Salon

This article originally appeared on AlterNet

Creationists find evolution so offensive that this week they attacked Neil deGrasse Tyson and his show Cosmos over the claim that stars evolved and created life as we know it. In episode 8 titled, “Sisters of the Sun,” Tyson highlighted the stellar evolution and explained in detail the life and death of stars.

Of course creationists take issue with stars that are scientifically proven to be billions of years old. The creationist website that’s emerging as the leading opposition to Tyson and his show, Answers in Genesis (AiG), claimed: “We know from the Bible that God created the stars on Day Four of Creation Week about 6,000 years ago.”

Yet they do not know this, because there is zero evidence that any star we see in the sky is less only 6,000 years old, in fact for us to see almost any of the stars in the sky they would have to be hundreds of millions or billions of years old because of how far away they are (as explained in earlier episodes of Cosmos about what a light-year is.)

The continued use of the universe’s actual timescale, an estimated 14.8 billion years to now, is a thorn in the side of creationists who know anything older than 6,000 years brings their entire myth to its knees.

AiG even goes as far to deny the fact that stars are born at all: “Whether or not stars are still forming today, the Bible does not specify, but no one has ever seen a star form.”

Yet we do not need to the Bible to know if stars are still being born. Astronomers at from a collection of Universities from the US to Germany have observed such phenomenon, a star being born 800 million light years away. This coupled the Hubble Space Telescope having located massive amounts of stellar nurseries and has helped us fully explain the birth of stars.

Not surprisingly AiG’s own Danny Faulkner, an astronomer by degree, but not in practice claims that if stars are being formed today that we do not need science to explain how because God has the ability to make such things happen on his own.