A response to Bill Nye

I often think there aren’t enough things for me to blog about, but it turns out that there is no shortage of stupidity on this planet. Here is the popular quote:

“And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can – we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.

“It’s just really a hard thing, it’s really a hard thing. You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I’m sure, will be, it just won’t exist. There’s no evidence for it.”

On the surface, it’s easy to think that Mr. Nye is asking us not to teach our children our religious view, and if you stopped at just reading quotes in the media, that’s what you probably do believe. I’m glad to have watched the video , titled “Creationism is not appropriate for children”, as that isn’t exactly the message, but really it’s pretty close. The very title of the video is just about enough on it’s own, but I would urge everyone to watch it before forming an opinion, because then all you’re really forming an opinion on, is other peoples’ opinions of the video, not the video itself.

So what’s it all about? Really, his core message is to not use taxpayer dollars to teach Creationism as a legitimate theory in schools. I’m actually okay with this. Why? Because separation of Religion and State is a good thing. I don’t want my children learning about other religions in school, unless they’re taking a religious studies class that goes over other world religions, and then, it would have to be with my approval. So we cannot have it both ways, having only our religious viewpoints expressed in schools. It’s a bad thing.

Now, watching the video, you cannot help but notice the subtle overtone that Mr. Nye clearly things that Creationism is quite ridiculous and he actually says that the theory of evolution is core to everything in Life Science (Biology). As if Biology cannot stand on its own without evolution as a base. This is in no way true. The evolution theory is actually fairly unnecessary in almost every way to anything, other than perhaps genetics and DNA research. It’s really not that useful of a theory honestly, although perhaps someday in the future, scientists will make more breakthroughs and finally make it actually worthwhile. Right now, it’s not worthwhile. It has added zero benefit to the scientific community other than to confuse everyone into thinking that it’s a proven, valuable thing, when it is not. Now, if actual evidence and data someday supports evolution, I’ll be fine changing my viewpoints on it, but right now, no such supporting data exists.

However, Mr. Nye did mention the age of the universe and paralleled that evolution fits in better with the billions of years model of space than creationism. That’s because evolution requires billions of years to work, and really the main support for the statement. So if we think the earth is billions of years old, then this has some credence. Here we really start touching more on religious viewpoints that scientific viewpoints though. It’s kinda funny that it all hangs on the seven days of creation. If it weren’t for that, things would really be different. So either you think everything happened in seven physical days, and thus have a problem, or you believe that it’s just an overview of what G-d did, and you have no real problem. I’ve offered another Creationism theory, so I had to consider how this affects that theory.

I thought the pic was a cool timeline based on the flood. I haven’t evaluated it in anyway, just enjoy that someone put some effort into it!

To me, there are only a few key things to comment on, without any real definite resolution (because I haven’t lived for billions of years). First, on the one hand, you would think if man was created early in the life of the planet (sixth day) and given a planet that is several billions of years old, we would expect that the population of the earth would be much higher than it is now. The population of the planet doesn’t well support that humans have been around for billions of years. This however, supports neither side as it really doesn’t help evolutionists much either. Another point to consider, is that we haven’t uncovered any civilizations that far in the past. It doesn’t seem from our archaeological finds, that humans have existed for billions of years. Once again, doesn’t help either side really.

So what evidence actually supports an Earth age of several billion years? Really the only thing that does is fossils. Fossil ages for me are a mystery. I can’t make myself believe that there are reliable methods for dating them. The most used is, and just going from memory so the element is probably wrong, but Uranium based dating. So it determines the age by the decay rate of an element. To me, this idea is faulty because it expects the decay rate to remain constant for billions of years and never change. I find this hard to believe, since a billion years is just a long time and it feels possible that the decay rate could change at some point (speed up, slow down, be affected by environmental factors). I know ‘feels like’ isn’t very scientific, but I think some common-sense is sometimes useful (this isn’t always true though!). Also, I believe that fossils many times are taken from earth layers that aren’t likely to have been billions of years old, but the fossil is dated as billions of years old because it falls inline with the evolutionary scientist digging it up, so they discard the age of the earth layer in favor of the age of the fossil. This post goes over it in more detail, and while not presented in the most professional and scientific format, it sums up things better than I have time for here. It states that in most cases, scientists discard rock ages that they don’t like and keep the ones that fit what they want to believe, and I in-fact believe this is often true.

This ran a bit long, so for now, happy thinking!