Oh the sneaky sons of bastards

So I was planning on refreshing my memory a little and searching for any new advances in astronomy, and so googled "big bang theory". Under the results for the (amazingly funny) sitcom and the Wikipedia article was a promising link: big-bang-theory.com. I click it. Read a bit...some things raise a few warning flags, but I read on...surely the science is still yet to come. Ah, finally, a link. But wait, it says "Does God Exist?". I click, but with a measure of trepidation. The site it leads to uses the domain "allaboutphilosophy.org". By this time my interest has been raised. What are they driving at? By the time I read their "Things to consider" section, I haven't a shadow of a doubt. These are Jesus-folk.

But I just gotta go on. Little to my surprise, the next section is "Holy Bible - God's Word". Obviouser and obviouser. It tries to pretend once again to be impartial and objective, but the fanboyishness becomes glaringly obvious. Nevertheless, I continue to the next section. Reading the title of its first subsection almost makes me gag. I can take no more. But I have a suspicion just where this is going. I keep skimming through each section, noting how each is drawing deeper and deeper into Jesustian lore(and refuting in my head each of the arguments I pick up). Finally, I reach the end, and my suspicions are confirmed. The title of the page? "Become A Christian" (The domain name is now "allaboutgod.org", having gone through "allabouttruth.org".

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this was not a scientific site, but an attempt to evangelise and proselytise. Really couldn't help but feel cheated of my valuable time and bandwidth.

This site is obviously misleading: it turns up fifth in the search page and is the first result which isn't a Wikipedia article or about the sitcom, so I'll bet it must get a lot of hits from people just out to discover more about the theory. And if the searcher isn't that well versed in the science of the theory, nor the dishonest arguments used by these fellows, they might leave deceived, or worse, they might be - *gasp!* converted!

I guess I should have heard the warning bells when they called my good buddy Bob Gentry's kookery an "attractive theory" (I'm currently conducting research on his claims with the aim of compiling a de-bunking of one of his videos. Watch this space) right there on the first page. But the prehistoric, recycled arguments in the "Things to consider" section of the next page are what revealed their true colours (idiotic probability calculations being among one of them). The third page, talking about the bible and all, goes on to proclaim the accuracy of the bible and straight out lying that ancient and more recent manuscripts agree with each other(see here). At the end of the jouney, when you click "No" to "Have we managed to suck your brains out yet?", they say "oh, man, we were just like you once, atheists and skeptics and all". That's inconsequential, but I find myself doubting the veracity of that statement.

All in all, a very sneaky, pretty clever ploy by the owners of the site. Still dishonest, though, and misleading, on top of using flawed arguments that have been debunked already at least a million times.