Wednesday 30 January 2008

Why Use YouTube When You Can Use GodTube?

Well, because YouTube has all of the same crap that GodTube has, along with some videos that are actually good. Just by typing the word "creation" into the search function (I know, why would any sane person do that?) I found the following little "educational" piece by a cretinist named Charley.
The scariest thing about the video is that this Charley fellow says that he lectures high school kids. Those poor bastards. What did they ever do to deserve that?

Anywho, the video serves as reasonable evidence that, whatever religious leaders say, there are plenty of people out there believing this nonsense. So, because I'm twiddling my thumbs waiting for the free online publication of the latest anti-atheism book, I'm going to summarise his arguments below:

Charley has four problems with evolution. The best thing about them is that they are even more simplistic than the normal, more "sophisticated" cretinist arguments.

1. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says that things don't get more complex so life can't have evolved.
If this was an episode of QI there'd be alarms going off very loudly right about now. This is about the least sophisticated cretinist argument, and any high-school level physics student can refute it. The claim is that the 2nd law states that life could not increase in complexity (a reduction of entropy) over time as entropy can only increase or stay the same.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics, ladies and gentlemen:

In an isolated system, a process can only occur if it increases the total entropy of the system.
Many have pointed this out before me, including Dave Gorman, but Charley's version is particularly fun because of the example he gives.
"A battery goes from charged to discharged. It does not recharge itself."
And quite right too. But let's say we connect the battery to a large external power source, say a fusion reactor for example. What happens then? Oh yeah, it recharges at the expense of the increasing entropy in the fusion reactor.
Now let's imagine for a second that the Earth has its own enormous fusion reactor, just hanging there in space and showering us with vast amounts of energy for free. What an unusual world that would be. Imagine looking up one morning and seeing a huge, fiery ball of energy just hanging there in the sky. There would surely be chaos! Panic in the streets! Headlines reading "Humanity Flees in Face of Fiery Hell-Sphere!"
Anyway...

2. There are gaps in the fossil record.
That's pretty much it. As with the other cretinists he requires that we are able to dig up a fossil of every single animal that ever lived on this planet. Only then would they stop harping on about the fact that there are no intermediate fossils between this and that already discovered intermediate fossil.

3. There is no known mechanism for Evolution to occur.
Oh yeah, he said it. Apparently DNA is just there for show. Also:
"Mutations are damaging the information not increasing it."
"Dogs do not change into cats, because the information for the cat is not in the dog."
Do I need to even say anything after these quotes? Except that much of the genome of dogs and cats is shared. Oh, and I was sure I read about single genes being able to activate the expression of features in animals that normally don't have those features...

4. The mounting evidence that the Earth is not four and a half billion years old.
He's right here. I think the current estimate is more like 4.54 billion. Although I can't help the niggling doubt that he wants to move the estimate in the other direction...

I know, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Really big fish in a really small barrel. I just couldn't resist. I'll try not to do the easy ones too much more. I'll probably fail though.

4 comments:

artificialhabitat said...

Perusing the many wonders of GodTube, i happened upon some Christian Hip-Hop. Now there is a sentence i never thought i would write.

Stephen Bain said...

Well, there's Christian metal...
I'm sure hip-hop is replete with religious references. Or do I mean biblical as in "the biblical sense"?

Laurie said...

My stepdaughter, who is currently in the process of being brainwashed, goes to Christian Rock concerts regularly. On the church bus. They make church easy and fun now because they were losing too many of the younger parishioners (=money) a couple of decades ago. Its a big social thing, and these stupid kids just lap it up. She went from 3 or 4 "close" friends to 20, and thinks it's great. Her father is just hoping she'll grow out of it. I doubt it. They have their hooks in now and they won't let go. Do I sound frustrated?

Stephen Bain said...

You do sound frustrated. In what appears to be an entirely justifiable way. I guess you can hope that it is just a social thing and that at some point the scepticism might kick in.

I'm kind of glad that we don't seem to have the cash-subscription Mega-church thing going on in the UK.

The Christian Union at Uni here divides itself up into what they call "cells", which concerns me a little as I'm sure that's how terrorist groups organise themselves...