In one portion, something stuck out at me:
Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.This is an important lesson to remember. When something new is discovered in science, there's often a great deal of uncertainty to it. But after thorough investigation, it generally settles down on an answer, even if that answer is quite different than the initial estimate.
Yet the gasbag Ray Comfort seems to think that's a problem. He's repeatedly complained that the Big Bang can't be true because astronomers have been furiously revising the estimates and made some pretty significant changes as we've beaten down the errors and refined techniques. He proposes that things that are eternal and unchanging are inherently better because you can't trust that darned Big Bang since the estimates keep changing.
Similarly, I guess Ray can't acknowledge the charge of an electron. Even though it's a fundamental quantity that underlies so much of electronics and physics and if it were wrong, they would crumble, if the estimate changes, it can't be trusted to exist in the first place.
This kind of thinking isn't just wrong. It's abhorrently stupid. There's no good response for such abject lunacy. The best we can do is point out the flaw and mock it, dissuading others from thinking it's a tenable position.
