I tried watching Ridley Scott's movie "Prometheus" this evening. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. But I couldn't. In the first few minutes of the movie, Scott had painted all of the "believers" as noble characters, and all of the "evidence-based reality" people as the sort you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.
In these few minutes of viewing, I saw the same sort of nonsense that you can find in typical creationist screed, including the "it's just a theory" non-argument (which really only shows the speaker's ignorance of what a genuine scientific theory amounts to). Meanwhile, the supposed archeologists of the mission, one of whom is painted as a noble believer, is being questioned by one of the evil evidence-based reality people with (paraphrased) "Where do you have any evidence that these supposed aliens jump-started the human genome?". The response (given with nobility of course) is "it's what I choose to believe." Well, that's not science at all and it certainly isn't going to get you published. Apparently, however, there are still enough rich people with lots of money to spend on promoting faith in the late 21st century to fund a "trillion dollar" expedition, so I guess there's that at least.
Like I said, I really wanted to like this movie. I loved Alien, and Blade Runner and even Numbers (the TV show), but this movie managed to establish everyone's character as completely unlikable, at least for the half-dozen or so characters that were explored, in a very short time. This made the movie unwatchable for me.
Incidentally, I'm well aware of the fact that being a believer doesn't absolutely preclude being able to do good research, but there's a big difference between being a scientist who has religious beliefs, and practicing the sort of non-science of coming to a conclusion sans evidence - currently largely the domain of "intelligent design research".
