Cosmos Finale Takes One Last Shot - "Delusion that We Have Some Privileged Position in the Universe"

Evolution News and Views ^ | June 10, 2014 | Casey Luskin

[bestintxas]

A stupid series that I only watched Episode 1 for a few minutes to tell me all I needed to know.

It will go down in the dustbin of history like AlGore.

[GraceG]

I got annoyed when they started blaming Venus’s climate on CO2, if this were the case mars should be hotter than earth...

Venus is hot because of the lack of plate tectonics and lack of magnetic field which caused all the water to evaporate, and the hydrogen from the water to get stripped away by solar wind...

The only decent environmental story in the whole cosmos series was the one about the lead in the gasoline, which was actually a problem, but then they poisoned that story by trying to haphazardly equate it to the CO2 levels...

Lead is not a natural occurring substance in the air at the amounts it was when we started leading gasoline, CO2 has been around since basically forever and won’t kill a darn thing unless it is in HUGE quantities...

They also talked about earth’s climate like it was some fragile teeter totter, that if you pushed in one direction too far it would spiral out of control.... We have a surface covered by 75% water this acts a natural buffer to absorb a LOT of variations, that and they never seemed to take into the account of all the natural fires humans actually prevent that put CO2 into the air...

sloppy agenda based science...

[Alex Murphy]

Sunday night's episode thus included a lengthy segment quoting Carl Sagan from the original Cosmos series giving his famous pale blue dot monologue. Sagan called Earth a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," and "a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark." The monologue promotes the materialistic view that "In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves." But perhaps the most telling Sagan quote replayed on Sunday night cited: "the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pail light."

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” -- Psalm 14:1

[dragonblustar]

Executive producer Brannon Braga is creator of numerous Star Trek episodes. There's nothing wrong with that -- in fact I'm a big fan of his work. Yet during a talk at an International Atheist Conference in 2006, Braga described his involvement in Star Trek as creating "atheist mythology." He stated his "conviction that religion sucks, isn't science great, and how the hell can we get the other 95% of the population to come to their senses?" He even said Star Trek provides a "template for a world" where "religion has been vanquished, and reason drives our hearts" -- a future he says he "longs for."

Communists tried that in real life. It didn't work out so well.

[cusp]

The series lost me with all the global warming crap.

[Claud]

I don’t get the controversy. When Dante described his ascent into the heavens toward God, he looks back and sees how puny and insignificant the Earth is and smiles.

This was in the 1300s.

Methinks some scientist types ought to read more Christian literature.

[wattsgnu]

I had high hopes for this series, but I only made it one episode and I think 5 minutes of the next. Too much liberal/anti-religion BS for me. I remember liking the original Carl Sagan one when I was a kid.

[Dutchboy88]

Their own lives and remarks contradict their suppositions.

[Heartlander]

France tried it as well:

…The first great atheist uprising was the French Revolution, which sought to dethrone God with godless “Reason” and sought to replace the Holy Trinity with the atheist trinity of liberté, egalité et fraternité. The man who is traditionally attributed with coining this triune revolutionary war-cry, which would later be officially adopted as the motto of the French Republic, was Antoine-Francois Momoro, a rabidly anti-Christian radical who advocated the eradication of religion. He played an active and bloodthirsty role in the crushing of the Catholic peasants of the Vendée and was a key figure in the notorious Cult of Reason, an anthropocentric alternative to religion, which effectively enthroned self-worshipping Man as the Lord of the “enlightened” cosmos. In 1793, Momoro supervised the nationally celebrated Fête de la Raison (Festival of Reason) in which his own wife was dressed and paraded as the Goddess of Reason, surrounded by cavorting and costumed women. In a wild and licentious liturgical dance, the Goddess of Reason processed down the aisle of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, surrounded by her female entourage, to a newly-installed altar to Liberty, the Christian altar having been desecrated and removed. All across France, Christian churches were desecrated and re-established as Temples of Reason.

The Cult of Reason metamorphosed into the Reign of Terror in which the streets of Paris literally ran red with the blood of its victims. The Goddess of Reason made way for Madame Guillotine who was omnivorous in her bloodlustful appetite, devouring Christians and atheists alike.
Guillotine, Gulag and Gas Chamber: The Glorious Gifts of Atheism to Humanity

[Dahoser]

I turned on the first episode and there was Obama. Immediately turned it off and haven’t seen a second since.

[FourtySeven]

Exactly. I don’t find the concept of a puny earth insulting at all. Paradoxically such a realization led me to belief in God.

After all, since the universe is so vast, if one believes humanity is merely some evolutionary accident, it takes a great amount of hubris indeed to believe one’s life has any significant meaning at all.

There is no other choice when faced with the reality of creation and the reality of my own human desire: it’s either accept God is real or behave as an animal. I don’t want to be an animal (that’s just something real about me, that’s a fact, about me), so there must be a God.

[TigersEye]

Tyson is not a genius he's a sellout and an idiot. I have been tweeting him once a week asking him to find the Hot Spot. But with over a million followers he will never read it.

No smoking hot spot

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

He is also full of crap about the heat absorbing properties of CO2. That has been thoroughly debunked and it has been shown beyond doubt that most radiant heat is lost back into space. He must have told 15 baldfaced lies on last week's show.

[Dr. Thorne]

“The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”” - Psalm 14:1

[Political Junkie Too]

the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pail light.

Did Cosmos ever explain what a "pail light" is?

-PJ

[martin_fierro]

[300winmag]

I remember liking the original Carl Sagan one when I was a kid.

I thought the original series was pretty even-handed until the final episode, which was very heavy on leftist politics as somehow being "scientific". If anybody connected with the show admitted to studying philosophy or number theory, they would have admitted that their statements required them to "step outside" their cosmos to make observations of what would be unknowable within the system, itself. The same thing applies to faith, although it's generally more openly admitted there.

So we all enjoy a privileged position in the universe, because we can logically place ourselves outside of that universe to enable us to talk and speculate, right or wrong. Our biggest problem is that we're a single point on an otherwise empty piece of graph paper. We're only now developing the tools to start looking for other candidates that might go on that graph. Unless we get really lucky, we'll have to plod along building new kinds of observatories, and re-interpreting old data.

But we're already in a privileged position in that vast, uncaring universe. We're just looking for other locations that might have privileged observers looking for us. Perhaps we're on someone else's photographic plate, with hints of our existence there for centuries, but nobody has found the needle in a particular haystack, yet.

[GraceG]

[ He is also full of crap about the heat absorbing properties of CO2. That has been thoroughly debunked and it has been shown beyond doubt that most radiant heat is lost back into space. He must have told 15 baldfaced lies on last week's show. ] All molecules absorb kinetic heat energy and then re-release it... It is like these morons think that CO2 absorbs heat at every angle to the molecule and then releases it back straight back downward.... if this were the case you could build an awesomely efficient solar collection device made out of a clear glass column filled with CO2 and with a heat collector at the bottom of it... No to mention the fact water vapor which is variable in percent of the atmosphere: per wiki The percentage water vapor in surface air varies from .01% at -42℃ (-44℉)[23] to 4.24% when the dew point is 30℃ (86℉). So with water vapour percentage swinging all over the place even if it is 1/10th the greenhouse gas of CO2 should prove to be catastrophic according to AGW modeling people... And they ignored the "city effect", you have these cities built with large expanses of concrete and asphalt absorbing heat during the day and releasing it at night in giant columns of rising warm air over cities and urban areas, that has GOT to affect the Jet Stream FAR more than a fractional increase in CO2...

[overdog2]

Thank you for this thread... the additional information you provide in some of the subsequent posts is equally enlightening.

For those that question “God’s” involvement in the universe...

1) the odds of life happening in the universe by random chance. (1-10/236 power) http://ontherightside.wordpress.com/articles/the-odds-against-life/

2) the odds of the earth being in the right place in the right solar system, in the right place in the galaxy, the right distance from the right star, with a celestial body the right distance to provide the right tides and wind speeds to support life... (and 120 other necessary parameters 1-10/139 power) http://www.mankinds-last-hope.org/probabilityofearth.html

3) the odds of Jesus (or any one) fulfilling 300+ Old Testament prophecies in His lifetime. (1-10/157th power) http://voices.yahoo.com/what-odds-jesus-700-plus-prophecies-fulfillment-5064980.html

[dragonblustar]

Thank you for pointing that out. I almost forgot about that.