Operation: Refuting Compromise

Atheists Blast Christianity

Yet another misleading anti-Christian assault from Australia’s taxpayer-funded TV station

by Dr Jonathan Sarfati

19 April 2004

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) screened nationally a three-part series entitled ‘Testing God’ on 7, 14 and 21 March.  Originally produced in the UK, the anti-God thrust of the title of the first episode, ‘Killing the Creator’, accurately reflects its content.  But then, the taxpayer-funded ABC has a long history of anti-Christian bigotry—some may even call it Christian vilification.

For example, without fail, they would celebrate Easter with the bizarre anti-Christian theories of the likes of Barbara Thiering, while any token conservative Christian voice, if any, was given little airplay.  They also gave much air-time to glorifying the scientifically and ethically discredited Australian Humanist of the Year (1995) Ian Plimer, despite having to apologize twice for broadcasting blatantly false statements.  (However, this didn’t stop leading progressive creationist Hugh Ross from citing Plimer’s book Telling Lies … as an ‘authority’ for the alleged shortcomings of young-earth creationists, with no disclaimer at all about Plimer’s atheism and unethical tactics, or the book’s Bible-mocking and many bloopers (letter to Charisma, September 2003, p. 10.))

Even the ABC’s choice of staff shouts volumes about their agenda, e.g. outspoken village atheist Phillip Adams, Australian Humanist of the Year 1987, has a high position to promote his religion, with no conservative counterpart.  And Australian Humanist of the Year 1993, Robyn Williams, compères The Science Show. (The anti-Christian bias is well documented by Cameron Horn’s book Press v Pulpit: Christophobia in the Australian Media, available from AiG-Australia.)

The series is hosted by the ABC ‘religious affairs’ program called Compass, fronted by nominal Catholic Geraldine Doogue, who is usually promoting their anti-biblical philosophy.  This three-part series in 2004 perpetuates the fiction of a conflict between Christianity and science, in which Christianity loses.  As usual, the anti-Christians are only too happy to use ineffectual, or better, liberal theologians as ‘useful idiots’, Lenin’s term for his naïve supporters in the west who didn’t realise that they were destroying their own foundations.

The first program focuses on cosmology, the second on evolutionary biology and the third on the mind and psychology:

Program  1: ‘Testing God: Killing the Creator’

The whole thrust of this program is how modern science has allegedly proven that there is no need for a Creator.  However, they omit the Christian foundation for this very science, and make a number of logical and scientific errors.  The critique shows how the big bang has numerous flaws, and that the universe’s beginning is a cogent argument for a Creator.  It also shows the fallacies of atheistic arguments such as explaining the universe’s beginning by a quantum fluctuation and its design by multiverses.

Program  2: ‘Testing God: Darwin and the Divine’

This episode accepts evolution as a fact.  There is a curious alliance between rabid misotheists who use evolution as evidence against a Creator, and compromising churchians who claim that evolution was God’s way of creating things.  The critique shows that evolution is really a deduction from materialism, and can provide no foundation for morality, except the inhumane ‘morality’ of Hitler.

Further, only a biblical creationist framework provides an answer to how death and suffering can exist in a world originally created by a God of love.  That is, they are intruders into a world originally created ‘very good’, and were introduced by Adam’s sin.  The compromising churchians instead must believe that death and suffering were always part of God’s creation.  So they are reduced to the heretical idea that God is not sovereign, in control or all powerful.  They even maintain that God had to create by evolution so creatures could have free will.

Program 3: ‘Testing God: Credo Ergo Sum’

This program <www.starcourse.org/jcp/testing_God_3.htm> was waffly, and was mostly about topics outside AiG’s purview.  There was discussion on intercessory prayer and near-death experiences (NDEs).  See Near Death Experiences? What should Christians think? for AiG’s brief perspective.

To see AiG’s detailed responses to Programs 1 and 2, go to ‘Testing God: Killing the Creator’ and ‘Testing God: Darwin and the Divine’.

Additional recommended resources

• Refuting Compromise
• Refuting Evolution
• Refuting Evolution 2
• Why Is There Death & Suffering?

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