Bears.

by kara on March 23, 2014

“Cosmos” was bound to be a veritably irresistible magnetic force to conservative dumbbells everywhere that refuse to believe in science because their Bible tells them not to and because they’re tired of having Obama rammed down their throat. But you only have to poke around the intelligent design shill blog Evolution News site to realize that Cosmos is their cash cow. They can rally the faithful around this thing forever. Please give us $$$, cuz you don’t want fancy pants non-Jesus-loving Neil Tyson and filth-mouthed Seth MacFamilyGuy teaching your children, do you? NO YOU DO NOT. It has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with keeping the masses ignorant of their potential to reinforce people’s position as pawns in a globe-spanning system of wealth built on the backs of the poor. “Evolution News” also falsely claims that the show Cosmos is a “ratings disaster and links to things that don’t support this. “Evolution News and Views” is published by The Discovery Institute, a vehicle that seems primarily designed to help religious right-wing millionaires fund attacks on the theory of evolution.

Creationists got mercilessly mocked after their response to the premiere episode. The following week, evo-deniers switched tactics. Instead of the LEAVE JEEBUS ALONE tact they’d previously taken, they offered up words about intelligent design’s faux-science, perhaps in the hope that their words will put us into a coma of boredom and then the utter nonsense of its content they are won’t matter. I tried to read all the words in the Evolution News review of episode two. They were especially mad about this episode, because Neil Tyson basically says that “evolution is real, yo.” and drops the mic.

I even tried to diagram some sentences from Evolution News, because I am a full-service blog. But, Jesus HW Christ, it is incompre-fucking-hensible.

“In this second episode of Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson and his co-creators hoped to convince viewers that intelligent design is wrong, but discussing by simply the complexity of biology, they couldn’t help but expose people to the evidence for design in nature.”

When those ID guys try to write science-y stuff, they certainly fuck it up. And make it boring. Which is actually the point. Make the writing as antagonizingly annoying as a five-year old, as obtuse as a Ph.D. dissertation on flatworm parasites, and everybody shuts down when decisions are made. Their point, I think, is that intelligent design IS TOO MUCH SCIENCE, but also loves Jesus SO VERY MUCH and since they are way smarter than Neil Degrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan, ipso fatso ad hominem QED. No matter how hard they try to fling graphs at you, at the end they inevitably circle the Jesus drain.

While we might disagree with Tyson that natural selection is “the most revolutionary concept in the history of science,” no ID proponent denies that natural selection is an important idea that can explain many things. Changing the color of a bear’s coat from brown to white is probably one of them — it’s a small-scale, microevolutionary change. The difference between ID proponents and evolutionists like Tyson is that ID proponents acknowledge that natural selection is a real force in nature, but we don’t just unconditionally grant it the power to do all things. Instead, we test forces like natural selection, and find that there are limits to the amount of change it can effect in populations.

Right, the bear is just a “small-scale, microevolutionary change” so it can not be applied to ALL THINGS. Those bears aren’t even human! We can not apply what happens to BEARS to what happens to glorious, Jesus constructed  HUMANS? If I had an Intelligent Designer and he made the number of mistakes this one has made, I ‘d go on monster.com and post for a new one. If ID is true then why did God give us an appendix? OR Wisdom teeth? Is he just a dick? There are ~1,150 species of tardigrades, according to Wikipedia. They can survive the most adverse conditions the planet (and outer space) can dish up. Conditions that would more than suffice to kill beasts of burden, food crops, cats and dogs, and, sadly, human beings. Why, exactly (one wonders), would an intelligent designer invest so much to ensure that itsy-bitsy bug things can survive anything and make so many different species of them?

Meanwhile, the Catholic Brigade is still stuck on episode one, which told us about Giordano Bruno, a firm believer in the Sun being the center of the universe. If there was an entire mini series on the fellow, we would have time to communicate how Bruno’s execution also tied to his denial of the divine cosmology as well as his scientific beliefs. But, that’s their BEST argument – that their religious nutjob side killed the guy for the RIGHT reasons. You sure showed us! You totes had reason to burn that guy to death! He didn’t believe in your sky god! Excellent reasoning!  The best part: “Cosmos” is labeled “a glossy multi-million-dollar piece of agitprop for scientific materialism” as if that’s a bad thing. I mean, I understand why religious zealots might think it’s cool to slander a science documentary in language suggesting it’s all a Communist plot. But if there is one thing that the United States sorely needs right now, it’s more effective propaganda in support of facts and the scientific method.

Meanwhile, Dead Breitbart’s Home For Dyspeptic Banshees waited a week to spit out a post that we thought by now they could have written in their sleep: that science is just the way to gain political control and keep the Christian man DOWN, man.

My favorite version of “your God is too small” is the concept that Sagan criticized, that the universe is about us as a species. How about a religion that embraced Sagan’s philosophy, instead of fundamentalism’s refusal to acknowledge that humanity has no privileged position in nature or in the cosmos? A religion like that would see the existence of God as an open question, seeing meaning as something humans create for themselves instead of receiving purpose like a Social Security number.  How do Xtians imagine the heavens and earth were actually put together? Did giant hands mold it all? Do they expect to find God’s hammer and saw in deep space? Why can’t the Big Bang or evolution just be God’s tools? Is your god so weak as to not take a simple 20 second challenge from a lowly scientist? In the olden days, even the priests and nuns in Catholic schools taught the sciences, and expressed that one can keep a faith while working within the laws of physics in this Universe. Even Evolution was another tool by a Creator to move along life’s ever changing complexity.

Science may be able to explain how we feel awe when we contemplate existence, and angst when we contemplate non-existence, but it can’t make us not feel those things. But so what? That’s just part of being human. How does pretending to know things you don’t know enhance our sense of awe, or alleviate our sense of angst? The creation of omniscience from nothing is easier to explain than the accretion of every-day consciousness from nothing. Consciousness might be a current problem, but it’s simple arithmetic compared to the differential equation posed by the spontaneous creation of an omniscient being.

If any religious person actually believed this Universe was created by a supreme being they would revere, worship and study that creation, in effect becoming scientists. But they don’t. They sit in churches and cling to dogmas written by iron age mystics and severely edited by every king since. They scoff at the actual creation by attempting to cram all of reality into these dusty, paranoid little tomes when the true glory lies there for us to discover. They don’t believe in a creator God at all: they believe whatever it takes to imagine their own centrality to a Universe (thanks to observation) of ever-increasing size, age and complexity. that is simple and astoundingly unimaginative hubris. And because science will never provide a complete explanation for everything, religious faith will always have a space to exploit.

Tune in tonight for when the outrage will probably go to eleven.

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