Why do people laugh at creationists?

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This video, this series, sums it up.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS5vid4GkEY[/youtube]

The one about -300 degrees celcius/farhenheit (the text says celcius, but the speaker fahrenheit) hitting earth and then forming moons, rings around Saturn and so on made me laugh out loud... it's so ridiculous.

a spherical orbit... oh, that's gold!

No time to watch the video now, but I laugh at young-Earth creationists (the majority of creationists, that is), because their hypothesis requires that God is a liar. (Really? He made the universe 6000 years ago, but just made all the evidence available point to a 14-billion-year-old universe? To "test my faith"? You really want me to believe that an omniscient, omnipresent deity capable of creating something as grand as this universe of ours has nothing better to do with His time than to screw with my head??)

It's very easy to grab a video of a 17 year old kid who's read a few books on the subject or maybe watched a few videos and understood a fraction of what he read and is only repeating what he thinks he learnt. If you then take half sentences of what he says, removing them from any context and then repeat them over and over, you can very easily play him like a little puppet and make him look like a complete idiot. Well done to the maker of that video, I bet he feels very proud of himself.

The truth is, creationist go into the subject of how the universe was made with a single bias - God made it exactly the way it's written in our modern translation of a document that was written in the bronze age. Evolutionist go into the same subject with a single bias - there is no God, and never was.

Therefore, neither group will find the truth, and in reality, never can know the truth because the truth of the matter cannot be observed. All we can do is make assumptions that cannot be proven.

My own, personal, current view (I don't hold fast to beliefs like this regardless of what new information I learn. Both evolutionists and creationists could learn from that practice) is that the biblical account of the beginning of the human race's time on the world was recorded by a much more primitive man than our modern civilisation, and was therefore a very simplistic recording of what they were told had happened, and just like the kid in the video, they told the story and eventually wrote it down based on their best understanding of it. It wasn't written down by a scientist who observed the whole thing.

Interestingly, the Sumerian creation story reads very much like a more complete version of the biblical account. It's almost like what we see in Genesis is the simplified version of an older story. Many believe that the Sumerian account records that more advanced beings than us genetically modified the protohumans that were living on this planet to speed up their natural evolutionary progress, thus "creating" modern man. Even the Genesis account can't make up it's mind who God is, and God keeps on referring to "himself" in the plural sense - "let us make man in our own image", and later in the Babel story - "let us go down and confuse their language".

Considering that the Sumerians recorded a vast amount of astronomical data, including showing all the planets in our solar system as round objects orbitting the sun (not a flat earth with the sun going around it, as our civilisation believed until relatively recently), and showed all the planets in the right order and in scale to each other, and our civilisation only just found Pluto in the 1930s (I think, it was sometime in the first half of the 20th century), they clearly had access to a greater knowledge than we have today.

If you go into any subject with the decision already made that regardless of the evidence, certain things must or must not be true, you're never going to find the truth, because in reality, you're not looking for the truth, you're merely looking for evidence that supports your theory.

@Irvy: Sources?

Google the Sumerian civilisation and you'll find a wealth of information. How much of it is true or based in fact and how much of it is conjecture I really don't know, and to be honest it doesn't bother me. It may all be nonsense made up by someone in order to have a laugh.

Without a time machine, which I don't think we're likely to get within my lifetime, there's simply no way of knowing how the earth came to be, or how we ended up on it. All we know, everything we believe was at some point told to us by somebody else, be they a teacher, a parent, a scientist, it's all 2nd and 3rd and 4th hand information and therefore has been subject to numerous people's interpretations and biases.

Does that mean we should bother trying to work it out? Absolutely not! However, it does make fighting over who's right a little bit silly.

If I say that I have £5 in one of my hands, but I won't tell you which one, you have several options of what to believe. A very learned, very wise scholar might tell you that the £5 is in my right hand, and you can choose to believe him. A minister might tell you the £5 is in my left hand, and you might choose to believe him. Someone else entirely might tell you that I'm lying, I don't have £5 in either hand and I'm just trying to trick you. Another might tell you that there's 2 £5 notes, one in each of my hands.

Unless I decide to open both hands you'll never know. Even if I tell you which hand it's in, I could be lying. Unless you see me opening my hands, you'll never know for sure, because only I know, and I'm not telling. If I show someone else but not you, and they tell you, you still don't actually know, because they might be lying, or they might get mixed up and say the wrong hand.

Fighting with someone else because you believe it's in the right hand, and they believe it's in the left hand, that's just silly. Making fun of someone because they believe it's in the right hand, when you believe it's in the left hand, also stupid, because neither of you really know, you've just been convinced by someone cleverer than you who really doesn't know either. Only I know.

When you actually find out that the £5 is in my pocket, you'll all be really pissed.

Your "hand" analogy fails badly. In the case of creationism vs evolution, we have direct observable evidence in favor of one in opposition to the other.

Charles Darwin had no such single bias. He was a believer, although not orthodox in his belief.

ruveyn

Orwell, explain to be how you, you personally, know that the evidence supports either side. Do not tell me anything that has been told to you in books, or by any other person. Only tell me something that you have observed and witnessed for yourself and explain the methodology you used to prove that the evidence proves your theory and not somebody else's.

Otherwise you're just believing what someone else told you, just like the hand analogy.

There are more Christian evolutionists than there are atheistic creationists, so I tend to doubt your statement. To give an example, Kenneth Miller is a well-known biologist who has testified in favor of evolutionary theory against Intelligent Design in the Kitzmiller vs Dover trial. So, to say that both sides just presume something just seems silly.


Actually I doubt your statement, as when it comes down to it, some ideas just stand too much against the truth for them to be accepted, and through long debates, this kind of truth comes forward.

That video was genius!

"I get laughed at!" in slow-motion was pure insanity!

I liked the video.

Agreed. For example, WP member and my good friend Orwell is a pious man and a rationalist at heart. His beliefs have never been an issue with me; he is interested in the expansion of personal and human knowledge through senses, tool use and the greatest asset of all: the human mind.

I cannot take the hard line that Sand takes. I only wish for the religious minded to accept the gifts their god(s) gave them: a mind to rationalise with, a curiosity to know things, the gift of language, and the desire to improve the lot of all humanity.

Keep watching the videos. Discrediting the youthful VenomFangx is the least of it. He goes on to mitigate against the creationist teachings(giant ice shields around the earth) of school teacher Ken Hovind, convicted of tax fraud, as well as media personality Ben Stein, who tries to conflate theory of gravity(among other things) with theory of evolution.

These are all grown men. The youngest at the time was VenomFangx at age 22. Even he is a grown man, responsible for his words and actions.

I don't really understand why it's always portrayed as creationism Vs. evolution, the two concepts aren't mutually exclusive. As a general rule, i think it's best to ignore extreme theists and strong-atheists, they're just as deluded as each other.

The two concepts really are mutually exclusive though, as creationists posit a 6000-year old Earth and claim that no new traits or new species emerge. These claims contradict what is known from evolutionary theory. If two ideas contradict each other, at least one of them is wrong (it is possible that both are wrong).

My bad, I should have perhaps clarified i was referring to creationism broadly, which merely posits that a deity created the universe and/or earth. I am aware there are specific versions of creationism like you described, however i believe most people who label themselves creationists relate to the broad term as opposed to youth earth creationism.

Evolution was developed as a theory to explain something that happens in nature and to explain the abundance and varience we see in nature. It was never contrived to disprove religion and only the deluded attempt to use it to disprove religion.

What i find strange is the fact that extreme creationists only interpret genesis literally, yet the rest of the bible they treat as metaphors.