Stephan Paukner :: syslog

Shane Killian, jestingly classifying himself as a researcher in the area of bogosity, brings it to the point when he criticizes creationists: “These people don’t even know what the theory of evolution is, and yet they’re pretending to tell you all about it.”

In the first part of a series of YouTube videos he responds to a video titled “Evolution vs. Creation”. He analyzes its content and exposes the most relevant bogus arguments. The remaining arguments are so severe lies that it doesn’t make sense to comment them at all. Here I give a summary of what he’s showing:

Kent Hovind, who has been uncovered to having got his Doctor degree from a diploma mill, promises to give $250,000 to any person that finds any proof for evolution. But his definition of evolution is wrong: It does neither have anything to do with (or without) god, nor with the forming of the universe, nor with the development of our solar system, nor with the creation of life. The analyzed video claims that evolution is not a theory, but a model. But a theory is a model. The bogus video claims that evolution is not observed and tested and that it is about how life first appeared. But evolution does not describe how life appeared, and it is being observed and even used extensively in practice, such as in the development of medicines or in the defeating of the cholera agent. Then the bogus video misquotes Charles Darwin and shows that he was concerned about the small number of fossil intermediate links between species. But they detain his own explanation that the fossil record is extremely imperfect because it’s a rare event. “No intermediate fossils have ever been found.”—“Bogus!” Killian lists a number of fossil indermediate models. Creationists claim that intermediate models are no complete species. But, of course, every lifeform is always a species by itself, and of course there is no fossil evidence of an incomplete organism. Actually, every lifeform is an intermediate species. There are enough intermediate links found between ape and man, and creationists pinpoint to those missing links with yet no fossil evidence. And it doesn’t make sense at all to focus on the fossil record. There are other and more reliable (e.g., genetical) methods today which creationists simply don’t know, and if they knew them, they couldn’t criticize them as easily.

Part two continues with topics that don’t have anything to do with evolution anymore: First, it’s about the Big Bang. Creationists in their despair try to cite scientists incompletely: Hawking allowed to suppose a creator, but what they detain is that Hawking immediately showed that there might be no place for such. Then it clearly comes out: They don’t know what the Big Bang is. They think that something exploded and produced order; their imagination compares to an exploding terrorist bomb forming a wristwatch from the material in its surrounding. But the Big Bang is much more complicated: It was an explosion of space and time and contained very different physics than our average universe. Creationists don’t know anything about quantum mechanics or relativity theory—how should they. Then it turns out that creationists also don’t even seem to have any idea of basic physics or chemistry at all: They don’t know why there’s physical and chemical diversity in our solar system, although everything consists of the same chemical elements. And they don’t know why planets don’t all spin in the same direction. They indeed use their ignorance to santinize their claims. And they think this has something to do with the theory of the Big Bang. Then there is the argument of fine-tuning the physical parameters. They claim that life is impossible when the value of physical constants is varied. But this is not true. Calculations show that stars still can form, still live long enough and life still can form under variations of physical parameters.

Astronomer Phil Plait says that he fights creationists because their god is so small: Our universe is bigger, more beautiful, more worth of study and older than anything that they’re willing to accept.

But the problem is: We’re preaching to the wrong people. It doesn’t make sense to preach to educated people. We have to reach the unknowing, who are easily captured by bogus arguments.