By Nick Venable | 6 years ago



Religion and science have almost always been contentious bedfellows, with each side’s largest proponents often downplaying the other side, while the rest of us just sit back and watch the arguments. Some are quite pompous and rude about it, but world-renowned astrophysicist and pop culture icon Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for championing people for their faith, though he doesn’t subscribe to any particular creed. Some critics have been railing against his info-taining Fox series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey for being too one-sided in its depiction of science and evolution as wholly responsible for everything in the universe, but Funny or Die is here to give the religious reich a very special episode of Cosmos designed to fit into their belief system.

Hosted by Timothy Simons, who plays the incorrigible Jonah on HBO’s Veep, Creationist Cosmos is blatant satire, and could easily be a genuine terribly produced response to the Fox series. It’s ridiculously easy to envision someone cutting the “Funny or Die Exclusive” off and spreading this around the Internet as a how-to guide to the Truth about creationism. Part of the video’s genius is in how very little writing apparently went into it, as it’s mostly a series of “You know this thing? God created it” segments. A one-note joke that doesn’t overstay its welcome, since it’s basically how conversations with over-the-top zealots go, albeit with a flying church van. (Thankfully, most people live far below this line of no return.)

Seeing God’s face as a constellation is such an amazing introduction to the Almighty. And as community outreach leader Jared explains, God is everywhere you look anyway, since he made everything, from the moon to ants. In fact, it seems the only things God didn’t make were gay people, since they chose that for themselves, and fossils, because those were a trick that Satan put on Earth to sway believers. Funny or Die won’t win any awards for subtlety here, but then I don’t think there actually are any awards for subtlety.

It’s a wonder that some people expected the Cosmos update to be more open to spiritual interpretation, given it was developed by Family Guy‘s Seth MacFarlane, a known atheist who has given religion about as much slack as he’s given the 1980s and women. See a fairly tame example below.

This Sunday’s episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, called “The Clean Room,” will focus on putting an age to the Earth despite all the changes it’s gone through. You just can’t believe what you see on a planet’s driver’s license. Follow the footprints in the sand to a preview here.