by Alec Kohut, The (Not So) Angry Atheist
Last week, during some mild insomnia, I found myself unable to sleep at 3 am. While scrolling the TV channels menu, I saw the listing “Darwin,” flash by. Even more surprising was that the listing was for the Trinity Broadcast Network, a network almost solely devoted to shaking down believers for donations by people like John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and Benny Hinn.
My curiosity got the best of me and I tuned in to see what kind program labeled “Darwin,” would be on a religious based network. It turns out that the pseudo-science “documentary,” Darwin’s Dilemma, produced by neo-creationists in 2009 was the program. The video aims to refute the theory of evolution, using what is known as the Cambrian Explosion, a period when many of today’s biological phyla first appear in fossil record.
The neo-creationist argument is called “intelligent design,” and is just a creative way of repackaging the age old argument that life is just too complex to not involve a supreme being. But I am not going to cite the numerous ways in which intelligent design is a hoax, nor will I argue about the fossil record.
The thing that struck me as I watched Darwin’s Dilemma, was just how much the creationist argument has changed, or evolved, in recent years.
No longer is the Biblical creation described in Genesis considered remotely true. The idea of a young Earth has been completely abandoned. And any idea of human beings created in their present form, in god’s image is long gone.
Not even the idea of humans living with, and riding dinosaurs with a saddle survives.
No, today’s neo-creationist such as those at the Discovery Institute, dismiss any Biblical idea of creation, and instead argue that creation occurred around 540 million years ago, when the Cambrian Explosion occurred over a period of tens of millions years. It is this period they argue, when the basic “body types,” of today’s life on Earth were initially created.
In fact, today’s neo-creationists no longer even dispute that evolution does occur on a very grand scale. A look at the life that existed in their Cambrian creation moment, compared to now, is proof that even they accept the enormous evolution of life that has occurred in the past 500 million years.
But they still desperately cling to the idea that somehow, somewhere, in someway, god had to be involved. The intelligent design argument just shows how far real science has pushed pseudo-science.