Scott Bailey (AKA Agathos) left this in the forum. (Scott hasn’t really gotten a handle on this whole internet hiatus thing yet, and I for one am glad.)
The creationism debate as romantic comedy.
You can also check out the movie’s webpage and blog and see them touting the conservative Christian figures who are endorsing it. It seems like Sharron Angle has become one of their boosters.
well, this is going to be wrost than Mega-Shark Vs Giant Octopus
But how will it rank vs Sharktopus? Thats the real question on everyones mind.
I kinda wanna see this just to see how they explain there is an earth before there is a sun.
Francesco– that statement was comedy WIN!!!
I’m actually on a blog hiatus! Way easier to read other people’s articles over breakfast or lunch and make some comments than try to write new material or find vids… trust me, after several hours of research and writing, I need a break, and the internet is a great place!
I honestly think that even if I went to see this movie, sat through the whole thing and watched the final credits roll, I’d still think it was a Poe.
One line I love from the trailer: “Is she one of yours?” “No, she’s a Christian.”
They are missing a step.
They might want to make sure they get the two accounts of Genesis in complete accord before trying to link it up with science.
Just sayin.
Having either of the Genesis accounts fit with reality would also be a good thing. Day and night were created before the Sun? Huh?
Baby Steps.
Lemme guess; in the end everyone involved realizes that Genesis is correct and they all live happily ever after.
Except for maybe the vile evolution-teaching professor who refuses to see the light and unfortunately suffers a gruesome death, thereby proving that his beliefs were incorrect.
Coming next: A movie that proves Ireland AND Leprechauns both exist!
And after that blockbuster, they’ll produce a movie that will prove that Krypton (the planet, not the element) does exist, did explode and the Last Son of Krypton does live among us!
Yeah, something tells me the “science” that matches up with 6-day creation is the same “science” that has Adam and Eve riding saddled velociraptors.
Actually, I’ll bet it involves some bullshit interpretations of what Genesis really meant, including how “days” were really hundreds of millions of years, etc., combined with bullshit misinterpretations of various irrelevant scientific tidbits.
Don’t forget the mangling of some Einstein quote about God to lend the whole thing some undeserved authority.
You joke, but it is indeed serious! Reasons To Believe
Astronomer Hugh Ross has made a career of redefining “days” into epochs. Oh, and the epochs actually must overlap in order to work properly, I mean, it’s all right there in Genesis!
Ross also talks a lot of bunk about molecular and evolutionary biology despite his PhD being in Astrophysics. When someboody claims academic credentials, it does matter what field those credentials are in.
Agreed. I am currently reading Ross’ 2004 book “A Matter of Days”. As tough as it is to read this kind of stuff, I promised a theist friend that I would read it. I am going to write a chapter by chapter review as well.
In the first few chapters of mostly groundwork, Ross points out that his biggest opponents are Young Earth creationists, big surprise.
I really do want to know how he backs up his interpretation in Genesis.
It wasn’t a joke. A number of authors have presented variations of this idea, such as Gerald Schroeder. The arguments are always tenuous and lame, often butchering both Biblical interpretation and the history of the Earth. The biggest problem I see is that the Genesis accounts of creation both present histories that aren’t just over the wrong timescales, but in the wrong order and including many contradictory, impossible, and evidently untrue events.
I doubt it. Why would they even mention “six days” if they didn’t think the number of days was important?
But anyway, they still haven’t addressed talking snakes and fruit of morality. I guess we can look forward to CG renderings of snake larynxes in the sequel.
My F*****G god! They’ve raised Ernest Borgnine from the dead for this film!?!
Way to go, Jesus!
not dead, but 94 years old.
Not dead, but in Red.
“Parental Guidance – Contains Material Not Suitable for Children”
Never a truer word spoken.
Also: Bishop from Alien! That was Bishop!
I know!!! I totally was going to comment on that! You beat me to it.
Please tell me that that isn’t true?
Because… please?
I hope they have garbage cans set up outside the theater for those who want to puke after seeing the movie
Could this be some sort of dramatic presentation of some of the key elements from Gerald Schroeder’s “The Science of God?” which was written to prove that science and religion were in fact in complete harmony? I have not read it myself. I only know of it through Evid3nc3′s “Why I am no longer a Christian” series on You Tube and according to him the explanations put forth in the book made a good deal of sense to him when he was a Christian.
It’s a continuing thread. The whole xian, jewish, muzzie myth thing is fabricated nonsense so why not expand the theme? It may get the word out that religious nonsense can be married to science and perhaps get a few more bums on the pews because it gets a credibility it does not deserve.
As real as the Da Vinci Code.
I guess it’s a comedy.
Reasonable thoughts on religion, science, and skepticism? Seriously?
What exactly is your question?
Seems to me after reading the comments it should be:
Juvenile thoughts on religion, science, and skepticism.
How much of the site have you sampled before you feel obligated to inform us of your opinion?
Apparently we are not allowed to ridicule the ridiculous, so sayeth the great Stan arbiter of all things Juvenile.
Precisely, what do you feel is juvenile about the few comments it seems you have stumbled onto? I mean, if you’re going to say something, say something. If you feel like adding to the discussion, please do. But your comments so far are lacking the type of nuance and depth it seems you are seeking, so….. ? What else do you want. Can we help you? Why are you here. Do you think you are clever? Do you think your comment outsmarts all the comments you are criticizing? In what way? I really don’t get what you’ve come here after or why bother to say something simple without adding to a discussion or looking around.
Alright – here is the real question:
Using the theory of relativity and time dilation, can it be proven or disproven that the perspective of time passage from the center of the Big Bang would be vastly different from the perspective of time passage on the earth?
Not whether or not there are vomit-receptacles outside the theaters.
See the difference?
If you are truly interested in reasonable discourse, I would suggest actually watching the movie, carefully looking into the science, and posting factual proofs to bolster your argument.
See, that is a comment. That’s all you had to say. But instead, you didn’t look around at other threads, here people are just blowing off some steam, other threads are discussing things more seriously. If you have something particular to say, go ahead and insert yourself in a discussion, introduce a topic. I’m not really in this discussion, but it annoys me people just say this site’s all a loserville because they looked at one thread and don’t really have a comment, and without even really saying what they think is wrong with the comments they’ve seen.
You may call it blowing off steam – I call it juvenile. But I’ve inserted my reasonable comment in this discussion. Let’s see what happens.
You speak as if anybody cares that you think we’re juvenile. Personally I regard a life-long emotional dependance on an imaginary friend based purely on some crap bronze-age fiction to be deeply immature and about as juvenile as juvenile can be – however, you will note that I’m not on your blog whinging about what children you theists all are.
Let’s see what happens.
Stan ran away, color me surprised.
Do you think he got frightened by my knowledge of actual physics?
Erm, is that an actual question posed in the movie? Because in that case it tells me everything I need to know about the “science” behind it.
If it was actually a question you came up with on your own, I apologize for being dismissive. Even though the question doesn’t make sense, everyone should be allowed to ask wrong questions out of curiousity.
However, if someone is actually trying to use such a question to make the biblical genesis story appear to be in accordance with science, they should be ashamed of themselves.
You claim that this “movie” purports to present “science.” If this movie is presenting science, then why do it in the form of (as the trailer seems to indicate) a bunch of pseudo-romantic claptrap? Where’s the peer-reviewed evidence that’s been published in respectable scientific journals, Stan?
The science/faith angle is only one thematic piece of the “movie”. As I said, you actually have to view it so you’ll know it is not “Adam and Eve riding saddled velociraptors” ‘kay?
It’s twice now that he suggests we go see it. Now he’s telling us the part we’re actually interested in discussing, the science/faith angle” is only one part of it.
He’s just shilling for the movie.
Really, “Stan”? The whole point of a trailer is to get people to want to watch the movie. I saw this trailer and have concluded that it is poorly produced creationist claptrap with a bunch of has-beens and no-names. In other words, you couldn’t pay me to see this garbage. I’d rather watch a Michael Bay movie than to sit through some apologetic, pseudo-scientific celluloidal abomination like this.
Except Pearl Harbour, surely?
That doesn’t seem to be an appropriate response to anything. Tongue-in-cheek maybe? The movie looks to me more like a drama – someone dies, someone has a crisis of faith, or some atheist longs for god (LOL!) and a 3rd guy makes a movie for a high school project that proves Genesis and Evolution are in complete accord. Not even funny. It doesn’t have to be Ken Ham-style WTF Genesis for it also not to make any reasonable approach to evolution or being in accord with it.
I think that would have been the best part. Except for the saddles. Because if there are saddles, then there must be a saddle-maker, right?
Your question starts out interestingly and then becomes absurd, however I will try to give you an answer:
Time and space are the same thing. Moving through space effects how we experience time; at light seed, time has no effect – so, for example, if we sent out a hypothetical spaceship to do a giant loop around the Milky Way gallaxy at light-speed, it would take the spaceship three hundred thousand light years to acheive the journey from the perspective of anybody not also moving at an appreciable fraction of light-speed, while from the perspective of those on our hypothetical ship no time at all will elapse between the start and finish of their journey.
Now here’s why your question is absurd: There was no Earth when the big-bang happened. There wasn’t even the star from which the Earth would eventually form. That’s important.
What’s also important is that there was no outside perspective. We’re talking about the universe – if everything is moving out from an explosion having experienced the same initial impetus, then it’s reasonable to assume that everything has a similar relative velocity (remember that absolute velocity and time don’t exist), therefore everthing exeriences time in a broadly similar way.
Really, if you know the first principles, it’s not difficult to work these things out.
Plus, there’s no center of the Big Bang or center of the Universe. Comparing the location of the Earth to a location that does not exist is nonsensical.
To me, the question smells suspiciously like a creationist attempt to transform the literal days of the Genesis story into periods of a cosmological timescale.
I’m still here – just haven’t been online. Your points are well taken, but the theory posited in the movie takes all that into account. Rather than elaborate any further, I’m trying to come up with a link that will better be able to explain it. In the meantime, here is another youtube clip that will explain it a little better. I sure wouldn’t want any of you to have to handle any of those little pieces of paper that say “In God We Trust” on them in order to actually view a screening of the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu3R47gH4CM
@Stan:
Sorry, but that clip is exactly as idiotic as we expected: conveniently redefining “days” to mean “millions of years”, because you know, “they are from god’s perspective”. Also, totally ignoring the things that are so wrong they can’t even turn into “metaphors”, like the fact that god creates vegetation before the Sun. And then it turns out that when god “creates” the Sun and the stars it actually means that the Earth’s atmosphere clears, making them visible. So NOW it’s narrated from Earh’s perspective. Ain’t it convenient?
Yeah because we all get our science education from Movies.
You sound like some kind of ignorant shill. Why are you so insistent that we go see the movie?
I see my suspicions were correct. The “magic” of time dilation is invoked to resolve the problem of a six day creation. This feeble attempt to be “scientific” only highlights the problem of the Genesis account.
According to Genesis, plants were created on Earth on day 3, while the Sun (and the Moon) was created on day 4. So one has to wonder how plants were able to prosper for about one billion years without sunlight. The movie “resolves” this by claiming that the Sun was already there, it was just really really cloudy for a billion years. Huh? I thought the whole flimsy point of mentioning time dilation was that Genesis is told from the perspective of God? But now it’s suddenly from the perspective of the Earth’s surface?
Also, according to the “calculations”, whales and birds (created on day 5) must have been in existence for more than 250 mio years. This is flat out false. Dinosaurs didn’t even exist at this point, much less mammals and birds.
There’s also the question of how, again according to Genesis, on day 1 “the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the waters.” So there was a surface of water at the beginning of the universe? That does not fit cosmology at all. It does, however, fit a primitive, superstitious idea of a flat Earth that is born from the seemingly endless sea.
Apart from all this, why does the time dilation recede at an exponential rate? That makes no sense either, except as a sleight of hand to make the dates fit (which they don’t).
Still waiting to see how the 2 different Genesis stories are reconciled.
Answer: yes.
(Hint: you might want to improve the way you ask the question.)
Bugger – should have been a reply to Stan.
Thinking further, it may well be that the answer to your question, Stan, is: probably not. There are likely a few more things to consider as well.
Well, you convinced me there.
Scroll up.
Stan,
According to the trailer Genesis and Science are both right. Anyone who has actually read Genesis and a 4th grade (or above) science textbook should be able to see some problems here.
You know what though, it’s in code. It took 6011 years for anyone to figure out that code, but it was important for god to lay it out that way. It is like all those vague prophesies that line up with current events, lines right up. Man will go to war? No shlt. Really? Something that sounds like it might be about television? Spot on, you have real prophets coding shlt into the bible and god too, so you have to be an interested scholar to decode the effing thing…. where in the bible is the recipe for antibiotics. Really smart of a perfect god to plant all this accord with scientific discovery into code. I bet that apple was doomed to make us all too stupid to understand the bible. This code language must be perfectly obvious, but we’re fallen. I’ve encoded fallen to now mean “less intelligent than we were meant to be,” rather than “sinful.” It fits because I want it to fit.
Who need antibiotics. Just pray the sickness away.
Funny how the bible only fits with science after science, and not as, like, a useful book. Only if you know something already can you find any clues for it in the bible, and only because you have an active imagination for broad metaphors or small bits of wordplay. If it’s meant to predict anything, how come it only predicted everything after they happened?
Some shltty prophesizing, yeah?
@Kodie
Absolutely ridiculous … everyone knows that the Bible was the foundation of all modern science. For example when we had the Big Bang vs. Steady Steady state what was the crucial evidence that proved that The Big Bang theory was correct – the Bible of course!
Broken clocks and all that. ???? LOL.
True, but with the Bible they even try and turn the clock upside down and claim it’s the right time or make some real bad analogy which “proves” that all though it may look like the clock says 12:45 it does actually say 3:23 …
Stan, what I was alluding to was the way you phrased your question (it was a rainy Saturday and I was bored) ;-)
You didn’t ask whether we could prove “that the perspective of time passage from the center of the Big Bang would be vastly different from the perspective of time passage on the earth”. You asked whether we could prove or disprove it.
My initial response was yes, we can prove or disprove it. But a few thoughts later I realised that there were too many other things involved to be sure of proving it or disproving it conclusively, so I changed my response to probably not. In other words, I doubt whether we could conclusively prove or disprove what you asked (notwithstanding the excellent response from Custador).
Coming soon to a Cracker Jack flip book near you.
You know you are in a Christian film if you have to say the line
“You know we live in a post-modern world.”
Ha! That is a favorite Christian buzzword that I think I’ve rarely heard outside the church.
This horrible post-modern world without absolute answers to morality and where the Ten Commandments are not the basis for our laws.
Click your heels three times and say “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
It was so much easier back when you could just pick a Bible verse to determine someone’s crime. The Middle Ages truly were a high point of judicial excellence.
well said!
may I borrow that line to throw at a theist who’s currently driving me nuts?
By all means.
The term has been around since the 1870s (cf, Wikipedia), so I guess by now we must be in a post-post-modern world. Those fundies should try to keep up.
Dammit, now I can’t stop gagging…
Works by me!
As we all know, most Christians don’t know all that much of exactly what is in the Bible – so the fact that Genesis doesn’t match science all that well is not going to be something they figure out. But, for the people who are die hard, absolute believers, afraid to step aside from the Bible for fear of eternal hellfire – this is a way to make it OK for them to listen to reality, and science. From there – they can keep believing – or they can see that there’s no reason to – as they like. They’re not going to know in what order the earth and the sun were created – they’ll just go off of the movie saying that the two match, and be happy with accepting science then.
How’s your grandfather, Susan? <3 Discworld :p
He still has bony knees.
But maybe, just maybe, they’ll read their holy book and see what it actually says – you know, while “proving” that Genesis and science agree.