Revisionist History in the Cosmos TV Series

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2023

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is the Cosmos one big happy accident? Are science and religion mortal enemies? On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Casey Luskin talks with Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jay Richards about distortions and outright falsehoods presented in the 2014 reboot of the Cosmos TV series. Dr. Richards discusses how Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey presents science and religion as enemies by misrepresenting the lives of key figures in the history of modern science. "If you're going to tell that story of the warfare between Christianity and science, you absolutely have to have a martyr," says Richards. Both Copernicus and Galileo died peacefully, so the show spends an unusual amount of time animating the story of Dominican friar and mystic Giordano Bruno and his persecution by the Catholic Church. The problem? Bruno isn't a central character in the story of modern science, and he was executed for alleged theological crimes, not scientific ones. Richards goes on to discuss the show's misrepresentation of scientific giant Isaac Newton and even of the monotheistic ideas of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi. "What you get is the sense that religion and Christianity were either an enemy of science or at best they were incidental beliefs to early modern science that made no difference to scientific discovery. It's just not true."

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to ID the Future. I'm Casey Laskin broadcasting with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle, Washington.
0:16.0	We have online with us today a very exciting guest, Dr. J Richards, who's a senior fellow
0:20.9	at Discovery Institute and also a distinguished fellow of the Institute for
0:24.6	Faith, Work, and Economics.
0:26.8	Jay, if our listeners don't already know it, is one of the senior members of the ID Movement.
0:31.2	He's been with it since its very earliest days, written some
0:34.4	notorious books such as The Privileged Planet and also edited the award-winning
0:38.9	anthology, God and Evolution, Protestant Catholics and Jews Jews explore Darwin's challenge to faith.
0:44.7	So Dr Richards, you know a lot about the intersection of science and faith, and so we were hoping
0:49.8	to bring you on the show with us today to talk about this new reboot of the Cosmos series
0:54.4	which is premiering on Fox right now so thanks for coming on the show with us today.
0:58.0	My pleasure, thanks Casey.
1:00.0	So I have to confess I have not actually watched a whole lot of the episodes of the original Cosmos Dr Richards.
1:07.0	Maybe I can be forgiven. I guess I was what maybe three or four years old at the time when it premiered so I was probably playing with
1:13.7	LEGO sets and trains or something at the time wasn't too interested but you were
1:17.8	watching the original series of Cosmills so I'd like for you to maybe first give us a sense of you know this is a Cosmos reboot
1:25.3	What exactly are we rebooting? What was the original Cosmos series like? Who was in it for maybe some of our listeners who aren't aware of that?
1:33.0	Yeah, it was actually around 1980 broadcasts on PBS and I think is still one of the most watched documentary series that's ever broadcast on PBS but unlike that one that's
1:43.9	broadcasting right now on Fox on Sunday nights and National Geographic on
1:47.5	Monday nights the original Cosmos series featured the now late astronomer
1:51.5	Carl Sagan and it's probably most well known
1:55.6	certainly it's referred to a lot by intelligent design folks because Sagan
	...

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