004 Is Carl Sagan's Cosmos Fake
Channel: 4min-cs
Date: 2020-02-22

Carl Sagan's clip on the origin of life that He presented on Cosmos appears to be bogus, fake. He was one of the world's most famous scientists in the late 1900s. Prior to this, he spent over a decade in original research doing many experiments on the origin of life. In Nature, the world's most prestigious science journal, he reported a summary of these experiments. He explained that he primarily made a residue that was impervious to normal chemical action. It was effectively inert. In 1980, he presented a series of television programs called "Cosmos” to the public. In it he claimed that this residue consisted of "globs and globs of the chemicals of life." These two results are not just different, they are the exact opposite of each other.  This video is longer than my target 4 - 5 minutes because the serious nature of its contents require every statement to be documented and justified.


The segments of this video are as follows:
0:00 Introductory comments concluding with a clip of Sagan showing his laboratory and claiming that in it he made "the stuff of life."

0:48 The Nature article is presented and its contents analyzed, where he claims that he made what amounts to an inert tar. This tar is ubiquitous wherever uncontrolled energy sources such as sunlight or sparks are directed onto organic molecules. Whether one looks at organic matter in space or in the laboratory, natural processes make inert tar.

8:27 A summary of a journal article published 27 years later discussing how this tar still thwarted origin of life research and that there were no known workarounds to it. This confirms that Sagan did not make the chemicals he was so excited about in the Cosmos program. The problems Sagan reported in Nature had not been overcome even 27 years later. They still haven't today.

13:36 With the reference background established, we now look at Sagan's Cosmos clip on the origin of life, taken from his second Cosmos episode. We contrast what he stated to the public in Cosmos with what he reported to the science community in Nature. Essentially every statement he made to the public contradicted what he reported to the science community. This represents bogus, false, fake science.

20:21 we show that Sagan is not alone in misrepresenting to the public the actual results of origin-of-life research. In 1953 Stanley Miller, in the Miller-Urey experiment, set off the modern scientific study on the origin of life. However, his experiment did not make usable chemicals. It produced too much tar, had too much contamination, and supplied unusable ratios between the different kinds of amino acids that were made. Miller gave basis to expect that abiogenesis is stuck at the initial step. It documents failure, not success. This problem was discussed in the second video of this channel. However, to this day textbook articles and encyclopedia articles present this experiment as a groundbreaking, successful experiment in abiogenesis.
21:08 Richard Lewontin, a retired professor of biology at Harvard University, explains the modern scientific commitment to materialism. Science does not lead him to materialism. Instead, he is a materialist first of all. He then structures science so that only materialistic explanations of phenomena is allowed. He specifically states that you "cannot allow a divine foot in the door." In other words, the issue is not where the evidence actually leads. It is that discussion of God is not allowed regardless of the evidence. To me, this is fake science. It is personal philosophical preference disguised as science.

24:25 I present my personal concerns about this misrepresentation. I am a creationist. I pastor a Baptist church. People continually talk to me about how science has caused them to reject God and the Bible. What they don't understand is that modern science is no longer a search for truth wherever it leads. It has become a vehicle to promote materialism. Hence my personal concern. I allude to this concern, because it explains why I am willing to challenge Sagan, Lewontin, and others like them. The problem is not our philosophical differences. The problem is their deliberate suppression of open discussion whenever it might result in a challenge to materialism. Even a problem so well documented as tar formation and its disastrous effect on the origin of life cannot be discussed openly, because it presents a serious potential challenge to the sufficiency of materialism and to them this is not to be allowed, period.