Posted on 08/28/2012 11:53:12 AM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
Bill Nye used to be “The Science Guy” on PBS. Now he’s just a godless hater.
The former host of the “educational” TV show targeted to preteens, which aired from 1993 to 1998, said this week that those of us who believe that God created man and woman are idiots. And that we ought not pass along that belief to our children.
“I say to the grownups,” Nye condescended, “if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, your world that’s inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it.”
Because, said Nye, who places his faith in Darwin, rather than God, “We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.”
As I considered Nye’s remarks, I wondered if he passed along his thoughts on evolution to Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, who presided over The Science Guy’s quicky marriage back in 2006 (which lasted a mere seven weeks before ending in a decidedly weird, decidedly ugly breakup).
What does it say about Nye’s integrity that he stood before a pastor who absolutely believes the creation story set forth in the Book of Genesis; that he exchanged marriage vows with his seven-week bride before a God in Whom he doesn’t believe?
Yet, he presumes to tell the rest of us what we should teach our children.
And while Nye may be scientifically “literate,” notwithstanding that he has no formal scientific education, he is not nearly as infallible as he makes himself out to be.
Just last year, in fact, The Science Guy demonstrated his scientific shortcomings when he appeared on CNN to discuss damage sustained by a Japanese nuclear plant in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami.
Nye stated, incorrectly, that cesium is used to “slow and control” the nuclear reaction. But as any nuclear scientist would tell him, cesium is a nuclear fission product, not a control rod material.
Nye also stated, incorrectly, that the nuclear reactor involved in the Three Mile Island accident was still online.
And The Science Guy erred in telling CNN viewers that use of boron to slow the nuclear reaction is uncommon, when, in fact, boron-10 is commonly used in control rods and is circulated in the coolant of most, if not all, reactors in this country.
Now, the average CNN viewer could not be expected to know these things. But Nye, the so-called Science Guy, should have known better. Especially if he was going to discuss the subject on national TV.
It obviously doesn’t occur to Nye that, if he was dead wrong on nuclear energy, he could be just as wrong on evolution.
Otherwise the former Science Guy wouldn’t be so contemptuous of those of who are not scientific illiterates; who simply find less believable the science-fiction that ape transmogrified into man, than the Bible’s explanation that all-powerful God created man.
Ghink of it as similar to learning how to field at third base: it's a skill, an art, not a science.
Connaître, not savoir.
The problem with science is illustrated in the old joke about the man looking for a coin he dropped one night. Someone comes up and sees him looking under the streetlight; after they both look for a time, the new person asks the guy, "Are you sure you dropped the coin here?"
"No, I dropped it down the street and around the corner."
"Then why aren't you looking over there?"
"Well, the light's better over here."
The metaphysical preconditions for science are "uniformity of causes in a closed system"; which after a period of time, for the intellectually lazy, is expressed as materialism. But it is very difficult to come up with what would be a rigorous test for materialism itself; the more so as the candidate for non-materialistic actor (God) is sentient and is able to make choices without respect to our controls.
("How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?")
Well, it's a difficult problem, so let's ignore it.
After a time this gets shortened to "there's no such thing as angels" and then "there never could have been any such thing as angels".
It's a subtle error, compounded by something akin to what Owen Barfield called "ancient unities" : human thought itself, including the words and categories, has changed over time -- to the point that things which we regard as self-evidently distinct were in fact not differentiated at all. "Why is the sky blue?" can be explained by "Because God thought it was pretty and he was right" or by reference to energy-dependent scattering cross sections of visible light by a nitrogen-oxygen mixture of gases subject to density and temperature gradients. The confusion comes over different meanings of the word "Why?" : the one being *purpose* and the other *mechanism*. And the ancients didn't have much of a concept of a model as we understand it, still less of empirical testing, controls, and the like; the two forms of "why" overlapped.
Along with the development of empiricism as an adjunct to, then a rival, then a supplanter of scholasticism (it was not limited to theology or cosmology; and the tendency to rely on authority still lingers on today in medicine!), was a concentration on *power* : magic was in fact a rival to technology, and was abandoned not because "we knew better" but because it was lacking in comparative efficacy.
Which brings us back to connaître and savoir: science is the discipline of learning how to predict in order to make use of, or to control; it is not concerned with ultimate causes in the first place; nor again with morals. (Read any economics textbook on utility functions to see the amorality dripping off of the pages.) But just because these items do not impinge on the model, is not sufficient grounds to conclude, let alone to declare ex cathedra that they do not exist, still less that science has "disproven" them.
For more reading on this, try Galileo's Daughter or C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image; Lewis has brief forays in some of his novels into the competition of science and the magical arts at the beginning of the Renaissance. (You know, he was a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Oxford and then Cambridge; and if, as so many atheists do, you sneer at his simplicity, try reading his Allegory of Love to discover the breadth and depth of his knowledge of the period's literature.)
Cheers!
Did the ancient proto-whales take Thalidomide or something? And did they use the half-leg / half-flippers for surfboarding?
You'll have to show that this intermediate stage represented a stable enough niche w.r.t. predators as well as mobility on land/water/swamp/whatever, or else you are engaging in circular reasoning.
Two more interesting questions which I've never seen anyone one answer rigorously are --
1) the time frame over which the changes occurred, compared to the rate of change of the environment (I doubt it was changes in solar irradiation which prompted the transition, btw...); and compared to the expected mutation rate per base pair per generation; and it'd be really really cool if one could map the proteins and structures expressed directly to both the genetics and epigenetics.
2) At what point did the genetic line diverge so that the fin-droppers / fin-acquirers (depending on which direction they were going) could no longer mate with their homies left on land
3) How well did the changes in the mode of locomotion map to changes in streamlining of the rest of the body, storage of body fat / temparature regulation, changes in birthing and maternal practice, and modification of lungs? What is the purported physical mechanism by which changes in the legs make changes in these other structures follow? (I mean, it's not like there's a lot of variation in the placement of nostrils normally: so why should the genes controlling nose structure suddenly start exhibiting more mutations just because the legs became fin-like)? 4) By the way, I assume it is a good guess that the entire species did not suddenly grow semi-fins, but rather just a couple of litters? If that is the case, then unless this change was a dominant characteristic compared to normal legs, then the progeny with semi-fins or even more-finnish limbs, could only have resulted from the breeding of the limited population with the first set of proto-fins. If that's true, how did they avoid the deleterious effects of genetic bottlenecks from too few breeding pairs?
Cheers!
Speaking of going, I'm going to bed.
Cheers!
I am not sure what your old joke about the coin has to do with anything we are discussing.
If you deny that we live in a universe of “uniformity of causes in a closed system” which I take to mean an Objective reality then you have abandoned reason and there is no basis for us to continue discussion any further.
I have given you an example of a transitional form which you claim to want to see and you give me a sort of stream of consciousness rambling set of nonsense.
What evidence do you have, other than the bible which can in no way be considered evidencein my opinion, that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old?
Are you serious? I have read that website and I see nothing but arbitrary claims and theories. It is not even worth considering. Why am I even bothering?
Thank you for the ping. I actually have an interest in ID, although for me that is a long way from Genesis. “Calculating God” was an interesting story that got me started.
By analogy, one may set up an experiment in a chem lab, lock the door, and leave it to run overnight.
The results are assumed to be a fair test, that is, none of the grad students snuck into the lab overnight to retrieve their own glassware, and in doing so, turned off the electricity to your heater for half an hour.
Materialism assumes that there is not, never was, never can be, any external forces which cannot be controlled for (no supernatural).
How does one actually test that *rigorously* ? It is a philosophical assumption hiding behind the cloak of rationality: but it is not justified by the experimental results.
You are over-relying upon Occam's razor, which is useful for eliminating false positives, but isn't so hot at preventing false negatives.
Nice try, though.
Cheers!
It was neither stream of consciousness, nor rambling; nor yet again nonsense.
Explain to me (ab initio) what the expected mutation rate in base pairs of genetic material is in mammals; compare this to the expected rate of novel cladistic features or morphological structures such as walking limbs turning into fins.
Relate this to known environmental changes in the vicinity of this group of animals where they were alive, including the rate of change of the physical topology (land becoming marshy, drought which would reduce animals which previously fed on land *and* in the sea to rely on seafood, thereby making fins advantageous) and the local food web.
Can you do that?
Because, you know, evolution is the study of allele changes in a population over time (presumably in response to changes in the environment which render certain traits more advantageous for surviving *and* producing viable offspring).
If you can't then all you have is handwaving for that example, not science.
The other questions are similarly rigorous, even though you apparently decline to discuss them.
Cheers!
You prove that they’re “transitional forms” rather than separate species that a scientist wants to believe are transitional?
If you are that prejudiced against the Bible, you cannot consider yourself objective. A true scientific mind (which you earlier confessed you have not trained yours to be) considers all possibilities.
The person you’re replying to has already confessed to being deficient in scientific knowledge, yet wishes to press in a dogmatic manner this alleged “evidence”. It’d be unkind to throw actual scientific questions (with associated jargon) that person’s way, of course.
Scientists thus far have admitted that they have barely scratched the surface of deciphering every genetic marker of complex beings such as all the Mammalia, never mind humans. They even struggle with how enzymes are so reaction-specific. The more I learn of the three traditional branches of science, the more the evidence points away from a wholly materialistic explanation, or any kind of materialistic explanation for that matter.
Some others have postulated Behemoth to be Paraceratherium, aka Baluchitherium. It certainly was tall enough.
You’ve just declared Linnaeus to be infallible and ineffable.
When I was younger, taxonomists classified the giant panda as a raccoon, along with the red panda (in the Procyonidae family). Nowadays it is in Ursidae (the bears), or at least according to most scientists; the red panda has its own family (Ailuridae).
Duly noted -- thank you for stepping in.
Cheers!
All historical science is arbitrary claims and theories - most esp. evolution - more stories than you can shake a stick at...
It just so happens that this one particular theory - the hydroplate theory - explains many more features of the natural phenomenas. And since it jives with the Biblical claims I feel it is important to share with fellow believers as well as skeptics.
Since most are probably too busy to read maybe you [or other lurkers] would prefer to take an hour or so so watch, listen and learn...
Fountains of the Deep - the Flood of Noah; Earthquakes; 2 video series by Pastor Kevin Lea of Port Orchard Calvary Church in Port Orchard, OR [available on youtube videos] http://www.youtube.com/user/CalvaryChurchPO#p/c/11/XXQKSv5o_Po
BTW before Pastor Lea went into ministry he got his degree in nuclear physics.
I ‘ghink’ that was one of the best late-night posts I’ve read to explain the meta-physical aspects of modern science.
Thanks and I’ll be sure to include more of C.S. Lewis in my future readings. Esp. loved ‘The Four Loves’ available on audio too [in fact, maybe the only audio book recorded in his own voice].
hee yuck
u r so funny
You’re right all of science is just arbitrary theories not based on reason. I mean for instance scientist believe that the dinosaurs were all killed by a commit or asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago. Since I can’t believe the scientist what did kill the dinosaurs?
Commit was supposed to be Comet. Sorry.
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