Creationists Demand Airtime On 'Cosmos' For The Sake Of Balance

Goteborg

I did read the entire article. Try relying on your brain instead of pasting some stupid crap you read on the Internet. M'Kay? What you did was insulting. Own it.

Let me try to clarify for you then because I was using my brain. What I wrote initially wasn't from the article it was from memory. See, on ATS there are particular bits of etiquette that we are supposed to abide by. One of the more important ones, particularly when in a science related discussion, is that when you make an assertion you are supposed to support it with citations. It harkens back to the site motto of "Deny Ignorance". Therefore I looked for an article quickly to cite. If you're insulted because I followed protocol then I don't know what to tell you. I have to guess by your attitude you haven't been involved in many research projects otherwise you would be very familiar with the concept of citations and footnotes. However if you prefer to deny the science and embrace the ignorance, that's your prerogative and more power to you if that's the approach you prefer. However, if you're going to be using this site frequently you should expect people to be using citations and links to show where the information originated or to support a hypothesis or assertion.

reply to post by Goteborg


You know, honestly, you have distorted the whole thing.
You said, in boymonkey's thread, that Danny Faulkner had nothing to do with Ken Ham, and told me to "stop" talking about Ham. Now you are telling me "stop" doing other things.

I don't care one whit if you posted in my thread, or what you want me to "stop" doing (or do). I care about making it clear that Dr Faulkner is part of Answers in Genesis, which is Ken Ham's outfit. Those are the people under discussion here. It hasn't anything to do with you and your actions. In fact, AiG has blogged that they don't even disagree with a lot of it, and are trying to downplay the 'hype' of them 'demanding' airtime.

I posted a link about that. So people could see their point of view.

Can you please answer the questions?
Are you a YEC? I'm not.
Do you think Tyson is trying to impose some nefarious atheist agenda? I don't.

BuzzyWigs
reply to post by Fromabove

 

"there are some the believe that the universe is only 65 hundred years old... He doesn't care to tell us who those people are. But you probably already know who they are, and that's the bliss of it all. You can poke a little fun at those Christians and not even have to say the word Christian.

It's quite obvious who those people are - they are the Young Earth Creationists/Answers in Genesis people.

How is that 'bliss'?
The AiG people are, in my opinion, grasping at straws and becoming more stubborn as their walls are being torn down.
No one is lumping the Young Earth Creationists in with your 'normal', 'regular', 'typical' Christians. They are clearly a breed apart.

Now, I don't know how long in advance this show was produced and wrapped and packaged for the network, but this whole thread is based on the alleged 'demands' of the YECs, right after the Bill Nye v Ken Ham debate.

Perhaps you were unaware of that build up? It's tempting to think the entire fracas was orchestrated. And...it's working!
People at each others' throats -
just like they planned it all.


Look; I don't believe in the Young Earth/Biblical Literalist stuff. Lots of other people don't either. The extreme right-wing-conservative-Christians have created this firestorm...and it's escalating.
Are you a member of the Seven Mountain Dominionists? They are a large part of the impetus here.

Anyway....sorry for being long-winded.

I'm a Christian and I don't believe in the 6,500 year thing either because the Bible clearly doesn't say that. It's ok to be long winded on the ATS, so your cool on that. I put up so rather longs posts as well.

Goteborg

BuzzyWigs
reply to post by Goteborg

 

I'm not sure what your problem is here, again.
This is the thread I started. The other one was started regarding the same topic by boymonkey74. I have read all of your posts in both threads, and I don't seem able to figure out what your stance is about the show COSMOS.

Forgive me for what you perceive as reading comprehension problems, I'm not pretending anything here, I assure you....but I'm asking you all the same.....:

Do you think Tyson is being disingenuous, and that the show COSMOS is some sort of evil agenda against God/Bible? Because I just don't see it.

Also, are you a believer in the Young Earth Creationist theory?

You're not sure what the problem is? You went into someone else's thread and called me out because you A) disagreed with what I said and....B) were unhappy that I didn't post in your thread.

Kiss my ass. Un sub.

I understand your intention to make a point that drives it home, but you have to keep in mind that some speech that is either derogatory, or insulting at the very personal level might get you a sticker or two for manners and decorum. I'm only saying it so that it doesn't happen. You can still get your points across without going straight to the throat.

reply to post by Fromabove

I'm a Christian and I don't believe in the 6,500 year thing either because the Bible clearly doesn't say that.

So, then, here we are full circle.
You have dismissed COSMOS as junk; but yet you don't agree with the things that Tyson's pointing out as incorrect. (Rephrase: you agree that what he's pointing out as incorrect is, in fact, incorrect. Right?)
What parts of the show pass muster with you? Any of it?

What is it lacking (or including) that offends you?

reply to post by peter vlar

Excuse me for jumping in here but I have a problem with the expansion of space supposedly being faster than the speed of light and I would like to offer my opinion here.

I don't know of any physicists who deny that expansion occurred faster than light can travel.

Do you know any physicists?
This is simply a theory so denying it is easy. It is very possible that it does not happen because it cannot happen. What we need here is proof. This theory is based on an observational contradiction to the age of the Universe. That being 13.7 billion years or so to an observed object being a calculated 80 billion light years away, IIRC. Instead of assuming that there is a problem with their model they came up with “Lookback Time” (expansion of spacetime >C). This is a violation of relativity, i.e. speed of light, in my opinion. Spacetime is a concept and not a real thing in itself.

It's not really that big of a deal.

I think it is a very big deal. I honestly feel that they are in violation of relativity here and are dismissing this violation with the wave of a hand and by creating a new theory. This new theory, expansion of spacetime faster than the speed of light, was created to address contradictions to previous theories about the big bang and the Hubble constant.

The Hubble constant, red shift, is showing that some objects are farther away than the Universe is old. How can that be? They assume that since space is empty it can expand and there would be no violation to the speed of light. The only problem is that space is not empty.

Space time itself, as the medium is not beholden to the limitations of light or special relativity.

Explain what space time is and how it can move faster than light and what force is accelerating it. A medium describes something that has contents, it is not empty.

From your link;

There is one way around the speed of light restriction. This restriction only applies to objects that are moving through spacetime,

What objects are not moving through spacetime?

but it's possible for spacetime itself to expand at a rate such that objects within it are separating faster than the speed of light.

I say prove it. Spacetime is defined as three dimensional space with time added. I think they are abusing this term to try and save their old theory. Perhaps the Universe is older than 13.7 billion years or maybe the Hubble constant isn't constant. Einstein addressed this relative problem of objects separating yet moving at the same rate. This does not explain how something can move faster than C.

Again, what is spacetime then? Are they redefining this to be some kind of Luminiferous Aether? What is accelerating this new spacetime?

BuzzyWigs
reply to post by Fromabove

 

I'm a Christian and I don't believe in the 6,500 year thing either because the Bible clearly doesn't say that.

So, then, here we are full circle.
You have dismissed COSMOS as junk; but yet you don't agree with the things that Tyson's pointing out as incorrect. (Rephrase: you agree that what he's pointing out as incorrect is, in fact, incorrect. Right?)
What parts of the show pass muster with you? Any of it?

What is it lacking (or including) that offends you?

edit on 4/2/2014 by BuzzyWigs because: (no reason given)

I do like the cgi stuff. The animations are good. And every now and then they say something having actual science in it. It's just all the other stuff they talk about that they don't know.

Since I last posted, I thought about the light travel through space thing, and while it is true that light travels at 186,000 per second, I had a thought.

We know or can reasonably assume that universal expansion took place, so fast that the speed was much faster than light. Then I thought, what if light was also compressed so that it acted like a rubber band or spring when it is stretched and it was stretched across the universe along with the universe. So that light was everywhere. So light would still only travel at 186,000 miles per second, but it would do so on an increasingly expanding universe. They say (scientists that is) that at the farthest edges of the universe, it is expanding faster than light right now. Every second that passes in our place in the universe, light has that much further to travel to get to it's destination as we expand with our universe. This would also seem to be confirmed by the red shift of light in objects moving very fast away from us.

So, there could be many possibilities about light and how it travels and how far it could have gone with the help of the expanding universe. So, they don't really know how long it took for that light to reach earth, they just think that they do in a perfectly stationary universe.

Well, folks, how many watched last night's new episode about light? "Discover the meanings of light and enlightenment."

It was good, I thought. It even covered the awesome science of the early Muslims - how Caliphs sent emissaries around the world in search of books, rather than burning them (and burying scientists alive), as had been done in China.
Tyson talked about the Fearless Questioning of Authority - the history of it from ancient Greece to Chinese culture to Muslim..

Ibn Al-Hazen realized that light could not be emitted out of our eyes, bounce off something, and then come back (the common belief of the time). . and ibn Al-Hazen (sp?). He studied nature, questioned everything, especially things that everyone else took for granted.

"Much of the Light of Ancient Greek science would have been extinguished" without the Arabs/Muslims openness to new science. The "Golden Age of Science" of the Islamic world. AlHazen urged people to question ancient writings from every side. He was "the first person ever to set down the rules of science." "Finding truth is difficult, and the road to it is rough. As seekers after truth, you will be wise to withhold judgment and not simply put your trust in the writings of the ancients. You must question everything ...."

The "al-"s in algorithm, algebra, alchemy, and alcohol (Yep, 'alcohol'...interesting) are Arabic words...from when Arabic was the language of science. Oh, and btw, the arabic numerals were imported from India.
Anyone have any thoughts to share about the show's 5th episode?

reply to post by BuzzyWigs


The arab scholars of the ancient world were well ahead of the game. All sorts of discoveries were made, scientific discovery was encouraged and our learning advanced greatly.

Until their society gave in to the wahhabists and other fundamentalists with their shariah law which shut down all scientific endeavors and pursuit of knowledge outside of religious texts.


Conservative fundamentalist christian groups would like to achieve the exact same thing in western societies. For a long time they were laughed at, but in recent years they have achieved true political power with their seduction of the right wing in America.

reply to post by BuzzyWigs


There is a history lesson to be learned from the golden age of Arab science.
It lasted from 750 C.E to about 1258 C.E. In this time there was a great wealth of human intellectual activity and biomedical science, including medicine. In fact their work was impressive and progressed in all sectors of science, they literally studied the past and began to create a new future.

What happened? Religion..
Religious differences from within and the European Crusades from the outside. Now look at them today, it is religion that still divides, from within and out.

The question is...Have we learned anything?

reply to post by flyingfish


Well, apparently, however so slowly, we are.
Thanks for posting.

reply to post by ReturnofTheSonOfNothing

The arab scholars of the ancient world were well ahead of the game. All sorts of discoveries were made, scientific discovery was encouraged and our learning advanced greatly.

I now understand that is truth. I do find it very discomfiting that the 'Christian' world (of which I am not a part) doesn't even acknowledge that fact. I never knew it until last year.


In any case, the 'Christian' version of things is quite holey (not 'holy' - nor 'wholly' - but holey, as in full of holes like Swiss cheese).

Can't we all just get along? Live and let live? Stop trying to force eff-all on people who don't share beliefs with us?? Can't we just take care of each other, look out for each other?

LOL!!

Hey all...
I just checked back to the OP/thread beginning....reviewed the posts.
I'm so glad to see all the stars for you folks!

I'm liking this thread.
Peace.....

Here is a letter from Carl Sagan to a promising high school student.



Sagan.. Way ahead of his time.

Are they going to start discussing evolution in Sunday School classes? Are preachers going to start giving accurate descriptions of the Big Bang from the pulpit? If not, then they have absolutely no standing to demand anything.
This is a show based on science and it deals with scientific facts, findings and understandings, not of all theories that exist. It deals with what can be proven, not what can be imagined.
There are plenty of other shows the focus on creationism, entire networks devoted to it. They have no right nor reason to want to have their imagination discussed on Cosmos.

reply to post by JacobsLadder


Today there was a headline:
Neil deGrasse Tyson Under Attack from Christians Who Want More Biblical Creationism on His Show
Why not other creationism stories, like the Norse or Egyptian myths?

There’s been thousands of creation stories throughout time, so in the interest of fair-and-balanced, why not given one of these others a chance? Here are some potential creation stories, and the pros and cons for telling each one.

1. The ancient Greeks.


2. Ancient Japanese creation myth.


3. Ancient Egyptian creation myth.


4. Ancient Norse creation myth.

And that's only four of them. Check the link for more details and the author's 'pros and cons' of these four legends.

Just pick one of these four, or any of the thousands of others anthropologists have gathered over the years. Not that this would placate the conservatives demanding that ancient mythology be given a spot on a science education program. After all, a segment on creation myths would only serve to show that the myth in the Bible is just one of many, and lead many viewers to conclude that there was no more an Eve eating an apple than there was a Pandora opening her box.

The YECs should be careful of what they ask for. Give equal time to ALL the legends, or even just half a dozen, and viewers will at least be shown compare/contrast stuff - which often (but not always) leads to critical thinking. A skill that much of America seems to lack these days.

reply to post by JacobsLadder

Are preachers going to start giving accurate descriptions of the Big Bang from the pulpit?

Even Scientists struggle to give a detailed description of The Big Bang!!!

99% of everything else you said was spot on though!!!


I don't know why people care to be honest...
Let Young Earth believers have their say... Within 2 or 3 episodes their numbers would have dwindled by about 80% at least!!!

The other 20% probably don't even have access to a TV!!!


Is it just me...
Or does this remind anyone of this from a few years ago...



This always had me pissing myself with laughter!!!


Peace Jacobs Ladder!!!

Kansas to Black Out "Cosmos"

The new bill is the brainchild of an ironically-named Kansas State Senator: Tom Edison (R). “Cosmos is a liberal brainwashing program, designed to force our children into questioning the existence of our lord and savior Jesus Christ,” Edison said during a recent interview on one of the Fox affiliates under the gun. “It’s a keystone of the liberal agenda that America’s youth be converted into following their so-called `logic,’ so conservatism dies out in a generation or two. Well, we aren’t going to stand for this. We aren’t going to let this TV show ruin our children.”

Got to get to work, will check in later.