently.

I want to make a short disclaimer here first though. I'm not a biologist. My majors were physics and maths, and I did my utmost best to avoid biology at university. I'm not entirely sure why, but hey, what can you do. So my understanding of some of the principles of biology are flawed and I might well make mistakes. Please, please, don't take those as mistakes in the theory of evolution. It's almost certainly a mistake in my own understanding.

But enough of that. Let's get into the review!