Creationism Madness!

Creationist beaned in Boston

Recently, a young-Earth creationist named Nathaniel Jeanson gave an invited talk in Boston, and besides the usual crowd of believers, a group of skeptics attended as well. Rebecca Watson penned a wonderful description of the event (and on Skepchick as well), complete with audience — and speaker — reactions.

I don’t generally go to talks by creationists, as it would be a rare event indeed for them to say something original, or accurate. But Rebecca noted this:

Because his work at Harvard focused on biology, that was the bulk of his talk, but before reaching that discipline he first dismissed both astronomical and geological evidence for evolution and a multi-billion-year-old universe. Of the former, he declared that when we observe galaxies around ours, they are spread out equally to the “north, south, east and west” of Earth, and therefore we are literally at the center of the Universe (and therefore blessed by God?). This is silly. Mountains of research suggest that the Earth occupies a wholly unremarkable corner of a Universe that is vaster and more ancient than Jeanson’s comparatively puny philosophy can imagine.

I listened to a recording of the talk for this part, and Rebecca reports his argument faithfully. His argument is totally wrong. I know, shocker. His basic assumption is that the Universe has a physical edge, which is incorrect. There is a visible limit for the Universe, a farthest distance we can see. That distance is about 13 billion light years. We can’t see any farther away because there hasn’t been time since the birth of the Universe for a photon to get any farther. You can consider objects that have moved more than 13 billion light years away from us, but we simply cannot see them due to the expansion of the Universe.

You might therefore naively make a map showing all the objects in the Universe, and lo, we are at the center. But that would be true for any and every single point in the Universe. If you are on Alpha Centauri, or in the Andromeda Galaxy, or sitting near a young quasar 10 billion light years away, you would look out and still see yourself apparently centered in the Universe. The whole point here is that there is no special location in the Universe, no preferred point.

So, BZZZZZT. He’s wrong.

But, we knew that.

Of course, Jeanson ignores another rather obvious and difficult problem: if the Universe is 6000 years old, how do we see galaxies billions of light years away? Creationists have to bob and weave a lot to answer that one. Perhaps the light was created already on its way, or the Universe was created appearing old already. But that would be awfully tricky of a creator, trying to fool us by providing millions of individual bits of evidence of an old Universe but then saying it’s young.

I thought deception was someone else’s purview in the Bible.

Anyway, its stuff like this that’ll probably keep me away from live lectures by creationists in the future. Trying to wrap my head around creationist astronomy is like trying to ride a unicycle around a Moebius strip: it’s off-balance, physically impossible, full of one-sided arguments, and in the end you don’t go anywhere.

Originally posted by acmpnsfal
reply to post by john124

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Wow, cant you see thats why science does not have all the answers and religion does not have all the answers? They each believe they hold all the pieces to the puzzle, when in fact they dont. Science needs to work with religion (or even better the premise of spirituality) to better understand all. Separation leads to nothing but more misunderstanding and derision.

Originally posted by acmpnsfal
reply to post by john124

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Well seeing as science as we know it today is finding more and more ways to validate things we believed to be true in ancient civilizations which were largely spiritual

Originally posted by acmpnsfal
reply to post by john124

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Wow, cant you see thats why science does not have all the answers and religion does not have all the answers? They each believe they hold all the pieces to the puzzle, when in fact they dont. Science needs to work with religion (or even better the premise of spirituality) to better understand all. Separation leads to nothing but more misunderstanding and derision.

Originally posted by fockewulf190


Indeed. My take on this whole issue is that there is no truly known right answer, so why waste brain power on an unsolvable mystery. There is no way this planet, or universe, or what have you, is 6000 years old. Go to any museum with a dinosaur skeleton in it, or fossils, and the proof is right in front of your eyes that the world isn´t 6000 years old. Science factually blows that theory out of the water.

On the other hand, the other day I saw a documentary about the moon. In one part of the documentary, scientists were describing the gravitational effects the young moon was causing on the Earth. Back then, the moon was much closer to the Earth, so the tides were 1000 times bigger than they are today. Then, the scientists go on to proclaim their beliefs that since the oceans were causing such massive erosional effects on the early continental landmasses, and pulling massive amounts of minerals and stuff into the oceans, this lead to the development of life forming from this primordial "soup". They then show a bubbling mud puddle as being some kind of natural uterus which spawned life. Utterly ridiculous theory without a shred of rock solid evidence to back the claim up. Has there ever been a successful scientific experiment done duplicating this ancient brew in a lab and replicating the creation of single cell life? None that I know of. So science takes it on the chin here.

Evolution exists, but it cannot prove the origins of life. Creationism exists, but it sure as shinola didn´t start 6000 years ago. No one has the answers.

Originally posted by acmpnsfal
reply to post by john124

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Well seeing as science as we know it today is finding more and more ways to validate things we believed to be true in ancient civilizations which were largely spiritual(and our modern science is still pretty young), wouldnt it follow that we should try to reincorporate some of those belief systems into our current understanding of everything?