Cosmos and Creationists

Back in 1980, Carl Sagan, noted astrophysicist and public-intellectual ambassador for science at large, ran a TV series on PBS called Cosmos, which presented a great deal of scientific knowledge about various cosmological issues for public consumption. It was highly successful. Earlier this year, Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the closest thing to Sagan in today's popular culture, rebooted the series on FOX. The first few episodes have aired, and predictably, people who don't like what science has to tell us about these cosmological questions are not happy. According to this article, creationists are apparently trying to demand "equal time;" I can't tell whether they want that time on Cosmos itself or whether they want to be given a show of their own with which to answer NDT. Here's the money quote from some creationist guy:

I was struck in the first episode where [Tyson] talked about science and how, you know, all ideas are discussed, you know, everything is up for discussion –- it's all on the table -- and I thought to myself, 'No, consideration of special creation is definitely not open for discussion, it would seem.'

The thing that's so striking about this is how very, very wrong it gets what having an open mind means for a scientist. What it means is that you don't rule out any ideas before you look at the evidence. What it most emphatically does not mean is that you don't rule out any ideas after you look at the evidence. If you can't rule things out after you look at the evidence, well, what's even the point of looking at evidence? Why bother having science at all? The whole point is to let the universe tell us what it's like. If, to use the incredibly-cliched comparison, we aren't allowed to conclude, after looking at all the evidence, that the earth is round and not flat, well, it's absurd to call what we're doing science. It's some kind of weird philosophy of how you can never really know anything, blah blah blah. To a scientist, the shape of the earth is an open question precisely until we actually observe something in the world which is only consistent with one particular answer.

And the evidence says that the universe as we know it goes back about 13.8 billion years, at which time everything in it was packed into an unimaginably small region, and immediately after which it underwent a period of extremely rapid inflation and has been expanding more gradually ever since. (In fact, we just got another big bunch of evidence supporting this explanation, which is pretty cool.) Now, there's stuff to be said about the ability of religious types to craft "yeah but god made it happen" responses to this kind of evidence, but that's not really the point. The point is that it's absurd for a bunch of people who happen to dislike what the universe has told us about its nature to demand that a science show, devoted to telling people what we know about the world, spend any significant amount of time talking about specific "alternate" theories about the universe that are known to be wrong. NDT can, and I believe did, spend a significant amount of time laying out all of the reasons why we know that the universe is 13.82 billion years old et cetera, and doing so implicitly states that any particularly literal Biblical creationist beliefs are wrong. That's the most those beliefs deserve from him.