I woke up this morning, devoid of caffeine as I had not yet cracked open my Dew, and lo and behold over on Sadly, No!, this awful Youtube clip greeted me. For anyone who doesn't want to mop up their brain because it leaked out of your ear, the video is a very unconvincing attempt at supposedly refuting astronomy. 'Cause, you know, God created the universe, and the eeeevil Scientists didn't calculate for that. Or something.
I'm sorry. (Dabs at ear with napkin.) Where was I? Oh, I don't remember the full stupid of this video, because thankfully, once the grogginess wore off, so too did the haze of idiocy.
But reading through the comments and such, I started thinking. (Dangerous, I know!) The whole creation story (and that is what it is, a story) in and of itself does not refute evolution at all. Really, the story of creation in Genesis doesn't exclude evolution, though in the Bible, it's all created by God and evolution is adaptations. There was light, there was planets,there was things in the sea, there was creatures on land, there was man. Of course, given the time frame of when the story was told and eventually written down, I wouldn't expect people at that time to know as much as we do now. A friend and I were discussing this over the weekend, and really, there's nothing in it that wouldn't loosely match up with the general framework of evolution (just my opinion, and in a very general sense). Of course, I was laughing at the Creationist she stumbled on, and she was of the opinion that there's two sides to this "debate". No, no there isn't really, I tried to tell her, but she didn't believe me.
But that got me to thinking about a passage in one of my favorite books, 1984. Here is the passage that I am reminded of reading through the comments at Sadly, No!:
"But the world istelf is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny - helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited."
"Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness."
"But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals - mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of."
"Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing."
"But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach forever."
"What are the stars?" said O'Brien indifferently. "They are bits of fire a few kilometers away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it."
To me, their arguements are similar, only separated by the use of God. Of course, at this point in the book, Winston is being tortured.
Your Religious GOP: They didn't just read 1984, they studied it!
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