I’d like to preface by saying I admire Bill Nye. He’s one of those rare personalities who inspires us to learn more about the world and his contributions to education are indispensable.
That said, I’m not quite sure why he agreed to debate Australian “young Earth” creationism believer Ken Ham (watch the debate here). In fact, I have no idea why any scientist would bother to debate someone who believes the book of Genesis is a literal telling of how the universe was created. To conduct and participate in a debate between science and creationism suggests that there’s, in fact, a valid counterpoint to science — two equal sides to the issue.
This isn’t a debatable issue. There’s one side and science won a long time ago. Genesis is a metaphor. It’s over.
The other day, I read an article about how a gaggle of weirdos who believe that militant atheists are using chemtrails to murder angels. This isn’t Alex Jones territory, it’s Alex Jones fever dream territory — a perfect storm of derangement, paranoia and religious fanaticism. Shall we commence a two-sided debate about this? No way. There’s one side that’s real and… nothing else. Atheists aren’t in any universe committing genocide against angels using chemtrails and, yes, evolution is reality.
Incidentally, just because a group of people believes something to be true doesn’t make them liars, and, likewise, it doesn’t mean those beliefs are worthy of representation in a debate parallel to empirical reality. Offering these unprovable, and in some cases ludicrous beliefs equal standing only serves to ordain these beliefs as equally valid with scientific consensus. This is precisely the same argument against allowing creationism to be taught in public school science classes. Tuesday night, Bill Nye inadvertently allowed creationism to be taught in what should’ve been merely a science class.
Unlike the political debate, this isn’t a matter of right versus left, or equality versus inequality, or pragmatic versus radical… [CONTINUE READING HERE]