I like this idea much better than trying to tackle the huge subject of evolution in even a 2 hour special. This and other biblical stories are things that they can test with their expertise in construction and engineering. Others that come to mind are:
-Jesus walking on water
-Manna falling from heaven
-The ten plagues, maybe?
Well, I’m certainly not a biblical scholar. At any rate, if you treat the Christian bible as a source of myth, it’s the motherlode.
That’s a bit of a caricature, but your point does illustrate why this is a foolish task. Creationists don’t deny that natural selection occurs, or even that evolution occurs to a certain extent. Trying to “prove” evolution using the Mythbusters approach would simply make the Mythbusters look foolish.
I think that all of those would simply make them look foolish as well. Even a cursory reading of the Bible would indicate that these were meant to be unusual events – departures from natural, scientific behavior. It would be utterly unproductive to create a “scientific” experiment that demonstrates that a miracle could not have occured.
Not to mention that the last two examples would be completely infeasible. How would one design an experiment to debunk the notion of manna from heaven, for example? Or to debunk the occurrence of the ten Biblical plagues? (Not to mention that the manna did not “fall” from heaven; rather, it supposedly came from heaven and appeared on the ground.)
I think DiggitCamara’s point wasn’t that real-world birds should really come before mammals, but that that’s the kind of thinking you’d get from a person whose understanding of evolution was on the level of “dog giving birth to parrot”. Since “everyone knows” that mammals are more evolved than birds, and all.
And I’d also like to point out once again (it’s been said many times before) that creationism is perfectly consistent with evolution. Many people believe that God created the Universe and all its contents, and that he did so using natural selection and other scientifically-recognized mechanisms over a period of billions of years. “Creationism” doesn’t necessarily just mean “six days, 6000 years ago”.
I think it would be better to select some positive assertions made by creationists (such as “Haeckel’s embryo pictures are still being used to promote the debunked theory ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’”, or “Piltdown man appears as a supposed human ancestor in museums” - things like that - and expose then as the bullshit they truly are.
That makes more sense than attacking biblical miracles. I mean, they’re miracles, they’re not supposed to be believable or provable. Yes, you can interpret the bible as myth if you want to, but the Mythbusters are about urban myths. You know, cell phones causing cars to blow up at gas stations, coke dissolving teeth, that sort of thing. Their mission isn’t to debate the plausibility of actual mythology. Proving that Jesus couldn’t have turned water into wine is like proving that Icarus couldn’t have gotten off the ground with those wax wings.
Note: I’m not trying to make this in to a debate about whether religion = myth. I’m just saying that a lot of people would probably see “biblical mythbusting” as an attack on their faith, whereas going with Mangetout’s idea would probably cause less of an uproar.
Use Mythbusting ways to tear apart the attacks that modern creationists make against evolution, and we might have something.
The thing is, few people really think of that as creationism, whether or not it is. Some kinds of creationism are compatible with evolution, but many of the ones supported by people with politicians’ ears are not.
I bet he is first going to go for a BIG BANG…
Kirk is a genious. I mean, if I have the same amount of lines on my hand as a banana, then it must have been designed that way. Proven fact!
And I was going to send that to “America’s Funniest Home Videoes”. 
The bananas in my fruit bowl don’t have the same number of lines on them as on my hands, and because of this, I am obviously completely unable to eat them. Go figure
I’ve seen creationists claim exactly this kind of thing - basically that evolution claims that dogs can come from parrots. They’d consider this a “proof” of evolution, rather than a disproof.
Noah’s Ark would be an excellent episode. The “scientific” creationist claim is that the ark is plausible, since if they admitted it required all miracles then they couldn’t pretend it was alternate science. Perhaps they could also measure the heat generated by all that water falling from the vapor canopy, which would burn up the earth. They do need flames or explosions to make a good segment, after all.
Okay, you’re absolutely correct. I tried to extend the Noah’s Ark idea to other things and it completely didn’t work for exactly the reason you state. Mangetout’s idea about statements made by modern Creationists is much better.
See, I don’t see it as “compatible”. I wasn’t even taught them as “compatible”. I was taught in a Catholic high school (one that’s got about as much prestige as a high school CAN have) that if evolution was ever proven, that’s fine, then God is the spark that enables evolution. As a matter of fact, hearing this priest teach this was my final, mortal blow to any faith I’d have in Christianity/Catholicism/whatever combination of capital and lower case letters we wish to use. It was a blatant exercise in having your cake and eating it too, and technically immoral. After all, the point was “well, if we’re proven wrong, we’ll figure out some other way to come up right, even though we were proven wrong once”.
Now, I won’t claim that this priest was speaking ex cathedra or anything, but I DO want it to be known that this teaching IS out there and in the halls of a powerful and influential high school.
To close my rant, I’d say that the basic, garden variety strand of Creationism DOES rely and push “six days, 6000 years ago”. That belief makes the basic, garden variety strand of Creationism…fertilizer.
JAMIE: So, Adam, what’s our next myth?
ADAM: This was submitted to our website. One of our viewers found a book which claims that the entire universe was created in six days.
JAMIE: And how are we going to test that?
ADAM: I know you hate the competitions, but we’re going to do a Mythbusters build-off. Basically, you and I each have six days to create a universe, and whichever one of us makes the better universe wins.
(later)
JAMIE: What did we find out?
ADAM: As usual, we took completely different approaches to trying to prove this myth. I started with the planets and just couldn’t make anything like the earth. Sorry about your lathe. Yours was a little better; you got as far as ‘let there be light’, but you cheated by just plugging in a light bulb.
JAMIE: So, busted, plausible or confirmed?
ADAM: I’d have to say this myth is totally busted.
Ha. That’s precious. Someone needs to make QED push this thread to the Mythbusters.
They could repeat the Miller-Urey experiment. Might even make good TV.
Best image all day.
It sounds like an awful idea for what is essentially a light hearted television program.
Marc
The Mythbusters still get lettters from free energy crackpots claiming that their experiments were wrong or incomplete. And you’re going to convince creationists that their most cherished life-long belief is wrong because Adam and Jamie did some kind of experiment. Not gonna happen.
I’ve had arguments with creationists about the lack of a flood record from contemporaneous civilizations. Or the lack of flood evidence in the geological record. It doesn’t matter. If they can explain away dinosaurs, they can explain away anything.
All this show will do is generate a ton of angry mail, and if they’re lucky, free publicity. If they’re unlucky, boycotts and threats to the network. In the meantime, it will make the show take a decidedly serious turn, which is antithetical to what it’s all about.
Penn and Teller are the right boys for this job. And I think they already did it.