Bill O’Reilly just doesn’t know how to back off of a blunder. During an interview with David Silverman, president of the American Atheist Group, O’Reilly proclaimed the mystery of ocean tides to help explain the existence of God. According to O’Reilly, no one knows why the tides go in and out, so it must be at the hand of some mythological God.
O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.
SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?
O’REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.
Of course, science long ago explained the reason tides move in and out, there’s no mystery to it at all.
The tides on the Earth are mostly generated by the gradient in intensity of the Moon’s gravitational pull from one side of the Earth to the other, the tidal forces. This forms two tidal bulges on the Earth, which are most clearly seen in elevated sea level as ocean tides
This all started because O’Reilly is upset about the recent increase of an atheist perspective and message in public places, such as on billboards and on the sides of buses. We’ve had Christian and other religious messages in public places forever, but given that atheism is on the rise in America as well as other countries, the voice of atheists can be heard louder and clearer than ever before.
So now, in answering a question on his video blog, O’Reilly screws up again, simply making stuff up as he goes along to support his un-supportable position on scientifically proven facts. “How’d the moon get there?”
The prevailing hypothesis today is that the Earth–Moon system formed as a result of a giant impact: a Mars
He admits in the second video that “Okay, the moon does it, but how did it get there?” And science has already explained that. So he goes on to say that if there’s life here, why not on the other planets? First of all, we don’t know if there is life on the other planets, but more specifically, O’Reilly obviously doesn’t know the other very real influence of the moon on Earth. The moon maintains a specific orbit for the earth which allows life to flourish. Without it, orbit would be much more random and temperatures would fluctuate wildly. This is all basic science. What’s interesting is that while O’Reilly wants you to take his “faith” on his word, he’s obviously too busy to read in order to discover facts.
