Cosmos Recap: Neil DeGrasse Tyson Beats Up On God Some More

This week's episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey departs a bit from the format of the first two episodes. Instead of presenting a number of thematically related science vignettes, the entire episode is devoted to a single story, of the friendship between Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton, and the scientific revolution that resulted from it. And darned if Neil DeGrasse Tyson isn't just trolling the creationists some more in this episode, because he's gone and titled the whole thing "When Knowledge Conquered Fear." Now, sure, the specific example this episode focuses on is comets, whose irregular arrival in the orderly heavens were, in virtually all ancient cultures, seen as dreaded portents of doom. Oh, but we all know that's just a subset of "religion = fear and science = knowledge," and so Tyson's framing the episode in those terms is pretty much a provocation. Good on him.

And let's also address this before we get into our recap:

Danny Faulkner of Answers In Genesis and the Creation Museum appeared on The Janet Mefferd Show yesterday to criticize Cosmos for not providing airtime for Creationism adherents. When Mefferd asked if Cosmos will “ever give a Creationist any time,” Faulkner responded by lamenting that “Creationists aren’t even on the radar screen for them, they wouldn’t even consider us plausible at all.”

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