You might want to know why I borrowed a yogism and included it in this article. Yogisms are named for some of the funnier sayings attributed to one of the greatest catchers to ever play the game of baseball. That is Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra. Berra explained that this quote originated when he witnessed Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hit back-to-back home runs in the Yankees’ seasons in the early 1960s.
I have borrowed it to describe the updated version of the 1978 thirteen-part television miniseries, the Cosmos that was written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter. It was originally narrated by Harvard Professor of Astronomy and co-author of the series and a book of the same name, Carl Sagan.
The present incarnation of the series is being narrated by Harvard and Columbia University educated (and Carl Sagan devotee), Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ph.D. Tyson’s updated version has some spectacular special effects that will no doubt garner some Emmy Awards for this series.
The series opened with a perfunctory node to the scientific method and the relationship that observation and testing has to good science. I found this to be almost comical as the series unfolded with the introduction of the current cosmological view of a 15.8 billion year old universe. The authors cleverly used a calendar analogy so that the audience could wrap their heads around the concept of evolutionary deep time. They likened the history of the universe to the 12 months of a calendar with one month = one billion years (give or take) and each day = 40 million years. While I was pondering the enormity of that analogy, my mind immediately drifted to the current state of our national debt that exceeds 17.5 Trillion dollars and counting. How can we possibly wrap our minds around that number, but I digress.
As Dr. Tyson explained, the gospel according to evolutionary cosmology begins with “all the matter in the known universe being compacted into a space smaller than an atom.” I often wonder how atheist and agnostic scientists can present this miracle of physics as a foregone conclusion, but they balk at the biblical account of “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” Genesis 1:1. This Big Bang beginning of everything was accompanied with what Dr. Tyson called “strong evidence to support it.” What was this strong evidence? Well, according to Dr. Tyson, it was combination of the “amount of helium” or light elements in the known universe coupled with the “glow of radio waves” or cosmic microwave background left over from the original explosion. While this absurd creation account was offered, complete with impressive special effects, Dr. Tyson offered his account as if he was an eyewitness to this event. In reality, the entire Big Bang scenario is a purely hypothetical model of what secular science says happened approximately 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago. This is one of the glaringly unscientific aspects of modern cosmology. Rather than sticking to what we can observe, and being honestly presenting their speculations concerning the past, the true believers always present their conjecture as fact.
Another excellent example of this “we say it happened, so it must have happened” storytelling was the way the series explained the transition from the Big Bang to cosmic dust and debris, to the coalescence of that into everything else, including dark matter and dark energy. Never mind that estimates of the amounts of both dark matter and energy differ enormously depending on whom you ask, and don’t bother trying to recreate either of them in the laboratory. The problem with such completely hypothetical concepts is that we know much more about what dark energy and dark matter are not, than what we know they are. Just suspend credulity and understand that both of them are necessary in order to support the Big Bang model of the origin of the universe.
Then, as if we needed any more speculation, the narration continued to explain how the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the dust and debris to coalesce into stars. Yes, there was the perfunctory nod of appreciation to the creative god-like power inherent in stardust as Dr. Tyson repeated an oft spoken mantra of evolutionary cosmology that “we (and every other living thing) are made of stardust.” Something that almost never ever happens with these fantastical musings is the admission of any information that might contradict the accepted version of evolutionary reality. Dr. Tyson failed to mention the horizon problem or the fact that the Big Bang violates the First Law of Thermodynamics or that primordial star formation violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Additionally, the formation of massive stars is extremely problematic for evolutionary cosmologists. They are aware of these problems, but they will not give these criticisms any validity, because it tends to falsify their overarching model of a creation without a Creator.
And this brings me to yet another real problem for evolutionary cosmologists. That problem has to do with the fact that Darwin’s Grand Theory of Evolution has nothing to do with real science. It is rather an elaborate tautology. It cannot be tested using the scientific method and it cannot be falsified, therefore it has no scientific merit. It is a faith-based explanation of everything. Try to falsify it. It cannot be done. That did not stop Dr. Tyson from continuing to pound the evolutionary drum.
Dr. Tyson also referred to another completely hypothetical or, dare I say it, magical place at the edge of our solar system known as the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt. Why do we need an Oort cloud? Well, evolutionary astronomers will never divulge this dirty little secret, but comets are indicators of a young solar system. Comets are clumps of ice and rock or as Katrin Ros, a researcher in Astrophysics at Lund University, Swedenhuge, calls them “dirty snowballs that orbit around our sun.” As comets orbit our Sun, they lose some of their mass and will eventually completely sublimate or disappear within a 10,000-year time span. For this reason, evolutionary astronomers must have a way of supplying more of them. This is how evolutionists can ignore the fact that these comets are evidence against the billions and billions of years of cosmic evolution. They invent a place from which we can get a steady supply of new comets and, therefore, they can ignore the obvious implications of the currently disappearing comets. Even the mention of this as evidence that our solar system might be less than ten thousand years old is heresy and, therefore, a completely imaginary construct, the Oort Cloud, is presented as a fact of modern cosmology.
If you think that this type of scientific denial among evolutionists is rare, think again. Evolutionist’s continue to refuse to subject the remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) that allegedly roamed Earth 68 million years ago and contains confirmed traces of protein from blood and bone, tendons, and/or cartilage, to carbon 14 (C-14) dating. They understand that this specimen should have no C-14 left in it due to the 5,730±40 year half-life of this isotope. This refusal continues even after money to do this test was offered to those who have the samples. Never mind that there are other such miracles of evolutionary preservation. So far, none of them have been tested for the presence of C-14. The answer as to why they refuse is clear; any amount of this isotope in a dinosaur fossil would indicate the dinosaur lived within the last 40,000 years. While all radiometric dating techniques have serious problems, even a trace of C-14 in a dinosaur fossil would be extremely problematic to evolutionary timescale.
This brings me to another important point. Carl Sagan is famous for coining the phrase “billions and billions of years.” Although the phrase never appeared in the original Cosmos T.V. miniseries, it was mentioned in his book where he wrote, A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars—billions upon billions of stars—Carl Sagan, Cosmos, page 3. Professor Sagan’s final book was entitled Billions and Billions of Years: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, so I think he was proud of his characterization of the vastness of our universe and the deep time required to postulate the Big Bang hypothesis.
The problem with such folklore is that it can become part of the historical scientific narrative. This is true of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. It has become part of almost every area of scientific endeavor. In reality, Darwin’s Theory is a bait and switch ruse where a minor change within an organism that is the result of adaptations is used as evidence for major changes from microorganisms-to-men. Not only are these materialists asking us to believe that every living organism has evolved from one single bacterium, they ignore that even the smallest microorganism is extraordinarily complex.
When evolutionists glibly repeat billions and billions of years, we are apt to forget that a universe, so vast and filled with so many wonderful things, is really just a reflection of the One who created it. Carl Sagan and, now 36 years later, Neil deGrasse Tyson are telling us that it is absurd to believe, with regard to the universe, that the cause must be greater than the effect. More than that, they want us to believe that the creation itself does not infer that it has a Creator, the necessary First Cause. They use this same faulty logic to praise the infinite design of living things while denying that these same organisms are the result of an omniscient Designer. No, we are told that somehow everything that is seen and unseen in our universe just happened. We are to suspend logic in order to swallow this miracle of naturalism called the Big Bang, evolution’s version of “in the beginning God.”
The other interesting tidbit of information that I garnered from this exercise in “déjà vu all over again” was the connection that Carl Sagan had, not only to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but also to Bill Nye the Science Guy. Yes, Bill Nye professed a devotion to Carl Sagan, who was introduced to the wonders of astronomy by none other than mister billions and billions of years himself, Carl Sagan. I am not disturbed by this common connection. It is a good thing that teachers can inspire in their students a thirst for knowledge. What I am concerned about is the atheistic influence that these teachers can have on their students.
Our children are being brainwashed into this false teaching that is so infiltrated the schools and the media that there is little hope of reversing the course of this fairytale for grown-ups with its magic ingredient of deep time. What we are faced with today are fanciful just-so stories in the place of observable and verifiable truth.