I have talked to many creationists who, when asked for evidence that the universe was created by a god, tell you to look at the trees
. They think the fact that the world can be beautiful is sufficient to prove the existence of a supernatural being, and therefore you should be converted to Christianity by contemplating biology, but I’ve been thinking about biology for a few decades, and I look at a tree and am impressed by the chemistry of photosynthesis, and don’t see any Jesus in it.
Look at the trees
is shorthand for the most vapid, shallow, stupid kind of creationist argument. In a propaganda coup, Answers in Genesis has found three astronauts who are willing to endorse religious beliefs because they saw the grandeur of the Earth
, because people float in space,
and the Earth is a beautiful planet
. They claim the Bible is absolutely true, it’s inerrant, it’s sufficient for everything we need, it’s not a science book but where it speaks to science it is absolutely accurate, 100%.
Watch this video and see your respect for these men plummet.
Nauseating. AiG is hosting them at some event at the big fake Ark this summer (buy your tickets now!), but all I see is a couple of pilots and mechanics who have been persuaded by religious nonsense to believe in anti-scientific ideas. Sad.
Ironically, there’s a chunk in the middle of this video where they get quite irate about people who think the Earth is flat or that the moon landings were fake. It’s utter foolishness. And frankly it’s becoming more concerning, If you can get caught up in that kind of system of belief, you’ve completely detached yourself from the truth.
The truth of scripture
, that is, he quickly adds, before going on to denounce the wicked lie of evolution.
I bet they were scientists. Just fighter jocks, straight out of the glorified Sunday School that the U.S. Air Force Academy has become.
Edit: …they weren’t scientists.
Sorry, Just got up. Need coffee.
I hope this doesn’t add to your aggravation. It’s a write-up about Ken Ham and creationism in the AP.
https://apnews.com/article/scopes-monkey-trial-creationism-today-ken-ham-161a1071e95eef7242e2b4ce452ef4ea
Perhaps there should be an oath to be sworn before you can join NASA (or similar agencies, also universities)? Something like swearing to support and defend the scientific method against all enemies, religious and idiotic
Sadly though, we have seen how that other oath, to support and defend the Constitution, has been treated so contemptuously.
An external observation from Down Under.
If pretty = divinity, a walk across the University of Florida campus proves the existence of Aphrodite.
I think this part was maybe PZ’s own commentary, and was not supposed to be in Comic Sans?
My dad’s brother was a NASA engineer, working on the Space Shuttle program before taking an early retirement buyout sometime in the 90s.
My dad, on the other hand, worked as a civil engineer until retiring about fifteen years ago. Neither he nor mom have ever voted GOP, and their opinion of the party has only gone downhill since the Reagan years.
Naturally, the uncle who owed his entire career and personal prosperity to government largesse spent a good chunk of his retirement in the early 00s forwarding to his little brother e-mail chains with conservative Boomer memes of the day about government waste and how pathetic and stupid liberals are. Eventually, dad got offfended enough that he had to lose his temper and get him to knock it off with this nonsense.
I last saw my aunt, uncle, and cousins in person at Thanksgiving dinner 2017 in Cocoa Beach. IIrc the parents had both voted Trump and were still a bit shell shocked by the results.
Tl;dr: From my experiences I knew from an early age thst NASA “rocket scientists” were prome to being complete doofuses.
“Not everyone who is a religious fundamentalist is a flat earther, but nearly all flat earthers are religious fundamentalists.” No idea where this phrase originally came from, but I’ve seen it making the rounds.
Terrifying!
@ 8
I’m yet to see a flat-earther not invoke ancient Hebrew cosmology and/or claim that the powers that be want people to think the planet is round (along with evolution) as a means to deny Gawd.
No surprise here. My impression since the sixties was that US astronauts were mostly white male conservative Christians from the ‘heartland’. Flying a rocket doesn’t make you an intellectual. Neither does building them.
Astronauts can be sensible, too, and cherries are not so hard to find:
(https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/nov/30/apollo-8-mission)
I don’t doubt @12 John Morales saying Astronauts can be sensible too. But, I’ve spent a lot of time in aerospace and met and talked with Chuck Yaeger and a number of others in that sphere (test pilots and astronauts). And, my experience confirms that there are a lot that find religion in their quest for a comforting belief system in that dangerous, scary world.
This AIG propaganda is just more proof that if you look under every rock you can find someone who will ‘swear’ to anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a xtian terrorist vid on how gravel is proof of the existence of god. I see evidence of this in https://skepchick.org/2025/05/chatgpt-is-creating-cult-leaders/ and many other rational places on the internet (including pharyngula, of course).
Remember, all the early astronauts had a military background. And, the military admits that during basic training, they break down everyone’s mind and reprogram it to be good little unquestioning, obeying, knee-jerk chicken-hawk zombies. I know a number of them that still have that mind-set years later. Few escape this with their mind intact. I think probably PZ’s son is one of those who is still capable of rational thought.
It all points to my corollary to clark’s third law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.) “People will label anything sufficiently vast, scary or not readily explicable as the work of a deity”. Superstition is an automatic fallback of the human mind.
[Semi-OT]
shermanj, indeed, though I’d put it as ideology rather than superstition — some Marxists were quite religious about it, for example.
I myself have obviously never interacted with such people, but I’ve been aware of the reputation the US military (and in particular the Air Force) has for a proclivity towards Christian dominionism.
There’s a cadre there and it goes to the top, and I imagine there’s quite a pressure to conform.
e.g. https://religionunplugged.com/news/2023/10/19/how-christian-nationalism-spread-in-the-us-military
Dumb Idiot Ham paid these astronauts to prop up his false propaganda, I bet.
did they mention seeing the waters above the firmament?
Young Earth creationists believe in foolishness. Old Earth (such as evolutionary) creationists believe in false doctrine. They both run from the truth of Genesis. I challenge any of you to write to [email protected] to learn the correct rendition of Genesis, which declares that there have been five advents of mankind before Adam and Eve.
hzcummi, you are a perfect specimen. Rare in these parts these days, but you are appreciated.
Um, you just specifically told us what the correct rendition of Genesis is in your estimation; fucking bloody obviously there is nothing left to learn other than that you ostensibly claim to show there is no correct rendition of Genesis (there is G1 and G2 in the Babble, but nevermind facts) at hand other than by emailing an AOL account. Which, to be fair, is pretty fucking ancient in internet terms.
Anyway, that’s not exactly a challenge, is it? Any fucker can type a message to some spammy AOL account. No achievement, no reward.
(Gotta concede you are the most obvious troll I have seen in 2025)
I’ve been looking at trees quite a lot lately. Because of the record drought we’re in here, many of them – especially those in the wild that haven’t been watered – are looking very sick and stressed and, in far too many cases, they have died. So to me, here in South Oz, looking at the trees right now says that Climate Change and Global Overheating are hitting hard and we really should’ve listened to the Climate Scientists and acted on their warnings a long time ago.
Apart from yours, of course.
From the video in OP :
>
Wait that who “gave” him?
That NASA, the Apollo program, Alan Shepard* plus his own efforts to qualify for, train and fly the mission.
Nah, never mind all that actual reality and those who deserve the actual credit. Just say it was all gifted by a fictional sky fairy instead.
Credit where credits due huh?
.* Who was in charge of scheduling flights and which astronauts got which ones at the time. See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shepard#Project_Gemini;_chief_astronaut
John Morales@19,
I have to disagree: hzcummi doesn’t look like a troll (a commenter who simply wants to provoke a response) to me; rather, a complete numpty with some loopy notion they are keen to infect others with.
Further to my #23, here is this numpty babbling 17 years ago. He’s persistent, if nothing else.
That’s the only factual statement hzcummi gave out right here.
hzcummi has been posting here since 2007, but originally it was under the name Herman Cummings. He’s always been pushing his book — but somehow always fails to tell us how to find it.
I’ll do him a favor. His book is Moses Didn’t Write About Creation! . It’s out of print, but I’d be amused to see a copy.
Among his revelations, he insists that humanity has been living on Earth in their current form for 60 million years. He’s a weird crackpot.
@21 KG wrote:
Superstition is an automatic fallback of the human mind. – shermanj@14
Apart from yours, of course.
I reply: what a sarcastic and false statement. If you were thoughtful, you wouldn’t make such unfounded assumptions.
In all our writings, I state that I, as a human being, am fallible and subject to the insidious encroachment of superstition if I am not careful
ref.: http://theartsinarizona.org/enchiridion.htm . I have observed and read innumerable credible sources that support this. Our minds, no matter how disciplined, are subject to the tugs of irrational speculation. The prime example of this is the superstition that is religion.
As I mentioned earlier, these astronauts were awed by what they saw and it was so ‘mind-boggling’ that they resorted to supernatural fantasy to explain it. That is the manifestation of my corollary to clark’s third law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.) “People will label anything sufficiently vast, scary or not readily explicable as the work of a deity”. Superstition is an automatic fallback of the human mind.
@ PZ comments referring to hzcummi: Among his revelations, he insists that humanity has been living on Earth in their current form for 60 million years.
I reply: Well, if humanity has been in its current form for 60 million years, I would have suspected that the rtwingnut christo-fascists would have gained power and destroyed civilization long before now. Since we see, right now, that they are setting up the most destructive militaristic, christo-fascist plutocracy in history. tRUMP is channeling ronnie raygun, the inhumane, in his push for a ridiculous ‘golden dome’ defense system because rayguns starwars program worked so well. And, tRUMP’s nuclear fetish is fatally dangerous, He is sending nuclear armed stealth bombers to the middle east to finish off israels attack on iranian nuclear power plants. No musings by bedazzled superstitious astronaut minds will change that.
Shermanj@28
I was thinking about Trump’s Golden Dome vs Israel’s Iron Dome this morning and realized that it will indeed be Golden compared to Iron – way more expensive and nowhere near as strong.
Militant Agnostic, detailed breakdown here:
shermanj@27,
OK, if you’re not excepting yourself, I apologise. But WTF was the point of your link? Was that a cult you got drawn into? Or is it a parody site? I’m certainly not clicking either of the links on that page! BTW, “irrational speculation” is not the same as “superstition”; and while all religion involves superstition, there’s a lot more to it than that. You can’t just lump things together like that.
[OT]
KG, that’s the website of the org shermanj represents and why the ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ in so many comments — The Arts in Arizona. It’s a bit dated but it’s safe.
“We are an esoteric organization dedicated to creating and sharing artistic works in a wide variey of media and supporting artists in their creative work while engaging in community benefit activities for many decades. We no longer accept new clients and the above image is a static snapshot of the interactive home page from 2006 when it offered a multitude of options and our many works.
Our many still active affiliated organizations encompass a wide range of artistic, technical, sociological and socio-political realms. And, as part of the Omnigma family of organizations we continue to contribute to the betterment of society and our environment in a multitude of ways. “
@26. PZ Myers : “His book is Moses Didn’t Write About Creation!”
Well, he’s right! At least the title is – the mythical Moses of ancient Jewish & Christian mythology was probably just that a myth. Maybe with a kernal of truth and maybe not even that.
From the link :
That sounds ’bout right. The ouch aggro factor of biting people’s faces aside..
Ohhh-kaaay. Yeah, that’s definitley crankland. If so good this evidnec e and argument is – 15 years ago – why is nt known and confirmed or otherwise now?
Genesis reveals more of prehistoric life than ever known.. by like palaeontologists. No. Just . no and what the.. ?!
Morbid curiosity has been aroused but yeah, nah.
@26. PZ Myers : “His book is Moses Didn’t Write About Creation!”
Well, he’s right! At least the title is – the mythical Moses of ancient Jewish & Christian mythology was probably just that a myth. Maybe with a kernal of truth and maybe not even that.
From the link :
That sounds ’bout right. The ouch aggro factor of biting people’s faces aside..
Ohhh-kaaay. Yeah, that’s definitley crankland. If so good this evidnec e and argument is – 15 years ago – why is nt known and confirmed or otherwise now?
Genesis reveals more of prehistoric life than ever known.. by like palaeontologists. No. Just . no and what the.. ?!
Morbid curiosity has been aroused but yeah, nah.
Dóh! That wasn’t supposed to come through twice, sorry. Also clarity fix :
If so good this evidence and argument for Gaaawd is – 15 years ago – why isn’t it already known and confirmed or otherwise by now?
As for the OP’s title, I think its pretty much a rule that ALL human beings of any and every profession and group can be total dumbasses at times. The better peopel know this and try not to be and will apologise, learn fromit and change when they are whilst the worst people refuse to do those things and dig deeper.
It’s just crazy talk. Everyone knows that floating in space is proof that leviosa is a real, functioning spell. Only muggles would think it had anything to do with some god.
DanDare, ahem. Not that crazy.
“After years of averting questions on whether Christian themes were present in her wildly popular Harry Potter books, author J.K. Rowling finally opened up this week about the Christian allegory in her latest book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
|PIC1|During a press conference at the kick-off of her “Open Book Tour” on Monday, the British author told reporters that while religious themes were always present she purposely refrained from referencing any particular religion in order to conceal the ending.
“To me, [the religious parallels have] always been obvious,” Rowling said. “But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going.”
And where did the story end up? (Spoiler warning: Read no further if you don’t want to find out what happens.)
Apparently, the last installment of the series is about resurrection and life after death.
In “Deathly Hallows,” Harry visits his parents’ graves at Godric’s Hallow and sees two biblical references on his parents’ tombstones, reading: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” and “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
The first refers to 1 Corinthians 15:26 and the second is a direct quote from Jesus in Matthew 6:19.
By the end of the book, Harry becomes the “Master of Death” and “resurrects” from the dead the spirits of his parents, his godfather, Sirius Black and his old teacher Remus Lupin.”
(https://www.christiantoday.com/news/harry-potter-author-reveals-books-christian-allegory-her-struggling-faith)