meet the ray comfort of astronomy
Just a few weeks ago, in a guest post on The Panda’s Thumb, I warned that creationists are trying to assault astronomy and physics. And now ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Spike Psarris, an electrical engineer who’s tackling “the intellectual bankruptcy of evolution” with movies about astronomy which are a bargain at just $19 per DVD. Between his videos, interviews and his website, he repeats only ten or twenty times how he went to work in space programs as an “atheist and evolutionist” only to emerge a Christian creationist after he was swayed by overwhelming evidence of something or other. Hence, he obviously has the authority to put all of modern astronomy and biology in its place and he’ll start with a 105 minute trip through our solar system.
The short previews he provides have an absolutely alarming stupidity per statement quotient, as if Psarris is on a mission to compete with Ray Comfort in ignorance. Every other sentence he utters either starts or ends with how some piece of evidence about our observations of the solar system either prove evolution wrong or come up with results that are “devastating to the evolutionary model.” Now, even ignoring the obvious fact that evolution has nothing to do with planetary formation or astronomy in general, only the changes seen in active biospheres over long periods of time, and focusing only on the supposed evidence he tries to present, even an amateur astronomer can point out that for someone who worked in a space program, he doesn’t seem to know an awful lot about space.
For example, one of Psarris’ assertions is that the evolutionary model predicts that Jupiter has to have a large core but Galileo supposedly found that this core was no more than three Earth masses. Really? You don’t say, huh? Because astronomers estimate that its mass is between 14 and 18 Earths. He also claims that there was some sort of evolutionary prediction that Jupiter’s atmosphere shouldn’t have argon or an entire host of other gasses. And come to think of it, I’m sure there’s something about it in On The Origin of Species. Oh no, wait, he means in our universe, not some parallel astrophysical realm. Never mind. After asserting that a non- existent model has been proven false, he also whips out a bit of purple prose from a study’s abstract about a gap in our knowledge of Jupiter’s formation, written decades ago as proof that astronomers just make it up as they go along, feeding you lies and half-baked guesses.
Psarris repeats that trick whenever he can. Make a false or non-existent assertion, whip out some obscure, out of context quote, rinse and repeat, all the while chanting about the evolutionary model being wrong or an evolutionary prediction failing or how evolution is false, paying no attention that he’s miserably failing at trying to use physics to discard astronomy rather than actually dealing with the theory’s realm. After about five or six minutes, his anti-scientific mantra is like moaning in a porn flick, there for no other reason than as a repetitive background noise for viewers to enjoy. What exactly was he doing in a space program if he’s unable to tell the difference between biology and physics? How is his degree in electrical engineering in any way a qualification to spout inanities about observable and well known scientific facts? And why does he think people will really be willing to spend $19 on this absurd bit of space themed creation erotica?
