Christian child: existence of Jupiter violates theory of evolution

August 18, 2015 • 1:30 pm

I have no fricking idea why the existence of the planet Jupiter should violate evolutionary theory, but this Australian child clearly thinks it not only does, but also testifies to the glory of God. Can anybody explain the evolution part? The sad part is that the audience probably took this claim at face value.

Here’s the explanation of such brainwashing—in Australia, of all places:

The mission of Covenant Christian School in Sydney Australia is to assist parents in the nurture of their children. Being able to communicate is an important part of life for children and adults. Speech giving is one way of developing this confidence. Primary school aged children were asked to prepare a 2 minute speech. Each class then voted for their favourite and these were combined in a speech giving assembly.

56 thoughts on “Christian child: existence of Jupiter violates theory of evolution”

    1. Thanks, Stuart. That seems to explain it. I couldn’t imagine it was anything more that a non sequitur.

    2. The next claim is that models require 10-100 million years for a planet like Jupiter to form, but that the solar nebula would have dissipated around the sun within 5 million years. “So, according to evolution, Jupiter shouldn’t exist at all.”

      Heh. So this was copped from pseudoscience.

      I’d assumed that the boy was simply drawing some strange parallel between “awesome big planet” and “awesome big God.” I was also wondering why the existence of a real true Jupiter wouldn’t have falsified the Christian version of king of the gods.

    3. Quote mining a paper from 1992…I’ve seen much worse in the creationist playbook. My father told me that “there is no such thing as plate tectonics” when I was a kid. The link to evolution is easier to see with this canard; no plate tectonics means no continental drift means no way for similar animals to be on different land masses, therefore Creation.

  3. Wait. What?

    Kid was doing great up until the end.

    Has nobody told him that everything he said up to that point would have gotten him killed by the Church for heresy a mere Jovian century or so ago?

    b&

    3. Sad. He might as well have ended the speech with “and that’s why bananas jump highest on Thursday – because elves wear hats!”

      1. Um…I’m sorry but you couldn’t be more wrong. Reindeer fly highest during leap years because elves wear stockings. Your heretical views hardly warrant a response.

  4. The answer is summed up nicely:
    Covenant Christian School

    It is shame. There might be some potential in this young man but his lack of education at this fake school will set him back years. In fact he may never recover and end up even dumber than this parents.

  5. By Jupiter, that little lad did a good job, ignoring the gratuitous swipe at evolution.

  6. I googled the question “How does the existence of Jupiter violate evolutionary theory”, and found a creationist website “crev.info” talking about how (allegedly) the existence of gas giants like Jupiter violate the current theory of planetary evolution. I guess evolution is evolution in creationists mind. The same way they often conflate evolution, and abiogenesis, and the big bang.

    1. Yes, Kent Hovind does this frequently. All materialism/ materialistic science is evolution and all evolution is wrong.

    2. That sounds…not even wrong. My understanding of exoplanet searches is that we’ve found all sorts of big (gas giant) planets; its the little rocky ones like ours that are hard to find (and that’s due to our instrument limitations, not necessarily their rarity).

  7. I have no fricking idea why the existence of the planet Jupiter should violate evolutionary theory, …

    At a rough guess it’s a garbled version of the following.

    A massive planet like Jupiter mops up a lot of large comets which would otherwise travel into the inner Solar System (for example Shoemaker-Levy 9).

    Thus the presence of Jupiter much reduces the number of collisions of comets/asteroids with Earth, of the sort that (likely) wiped out the dinosaurs. If there were frequent impacts of that sort then perhaps larger life such as mammals would not have evolved on Earth.

    All the above is accepted science, and does point to the significant influence that Jupiter has had on the history of Earth.

    From there, the kid is likely making a “fine tuning” argument, that Jupiter had to have been put there by God, otherwise humans would not have evolved.

    1. I was thinking along those lines too as I’ve heard of this “Jupiter put there by g*d to save earth” before. It begs the question why couldn’t the almighty one just nudge any incoming rocks instead of creating a massive planet that doesn’t always do its job.

      But again, this in no way explains why Jupiter violates the theory of evolution. It wouldn’t have happened if we got hit by more meteors? I think it would have happened regardless.

    2. A massive planet like Jupiter mops up a lot of large comets which would otherwise travel into the inner Solar System (for example Shoemaker-Levy 9).

      While not wrong, the planetary science isn’t as simpel as that, and without even stretching I can use your premises to argue that the presence of Jupiter in the solar system actually makes the development of (complex) life harder.
      Start off with – most planetary science models have gas giants forming largely by direct accretion of gases (H and He) onto a core built up of dust and ice. Sure, the growing gas giant does accrete some comets, but relatively small amounts. Mostly they’re H + He, not “metals”.
      However, the formation of gas giants and more-so their migration through the system roes scatter many comets and other minor planes out to for the “Oort Cloud” and it’s inner rotationally-aligned disc, the Kuiper Belt.
      The kinetic energy of a comet falling into the centre of the system where anything needing liquid water and/ or gaseous carbon dioxide must dell, is much greater than a similar comet coming in from, say Jovian orbit.

      Thus the presence of Jupiter much reduces the number of collisions of comets/asteroids with Earth, of the sort that (likely) wiped out the dinosaurs. If there were frequent impacts of that sort then perhaps larger life such as mammals would not have evolved on Earth.

      In my analysis, the presence of a Jupiter greatly worsens the consequences of a comet impact. Whether the reduced likelihood of an impact counteracts this would require more detailed modelling.

  8. As I listened to the kid extol the majesty that is Jupiter, I kept wondering: If we are supposed to be the pinnacle of creation and the chief concern of his god, why the heck is there such a huge, cool planet way out there? Why is there anything out there? Why isn’t it all just…here?

    1. Sastra can write well to this. Jupiter was put there for us to be impressed by its majesty; it’s a sign that Jesus loves us so much that he’d give us such an enormously big present.

      b&

  9. Don’t let’s forget Dan Barker, among others, who probably sounded like this at that age.

  10. The little Aussie is well-grounded in the art of the non sequitur. Should serve him well if he aspires to the clergy.

    1. Don’t blame the kid. He was probably told that his speech had to refute evolution in some way. So he gave the audience a little talk on Jupiter and tagged it with some imaginary creationist propaganda.

      1. I’m not blaming the tyke, Tom. Hell, I’ve had to resort to that mode of argument on occasion myself: “Of course the defendant didn’t walk to school, Your Honor; he was carrying his lunch!”

  11. Many creationists will attempt to attack Evolution simply on the issue of the age of the earth/universe because there are so many random ways in which they can try, and when one argument explains why they’re wrong, they can just move on to the next one.

    I’ve encountered these pseudoastronomical statements before. Typically it’s similar to the argument that “bees shouldn’t be able to fly.” Jupiter violates everything we know about planet formation!

    Another one I hear is that galaxies can’t be billions of years old because they would have flown apart.

  12. The amusing thing is how the religious denied the existence of Jupiter’s moons for years because God would not have created something with no effect on the Earth.

  14. I notice that the motto under the Title slide is “All Knowledge Through Christ.” Yep, that Christ is sure a great source of facts about science!

  15. This is a terrible shame. Charming young man, intelligent and well-spoken, with an obvious enthusiasm for space and science, brain polluted by palpable nonsense. And the greatest shame of all–a creator makes the existence of things like Jupiter that much LESS awesome. Since the creation of absolutely anything that is logically possible is consistent with the existence of an all-powerful creator, how can anything be considered truly marvelous? Gas giant. Yawn.

    1. Wait a moment — a planet that massive that’s made of methane and water vapor? All sorts of questions instantly arise…must be from many more generations of supernovae than our own system to have that mix of elements…what’s the proportion of really heavy elements?…it’s going to have to be a lot more dense, almost insanely so…what sorts of chemistry would be going on?…and that much carbon and oxygen…life?

      Something tells me there’ll be a lot of papers to come out of this and similar observations….

      b&

      1. Wait a moment — a planet that massive that’s made of methane and water vapor?

        In the near-IR wavebands where the planet’s brightness is least overwhelmed by the star, the biggest absorption features are of water and methane. Far and away the biggest features. So, if they could see anything, those two are first features they’d see – against a background thermal emission from H + He.
        It actually makes measuring methane in natural gas streams by IR a bit of a pain in the bum. If there’s a little bit of water in your gas sample then you can get a very wrong methane reading. So you then need to measure your water-in-air at a different wavelength, and your sensor cost has just doubled. (OTOH, IR is so much more robust than, say, chromatography or oxygen-displacement, that it is still worth pursuing.)

        1. Ah…so the methane and water is just what we’ve detected so far, and the planet may well be almost entirely hydrogen as I would expect?

          b&

  17. The young man’s speech was peppered with all sorts of precise data about Jupiter… the lengths of its year and its day, for example.

    By what means was this information originally figured out? Faith or Fact?

  18. I seem to remember reading, quite recently, that gas giants can only be manufactured closer to the sun and that jupiter had moved out to its present orbit after it had formed. perhaps this is what they are refering to when they claim that it could not have evolved in this position missing out the fact that it could have moved.

  19. tl;dr version: Jupiter is awesome, therefore God.

    [Hint to the kid: well one of ’em has to be the biggest]

    I think he’s confusing different meanings of the word ‘evolution’, such as this:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System

    or maybe even this:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Lancer_Evolution
    … which is certainly the product of intelligent design, and judging by its rally successes, highly intelligent design…

    cr

  20. Seems like a good Kid , no doubt he”ll come to realise the “facts” he’s been fed about Evolution are total bullshit.

  23. As an Australian, I’m embarrassed, that some of these schools exist in various bible belts. Those of us who are in Humanist groups etc, keep our eye on the curriculum taught. These are young kids. I’m more concerned with schools adhering to the Science curriculum in high schools. I’ll pass this on……

Comments are closed.