I have been requested by my creationist brother to view a series on YouTube with an open mind and to record my observations. It's quite an undertaking, but I'll give it a shot and indeed, try to keep an open mind. OTOH, it would not be a fruitful undertaking if my reflections would be a private endeavor, that's why I opted to make a blog series out of it. The video series is named "Origins TV" and can be viewed online via this playlist (which seems to be a repost from Blip TV). I have no idea if and when I will have caught up to the nearly 100 episodes and it may happen that the time between two replies will be long. This is a spare time project and I do not want to be pinned down to any schedule or obligation.
First, a caveat. I am not a scientist. I am just a Joe Blow with a keen interest in some sciences, most prominently astronomy/cosmology and (evolutionary) biology (with an emphasis on molecular biology). I know little about geology and paleontology so my comments on those items will be sparse, if any, when those items arise.
That said, the series purports to give scientific reasoning for the creationist's position, so my reflections will be from a scientific point of view. This view means that to explain a phenomenon, a hypothesis needs to be made and this hypothesis should lead to testable predictions, most specifically, predictions that could falsify the hypothesis. While testing the hypothesis, one should not cherry-pick data but the hypothesis should be capable of explaining all data points.
Science is a methodologically naturalistic endeavor. This does not imply that the supernatural realm is denied by science, it just means that the methodology of science cannot take the supernatural into account. As an illustration of this, if e.g. miracles were allowed within science and many different scientists repeated the same experiment with the same result, that would still not imply that the next experiment could not yield a wildly different result because of a miracle. So if at any time an appeal to the supernatural is made as an explanation for a phenomenon, I will not regard that as evidence at all. It isn't.
My reflections will be very note-like and will likely not make a lot of sense unless you actually view the episodes. A link to the episode in question will be included in each post.
I could not determine when the episodes aired or what the order of airing was. Knowing this could have helped to set a context in which some statements are made but lacking this, I will just use the order from the YouTube playlist. I know that the YouTube playlist is not in the airing order because there are some references to other episodes early in the playlist. The playlist seems to be clustered on guests. Given some slides, it seems most episodes aired somewhere in the mid to late naughts.
The order of blog postings is that newest posts are first on the main page, so I will add a link to this post from each of the blog posts I will be making. This post is a living document and will be edited to include links to the various posts in the order that I make them.
Happy reading. Comments are welcome. They are moderated, just to keep spam out, but I will likely not deny any comments that are made on the subject, however critical or condescending it might be. Don't worry, I've got quite thick a skin. If you start a flame war, please put on your asbestos suite, because the flames will be returned your way! ;-)
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