Jockawo

VenomFangX posted this video on YouTube recently:

I thought I’d hit back at some of his (more) dubious points. I’ll put the time he made each point along with my thoughts.

1:20 – False dilemma

He states that the only options are that A) the ball formed by itself or that B) the ball was created by someone.

A third option is that the ball was always there. There are other options too…can you think of them?

I’m worried about the simplistic and untruthful arguments that he segues into from this initial dilemma; he begins by saying that, as we didn’t see the plasticine ball form, intuition (as opposed to the scientific method) is the only way we can come to a conclusion about its creation. He states the scientific method as being things we can “observe, test and repeat” From this he concludes that, as no-one observed the formation of the Earth, there is no scientific way of knowing how the Earth was formed (as we cannot observe, test and repeat the formation of the Earth).

The fact that his conclusion is false becomes apparent when we consider the (directly) unobservable phenomena that the scientific method can and has explained; gravity, electricity, quantum effects, wind, …the list goes on. He falls down in his definition of observation as being those things we can directly witness or see within our own (or our species’ own) lifetime. Consider the oldest tree known in the world; this is an organism that has been around for far longer than even the crustiest of living people. I dare VenomFangX to suggest that, because no-one saw it grow, it didn’t begin its life as a seed.

We can account for or, at least, begin to come to an understanding of the origins of our planet by a number of scientific methods. First, perhaps, we could use computer simulations to model the behaviour of the dust in the early solar system to see how tiny clumps, then lumps, then boulders, then planets of the stuff all came together. We might also try physically modelling such events with boxes filled with dust aboard the Space Station. We could even, if our technology one day allows it, study in fine detail the beginnings of a planetary system many light years away. All of these methods are soundly scientific and have analogues in fields far less exotic than planetary evolution.

I’m hooked on this guy’s videos.

I can’t tell if he’s serious or not; it’s fantastic!