I watched a bit of this video from Answers in Genesis, but couldn’t take much of it. Daniel Phelps had more stamina, and watched the hacks at AiG spout their BS about the shiny new space telescope. Danny Faulkner is their pet astronomer who rejects most of astronomy.
Their response was by AiG’s astronomer, Dr. Danny Faulkner, and their “rocket scientist,” Rob Webb. Their discussion was a rather weak critique of the JWST’s findings and funny and sad at the same time. Through most of their simulcast, one couldn’t hear what the NASA people were saying, but this may have been a technical difficulty. About 23 minutes in Dr. Faulkner and Webb bizarrely claim that light year distances don’t necessarily equal long time scales (thus not refuting a 6,000 year old universe). Soon after, Dr. Faulkner states his “theory” (not a scientific theory, but he doesn’t seem to know this) that we can see things billions of light years away in a 6,000 year old universe because of a “miracle.” His position is literally “then a miracle occurred.” This is reminiscent of the famous Sidney Harris cartoon found here:. Dr. Faulkner goes on to say that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden saw pretty much what we see today when looking at the night sky.
They do know that the Harris cartoon is not a recommendation, right? As soon as you resort to “miracles”, you’ve left science behind.
Not that that would bother AiG.
One of the usual creationist explanations for why our 13.8 billion year old universe is really 6,000 years old is…Last Thursdayism.
Our entire universe was created last Thursday by the gods that can do anything. It was created looking old.
You were created with all your memories so you think you lived a long life when you are really only 3 days old.
Enjoy the rest of your short life. You have 4 more days of it to live.
Every Thursday, the gods create a new universe!!!Next week’s universe features Cthulhu and intelligent squids.
This theory does make the gods look like cruel and arbitrary tricksters and our lives are trivial and meaningless. Well, xianity never had much going for it anyway and the good news is that it is also going to last for a whole 7 days and then be over with forever.
@1 Yeah, a god creating the universe last Thursday or 4004 BCE with all appearance of age would be cruel and arbitrary. Kinda like the thing described in the bible…
How’d they eliminate an antimiraculous act by Satanic forces meant to lead them astray?
AIG’s 6,000 yr old universe (ROFLMAO) is beautifully mocked by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster when Bobby Henderson (who created it to mock the Kansas xtian terrorist school system) says that ‘His Noodliness’ the Flying Spaghetti Monster goes around making fossils that look old just to mess with people’s minds. I always love Bobby Henderson and the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s way of messing with xtian terrorist’s mindset. They end their ‘prayers’ with the exhortation: Ramen!
Can we start a movement to have all the xtian bibles and propaganda moved to the FICTION section in all the libraries?!? That’s where rational thinking says they belong!
The only substantiated miracle I’ve ever heard of is ‘Miracle Whip’ that I put on sandwiches. Anybody have any other substantiated miracles to report?
So AiG claim we live in a sequel to Total Recall?
Can we please wake up Arnold?
“Goddidit!” the most laziest, wrongful explanation every young earth dunce has ever given about every scientific phenomenon that’s out there.
The video only shows AiG dunces making s*** up about the incredible telescope and the new stunningly beautiful observations it made in space. Don’t bother.
AiG has no shame and that is news , why? The leader of AiG who looks like a macaque claims evolution isn’t true …..yeah, right!
OK the “explanation” is somewhere between the Matrix and Total Recall. Do the idiots remember that the baddies were very comitted to covering up the truth?
.
Since Michael Ironside has not turned up and blown the Hamster’s brain away we can confidently rule out this miraculous deception of observed reality.
PS – Now that I started thinking about it, is there any possibility they might squeeze replicants masquerading as humans into the narrative?
Reptilians as agents of satan?
.
The problem is, I cannot achieve the state of mind to anticipate what they might think of next, except that the Jews are involved somehow (for instance, David Icke is concerned about the jewish faction of the space reptiles, not the others).
@6 shermanj
Miracle Gro fertilizers.
You can tell the jewish faction of the space reptiles by the fact that they all wear yamakes..
4@shermanj: Are you sure that idea was original with Henderson, or was he just riffing on it in his Pastafarian universe? I’ve heard that very idea seriously proposed by Christians themselves, that either Satan placed fossils to fool us, or God himself did it to test our faith.
OT
About religion: God Awful Movies just released their patreon- only review
GAM 361 Prince of Egypt (- an animated film for children about genocide)
There is some seriously twisted stuff here. Like Moses getting a sex slave as a gift in – I repeat- a children’s movie.
I’m mildly surprised they even bothered dating the whole universe. I feel like they could have easily claimed the story in Genesis is about the creation of our planet alone. Sure, there might be a couple lines that seemingly contradict that but it’s not like the whole thing doesn’t have contradictions already. That would have even let them run with the usual “look what amazing things our god has made” that they do with every other sort of natural wonder instead of trying to style it like “look how capricious and deceitful our god is, who wants to fool you into thinking this is much older than we say it is.”
I guess they just think their bottom line is better off promoting extreme ignorance on all topics rather than sidestepping an issue and using it to their advantage.
Labor @ 16
If you want to do virtue signalling to the tribe you need to ignore the contradictions. That is something human brains are really good at.
PS – Now that I started thinking about it, is there any possibility they might squeeze replicants masquerading as humans into the narrative?
Like “Westworld?” We could get some pretty twisted theological arguments out of that scenario. Followed, most surely, by some pretty twisted Reformation-level interspecies/intraspecies/sectarian warfare…
Asserting that we can see things billions of l.y. away even if they’re only 6000 years old because of a miracle does have one benefit. It will turn most text books that would normally be hundreds of pages long into pamphlets you can stuff in your back pocket. Simply stating that everything seen or detected is because of miracles will dramatically reduce the word count. It should also appeal to those taking multiple choice tests on scientific topics.
In the beginning, God said that the four dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric second rank tensor equals zero and there was light.
@PZ: Apropos of nothing, do you feel like maybe reviewing the original “Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot”? Maybe a chapter-by-chapter breakdown?
It’s not like the book costs money or anything.
Robbo @20: Actually, God said that the four-divergence of the Faraday tensor is proportional to the four-current density, and the four-divergence of the Hodge dual of the Faraday tensor is zero.
This speed-of-light rubbish sounds like overt self-parody. Someone else was blithering about this on a Panda’s Thumb post, and wasn’t even trying to sound coherent.
@23
1 Maxwell, 2:4-7, I believe.
“This speed-of-light rubbish sounds like overt self-parody. Someone else was blithering about this on a Panda’s Thumb post, and wasn’t even trying to sound coherent.”
I think that’s because you don’t have to understand evolution to say “It’s wrong, animals were created whole 6,000 years ago”. In fact the less you understand what evolution is the easier it is to deny it. But you DO have to understand something about cosmology and the natural of light to refute that it proves the universe is billions of years old.
@14
Much older I would think, IIRC it’s referenced in one of the earlier discworld books, and that’s just the first time I saw it in print. $SATAN putting fossils in the ground to mess with people has been a running joke for a long time.
— Philip Henry Gosse, Omphalos, 1857
(Or in other words, the fossils were not put into the strata to mess with us; they were put into the strata because God has a Law that just forces Him to put fossils into strata. Yep, yup.)
heh.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strata_(novel)
Owlmirror@28
Maybe God was trying to get evolution to work and ran out of time, so he just faked the whole thing. In effect, we’re living in a rigged demo.
Or God could be like the guy in those old Dunkin Donuts commercials. Every morning “Time to plant the fossils.” No wonder he gets so grumpy and smitey in the OT.