Brad Ideas - Creationism and the Abduction theory - Comments

Real Earth and BSG

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:06:24 -0700

In the introduction to the TV show, it started that BattleStar Galactica and the colonies were looking for this so called "Earth" while fleeing from the Cylons.
Base on what I have seen and researched about. The "Earth" is actually our own Earth. Cylons and Humans in the TV has two different ways of being Symbols.
First off, in the middle east there has been discoveries of ancient sites of "visitations from other beings" So Cylons and the Humans could be the "Alien Visitors" to our world who had helped us create the amazing Pyramids and etc.
Another symbol is Human is fleeing from their own creation, when A.I. started to be too much for the humans to control "Our future human race in space"
But it all draws down to the time period that BattleStar Galactic series was created it. Yep, It was our space missions to explore our universe and find more things about our own solar systems. Even our own creation of the possibility of Artificial Intelligences aka the Robots. Another note connected BSG and Our Earth is that, there are lot of science theories about Alien life is walking among our civilization to this day. Yes, our ancient history talked about Roman Gods, Greek Gods, Celtic Gods, Norse Gods, Chinese Gods, Japanese Gods, Hebrew Gods, and etc Gods throughout our world.

I don't pick up anything in

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 06:29:04 -0700

I don't pick up anything in here that's off the scientific or spiritual dial but, I agree, people can argue themselves into misunderstandings and seperate corners. Science and religion, or politics and the pebble on the beach, are just different perspectives on the same underlying reality. Given that, getting sweaty seems like an incredible waste of time. Life is short and as your closing comment on "natural" versus "artificial" suggests, there are levels of stupid which make it even shorter. Ideally, good science and good religion (or politics and business) helps us avoid this "stupid" and embrace the "awesome".

"Last time I checked science

Anonymous — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:52:51 -0700

"Last time I checked science and God(s) are dual opposites in much of literature."

Just because they are dual opposite in some literature does not mean they have to be in all literature. Reading through this blog I have found a disturbing trend among the group that is dissatisfied with any sort of spiritual, and this is spiritual not religious, ending having the idea that religion and science must be anathema to each other, when that is simply not true, plenty of individuals can be religious and have a healthy appreciation for science and vice versa. Either way, the ending is not he best plot. Lee's idea to abandon technology is idealism at its worst, and wholly unrealistic; he mentions how science outraces the human heart, well the colonials have born the fruits, could they not implement the adoption of technology in a way to ensure that this would not happen again? Just abandoning technology because nature is 'good' is Emersonian foolishness at its worst. Well I disagree Lee, nature sucks, things eat you and you die young.

making it work

Richard Akerman — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:54:33 -0700

This is the best I can do to make it work within the framework of my alternate ending - BSG: solving the Ark problem.

I think baby Hera's blood

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:15:12 -0700

I think baby Hera's blood was a clue. Many people noted that it was odd the humans thought her blood type was odd. I think they were tipping their hat all along the way.

We discussed genetic

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:07:14 -0700

We discussed genetic integration earlier. I wouldn't say it's impossible, just very very difficult with a bit of don't really know thrown in. That's scientific enough unless you want to choke on your own words. The problem I have is the general narrative and handling of this specific issue was very poor. Maybe other writers can run with these ideas and do them better but they can do that without feeding the BSG franchise.

At the very end

brad — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:13:53 -0700

Oh, the god was introduced on day 1, though not confirmed as real until later.

What I mean is the impossible ending came out of the blue in the final episode, that colonials can breed with early humans, that Hera is our ancestor.

Just Say "No" to having God The Main Influence In BSG

tman — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:32:20 -0700

Many on this blog are upset BSG used religion, gods, and angels to explain away the questions we had on a
series we spent over 4 years watching. I bought into BSG because I thought it was true science fiction; dark, dangerous, cutting edge and not some Harry Potter like fantasy. The shaky handheld camera rarely veered into brightly lit rooms. The show was as much about eluding raw emotions from the characters as it was about great complex storytelling.

Since there is no homogeneous definition of science fiction, some can argue its truth. I feel my personal definition fits in with many on this blog. That is SF, should be fiction strongly based on science. There should be no limit to the progressiveness of science that is explored. Last time I checked science and God(s) are dual opposites in much of literature. John W. Campbell, responsible for shaping the Golden Age of Science Fiction defined SF "To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at prophetic extrapolation from the known must be made". I feel BSG fails this test. Others may argue otherwise, but it makes me strongly question whether I should invest my time in 'Plan' and 'Caprica'. BSG writers have free reign to give us another great build up, only have some deity intervene to solve all the plot holes after we invest "X" number of years in another series. I guess we were told the truth about BSG's intentions early on, but if you were like me, denied it. When Baltar asked Six who she was, her response "I am a messenger of God". I never took that literally until the season finale.

Writer Ronald D Moore essentially wanted to wrap up the whole series with his heavy handed religious beliefs;
"Mathematics," Six Angel replies. "Law of averages. Let a complex system repeat itself long enough and eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God's plan."
"You know it doesn't like that name," says Baltar Angel. FYI: That was writer Ronald Moore holding the magazine on Mitochondria Eve. As if he's saying (RM) its possible we are descendents of Hera. Don't examine this too much because you will realize to make this true the 38,000 colonist left could not have more children aka DNA spread through our genes then the descendants of Hera. Unless all the colonists were Cylons there is no strong linkage to our origin on Earth2.

Not at the end

Sandy — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:43:51 -0700

Third, this was introduced at the very end.

I am pretty sure Head Six told us about this ending a long time ago. Season 1...

Opposite effect

Anonymous — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:29:58 -0700

Does this clarify some of the reasons to be upset.

You have the opposite effect for me because I think you are promoting yourself to Lord of Sci-Fi, and frankly if that is your platform, I will never vote for you.

Degrees of impossible

brad — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:27:05 -0700

There are different kinds of impossible, including in fiction. We accept certain types of impossible (like FTL drives) especially if they are given at the beginning of a story. We accept the odd mistake (like the water momentum that Grazier regrets) as simply mistakes on small things because people make mistakes.

But there’s a big difference with this. This is first of all, no small thing. It’s the resolution of the entire story. It’s the connection of the story to us, the viewers. It was very important to Moore, he went to a many lengths to generate such a connection. This one thing, one of the most important foundations of the story, deserves extra care. Mistakes are to be far less tolerated here, for our whole appreciation and understanding of the meaning of the story will lie on this.

Secondly, this is pretty high up on the impossible scale, barring divine intervention. Life on Earth evolved through over a billion years of adaptations to the specific environments. Even close branches of the same family on Earth can’t interbreed. Interbreeding with aliens (short of divine design of our DNA and theirs) vastly less likely than us interbreeding with mushrooms, to whom we are quite closely related.

Third, this was introduced at the very end. We tolerate impossible premises. Implicitly we accept them in our decision to keep watching or reading. We should be less tolerant of impossible endings put upon us at the last minute. They break the deal that the author will give us an ending that has meaning, which makes sense.

Fourth, this particular flaw, involving divine programming of our DNA, and arks, is one of the worst types of antiscience in the world. It’s not as bad as it could have been (ie. Galactica 1980) but it’s pretty bad. It’s not an idea that a good SF show should find itself promoting.

Does this clarify some of the reasons to be upset.

Answers to everything? Nope...

zach — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:18:48 -0700

No, the absence of answers to everything is not bad writing.
I prefer questions to answers - they keep the mind busy.

But what IS bad writing is arriving in Earth's past, abandoning all technology, medicine (btw, what happened to all those wounded in the attack?) and tools, crashing the ships into the sun, interbreeding with pre-verbal humans, presumably deciding to "forget" all their knowledge and skills (and they must have, because we found no trace of their civilisation or their "heritage" to us other than the mitochondrial DNA) and definitely not passing them on to tribal humans (obviously, or this world would have had a much different history), not taking into account the viruses they had no immunity to... and the list goes on and on. Others have written about it, no need to repeat it all.

And while we are on the subject of answers... some of them are rather disappointing too. I had been intrigued by the Opera House visions throughout 3 seasons, but in the end they turned out to be... what? ... basically a trailer for the upcoming events? Oh, how "imaginative"!

Loose ends

Alvin — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:13:12 -0700

I don't mind loose ends or ambiguous answers, per se, but given the importance of some of the questions, I wanted them to at least be addressed. To have them be forgotten is frustrating.

2 things

Sandy — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:06:40 -0700

What a shame to end the best piece of television e v e r in such a way.

First, I loved the end. I thought it was perfect. I have no problem with loose ends. I realize some people want answers to everything, but like life not everything has answers.

Second, The Wire. 'Nuff said.

Great posts, Alvin

zach — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:02:55 -0700

"The problem we should be having with it is not that it's a religious ending, but a poor narrative."

Couldn't agree more. Well put, Alvin.

I am not religious, either. But what I am is rather disappointed with some parts of the story itself.
For the sake of a good story I am willing to accept divine inteventions, angels/messengers of god(s), even quite a bit of bad science in an otherwise great SF series, but what saddens me is bad writing.
And the finale was definitely the latter. :(

What a shame to end the best piece of television e v e r in such a way.

Creationism and the Abduction theory

brad — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:56:32 -0700

The posts will come fast and furious in the next two days.

First I want to cover a little more about why this ending is of so much concern to many viewers. While many will accept that it is unscientific, and just say that they never cared that much about such things, the particular errors and issues of the final plot are rather special. What we saw was not merely spacecraft making sound in space or FTL drives or some other random scientific error.

The error in BSG centers around the most pernicious anti-scientific idea of our day: Creationism/Intelligent Design. In particular, it tells the “Ark” story, though it sets it 150,000 years ago rather than 4,000. And, because Moore knows the Ark story is totally bogus, he tries to fix it, by having the alien colonists able to breed with us humans, and thus having the final result be a merger of the two streams of humanity. That’s better than the pure Ark story, and perhaps enough better that I see some viewers are satisfied with it, but with deeper examination, it is just as bad an idea, and perhaps in its way more pernicious because it is easier for people to accept the flaws.

SF writers have been writing the Ark story since the dawn of SF. Indeed, the alien Adam and Eve plot is such a cliche from the 40s that you would have a hard time selling it to an SF magazine today. Not simply because it’s nonsense, but because it became overused back in the day when it wasn’t as obvious to people how nonsensical it was.

The Ark story is not just any bad science. It’s the worst bad science there is. Because there are dedicated forces who want so much for people to accept the Ark story as possible. Normally busy scientists would not even bother to debunk a story like that, but they spend a lot of time debunking this one because of the dedicated religious forces who seek to push it into schools and other places religion does not belong. And debunk it they have, and very solidly. The depth of the debunking is immense, and can’t be covered in this blog. I recommend the talk.origins archive with their giant FAQ for answers to many of the questions about this.

BSG plays a number of tricks to make the Ark story more palatable. It puts it back further in time, prior to the migrations of humanity out of Africa. (Oddly, it also has Adama spread the people around the continents, which simply means all the ones who did not stay in Africa died out without a trace or any descendents.) It makes it a merger rather than a pure origin to account for the long fossil and geological record. It has the aliens destroy all their technology and cast it into the sun to explain why there is no trace of it.

It does all those things, but in the end, the explanation remains religious. As the story is shown, you still need to invoke a variety of divine miracles to make it happen, and the show does indeed do this. The humans, on this planet, are the same species as aliens from another galaxy, due to the plan of God. They have cats and dogs and the rest, even though 150,000 years ago, humans have yet to domesticate any animals. Indeed, god has to have designed the colonials from the start to be the same species as the natives of Earth, it all has to have been set up many thousands of years ago. This is “intelligent design,” the form of creationism that gets dressed like science to help make it more palatable. It is also a pernicious idea.

In one fell swoop, BSG changes from science fiction — hard, soft or otherwise — to religious fiction, or religious SF if you wish. Its story, as shown, is explained on screen as being divine intervention. Now, thanks to BSG, there will be discussion of the ending. But it will involve the defenders of science having to explain again why the Ark story is silly and ignores what we know of biology. I am shocked that Kevin Grazier, who advocates science teaching for children, including biology, was willing to be a part of this ending.

Sadly this ending goes beyond being bad SF.

How to make it work.

Now there is one plot which BSG did not explore which would have made a lot of sense if they wanted to tell this story. It’s been noted on this blog a few times, but discounted because we believed BSG had a “no aliens” rule. This is what I called the “Alien Abduction plot.”

In this plot, aliens — in this case the God, who does not have to be a supernatural god — captured humans and various plants and animals from real Earth many thousands of years ago. The god took them to Kobol, and possibly with other gods (the Lords of Kobol) created a culture and raised them there. From this flows our story.

This plot has been used many times. Recently in Ken Macleod’s “Cosmonaut Keep” series the characters find a human culture way out in the stars, populated by people taken by “gods” (highly advanced beings) a long time ago. The same idea appears in Rob Sawyer’s dinosaur series, and many other books.

Do this, and it suddenly explains why the colonials are the same species as the people on Earth, but more advanced. It does not explain their cats and dogs, or their Earth idioms, but those can be marked down to drama. (They would have to have independently domesticated cats and dogs and other animals, as this had not happened on Earth. Same for the plants. The gods could also have done this for them.)

This plot works well enough that it’s surprising no hint of it was left in the show. I do not believe it was the intention of the writers, though I would love to see post-show interviews declaring that it was.

And even this plot has a hard time explaining what happened to their culture, the metal in their teeth and many other items. For try as they might they could not abandon all their technology. Even things that seem very basic to the Colonials, like better spears, writing, animal and plant domestication, knives, sailboats, complex language and so many other things are still aeons ahead of the humans. They plan to breed with the humans, and will be taking them into their schools and educating them. There was a sudden acceleration of culture 50,000 years ago, but not 150,000. And then there’s the artificial DNA in Hera and any other Cylon descendents. (And no, Hera isn’t the only person we are supposed to be descended from, she is just the source of the maternal lines.) But maybe you can shoehorn it in, which makes it surprising it wasn’t used.

The idea, taken from the old series, that the Greeks would have taken some of their culture from the aliens also is hard to make work. Why do their cultural ideas and now hopefully debunked (to them) polytheist religion show up nowhere else but Greece and eventually Rome? How do they get there, and only there, over 140,000 years of no writing, hunter-gatherer life? I am not a student of classical cultures, but I believe we also have lots of evidence of the origin and evolution of our modern Greek myths. They did not spring, pardon the phrase, fully formed from the head of Zeus. Rather they are based on older and simpler stories we have also traced. But the alien religion is based on our modern concepts of ancient Greek religion.

Even in 5,000 to 10,000 years, there would be a moderate amount of genetic drift in the Kobol environment, including the artificial genetic manipulation involved with Cylons. Since we learn that Africa has more game than the 12 colonies, it’s clear the colonials did not have all of Earth’s animals. It is contact with animals that generates most of our diseases. When different groups of humans get separated for many thousands of years, with different animals, the result is major plagues when they meet. Without divine intervention, the colonials are about to be reduced to a small fraction of their population. Especially after tossing their hospitals into the sun. (Why don’t we see any sick people saying, “Excuse me, do I get a vote on this whole abandon technology idea?)

Atlantis

The other plot which could have explained this I called the “Atlantis” plot. In this plot there is an advanced civilization long ago which reaches the stars but falls and disappears without a trace. It is the civilization that colonizes Kobol and becomes as gods. This requires no aliens. This is not their chosen plot, since it’s even harder to explain how this civilization left no trace, since it would not have gone to the technology destroying extremes the Colonists are shown to do.

Coming up: Why religious SF is a bad idea, even if you believe in the religion. (Hint: while the author is god, you don’t want them to really use that power.)