HOW SCIENCE WORKS PART 2

Caution mini rant ahead. 

The Creationists strike again. At least a few of them. The newest schtick? Demanding that Cosmos offer them equal time to refute evolution. It's not like the episodes aren't complete so that extras can be added. I guess they could buy commercial time to present their "side" of the story. After all it's only fair. Right? 

Well, the fairness doctrine got dumped more than a few years ago and that only covered news stories anyway. Seeing as how Cosmos isn’t news program AND the episodes have already been completed I guess the folks from Answers in Genesis are SOL.

If you want to present your flat earth, off the wall ideas then do what the producers of Cosmos did. Line up a producer, get the financing, get your shit together, make your own series and see if you can get anyone besides TBN, CBN, EWTN or the Mormon channel to carry it. If you don’t recognize the station designations, don’t feel bad. You probably don’t watch them anyway.

Dr. Falkner really is an astronomer. But after reading his entry in the Creation Wiki I’m not sure that he understands, even though he’s a professor emeritus that he really understands how science works.

“I’m really concerned with people who put that much faith in the big bang. It is the overwhelmingly dominant model, and they’ve had a few impressive predictions, like the background radiation. But it has many problems—they keep changing the model to make it fit the data we have. As a Christian, my biggest concern is that it doesn’t agree at all with the Genesis account of how the world came to be, and my big concern is that when you make that the fingerprint of God, as it were, then when the big bang is discarded, what does that do to Christianity? “

Daniel Falkner and yes, he has the degrees. It's not a matter of faith. It's the best explanations we have at this time for how the observable universe works. Who knows how that explanation might change in fifty years. A hundred years. Or a thousand years from now. 

Back in the dark ages when I took Chemistry and senior science high school, biology in college and enough anthro classes to choke a small horse I was taught that you observed the natural world. If there was something you didn’t understand you came up with a possible explanation, a hypothesis. Then you tried to design an experiment to prove or disprove that hypothesis. Then you submitted your work to other scientists and they tried to duplicate your work. If they can’t, then it’s back to the drawing board. If they can, you come up with a theory to cover the information you’ve discovered.

You do the best you can with the information you can discover at the time with the available information and equipment. Who knows five, ten, twenty, fifty years down the road someone will add to the work. Then maybe fifty years later someone else will add to it again. That’s how science works.

You most definitely do not start with the Bible, the Koran or the Torah. And you don’t finish with them either,.