“Believers” Are Freaking Out About Cosmos

Cosmos

If the first episode of the Cosmos series was too controversial for its viewers (with the minor mentions of evolution, climate change and the Big Bang), the second episode that aired on March 16 far surpassed the first. The entire episode was dedicated to the subject of evolution and the vast cornucopia of evidence that exists to prove that it is the lone explanation behind all life on earth.

“The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact,” said show host Neil deGrasse Tyson.

As expected, those who deny the theory of evolution were shocked with this episode. Here are some principal lines of attack:

Denying the Big Bang – According to Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, a critique of Cosmos suggests, “the big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned.” However, this critique is rather poorly researched. A groundbreaking study recently published in The New York Times provides substantial evidence for “inflation,” a component that helps us better understand the spectacular happenings just after the Big Bang. With the help of a special telescope that examines cosmic microwave background radiation, researchers at the South Pole discovered “direct evidence” of the theoretical gravitational waves that are speculated to have emerged from the Big Bang and believed to have contributed to the dramatic and sudden inflation of the universe.

Denying evolution – The second episode of the controversial show, closely examined the strategy mentioned in Charles Darwin’s world-changing 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The show delved into “artificial selection” by breeders so that the much superior force of natural selection can be appreciated. It used Darwin’s much popularized metaphor “the tree of life” – an analogy that can better explain how all organisms are surviving on different branches of the same hereditary tree. After the episode, the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin accused the show of trying “to persuade people of both evolutionary scientific views and larger materialistic evolutionary beliefs, not just by the force of the evidence, but by rhetoric and emotion, and especially by leaving out important contrary arguments and evidence.” Luskin also contended the idea of “the tree of life” because she probably does not know about the scientists working on the Open Tree of Life project, which plans to generate the “first online, comprehensive first-draft tree of all 1.8 million named species, accessible to both the public and scientific communities.”

Denying climate change – Cosmos is yet to explore climate change in depth even though it has referred to the subject in passing in both its first and second episodes. In the meanwhile, Media Research Center’s Jeffrey Meyer critiqued Tyson’s appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers.

“Tyson chose to take a cheap shot at religious people and claim they don't believe in science i.e. liberal causes like global warming,” wrote Meyer on his Newsbusters blog.

Contrary to Meyer’s claim, Tyson actually clarified on an Inquiring Minds podcast that Cosmos is not anti-religion. As for calling global warming a “liberal cause,” Meyers perhaps needs to go through the famous study finding that suggests 97 percent scientific studies agree with the idea of human-caused global warming. For this study, researchers reviewed 12,000 scientific abstracts that were published between 1991 and 2011.

Photo Credit: Riedsa

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