dances with atheists 2 mission galactica the cylon attack

The late oft cited British astronomer Fred Hoyle stated in a one liner critique of Darwinism that the possibility of life beginning spontaneously by chance was the same as the possiblity of a tornado hitting a junkyard and assembling a 747 Jet.

Or as I would put it: It didn't happen.

The critique is not entirely orginal. A Christian commentator had previously remarked that the chances of life beginning as Darwin had postulated were the same as the chances of an explosion in a print shop creating a completed Oxford English Dictionary, presumably finely bound and price tagged for the market and with an introduction by Stephen Fry.

Mr Hoyle was also famous for naming the singularity from which modern scientific measurements suggest the universe orginated, as The Big Bang.

As an atheist he was apparently never keen on the emerging measurable prognosis for the reality of the Big Bang perhaps recognising it as a death knell for the pretention that atheism is science. He may also have found the Big Bang inconvenient to his early seeming acquiescence to Darwinism since it made the availability of what we conceive of as Time somewhat limited for those who wished to use limitless Time to justify the possibility of limitless nonsense, ie Darwinian evolutionary processes.

Nonetheless he named the Big Bang and to his lasting credit came up with the single most memorable phrasal expose of the nonsense claims of what had previously passed for scientific atheism.

After the further scientific confirmation of Big Bang cosmology by Arno Penzias and contemporary physicists, and following on from Mr Hoyle's own 747 analogy, atheists could no longer credibly posit their atheism as being synonomous with science.

They still do it mind. But their claims are not credible.

Prior to the scientific endorsement of the Big Bang cosmology, atheists had effectively claimed without the possibility of rebuttal that there was limitless Time in the universe for the impossibilities of Darwinism to happen.

We know now that without limitless time, it didn't happen.

(As a sidebar I would suggest that the concept of limitless time may be a synonym for limitless space. I am by no means convinced that time is itself a medium.)

In spite of his critques of Darwinism, Fred Hoyle reportedly remained an atheist all his life.

As an atheist he was faced with a personal dilemma as to how to reconcile his rejection of Darwinism with his continuing to also reject God.

His solution was to advocate a theory he called panspermia in which he postulated aliens from another planet had somehow seeded life on earth.

Confucius he say: A nonsense theory with a catchy name is still a nonsense theory. And although the panspermia plot has been used in Star Trek Next Generation, the best of the Star Trek franchisees once it hit form around Series Four, it's not even good science fiction.

The mathematician David Berlinski remarked of Fred Hoyle's panspermia notion something along the lines of: "This only succeeds in moving the origin of life question sideways to another planet. It does not answer the question we have set ourselves as to how life started. Yet for some people the aliens can do it every time."

I wonder was the leading British astronomer of the past hundred years Fred Hoyle a Trekkie and did he perchance while away a few timeless evenings in the 1980s watching the old Battlestar Galactica series.

I think the chances, taken over limited Time with nothing else worth watching on the box, are that he did.