Posted on 08/28/2012 3:39:34 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Scientist and children’s television personality Bill Nye, in a newly released online video, panned biblical creationism and implored American parents who reject the scientific theory of evolution not to teach their beliefs to their youngsters.
“I say to the grownups, ’If you want to deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we’ve observed in the universe that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it,’” said Nye, best known as host of the educational TV series “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”
The video, titled “Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children,” was posted on Thursday by the online knowledge forum Big Think to YouTube and had netted more than 1.3 million views as of Monday.
In it Nye said widespread public doubt in the scientific concept of evolution — which holds that human beings and all other forms of life developed from a process of random genetic mutation and natural selection — would hinder a country long renowned for its innovation, intellectual capital and a general grasp of science.
“When you have a portion of the population that doesn’t believe in (evolution) it holds everybody back, really,” he said.
According to a Gallup poll that surveyed 1,012 adults in May, 46 percent of Americans can be described as creationists for believing that God created humans in their present form at some point within the last 10,000 years.
Education advocates have argued for decades over what children should be taught in public schools in regard to the formation of the universe, life and humans.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that requiring biblical creation to be taught in public schools alongside evolution was unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment separation between church and state.
In April, a law was passed that protects teachers in Tennessee who wish to critique or analyze what they view as the scientific weaknesses of evolution, making it the second state, after Louisiana, to enable teachers to more easily espouse alternatives to evolution in the classroom.
Nye said that while many adults may believe in creationism, children should be taught evolution in order to understand science. Absent a grasp of evolution, he said, “You’re just not going to get the right answers.” And he called evolution the “fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology.”
Teaching children the building blocks of science is essential for the country’s future, he added, saying, “We need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.”
Nye’s popular show, produced by Disney’s Buena Vista Television, aired from September 1993 to June 1998 on PBS and was also syndicated to local television stations.
Where did I do that? I said I thought it would be nice for them to know, although I don't endorse it. No where did I pretend to be even handed. I want my kids to know about it, and I even have taught them the evidence for ID, much of which is very interesting. (I find ID much more compelling that Genesis.)
So yeah, most of you wouldn't care to talk to me in real life, probably, but my point was that you can teach creationism without "harming" the child, therefore Bill Nye is an idiot.
I’m not a liberal.
And I’m not an atheist either.....I don’t understand why you posted that to me, along with a ton of other people for whatever reason.
The problem I have with this entire idiotic debate is WHO CARES? If you like creationism, great. If you like evolution, great. We need to spend more time focusing on the issues we have today rather than beating each other up over how we got here a million years ago! Why someone like Nye would stick his nose into child rearing is beyond comprehension and simply confirms my assessment that he is an idiot.
Thanks for the ping!
You’re not giving credit where credit is due...
Science in the Bible
http://www.clarifyingchristianity.com/science.shtml
Furthermore the book below is written by a modern day scientist who belongs in the pantheon of Newton, Einstien, Kepler, Mendel, Bacon, Pastuer, Paschal, etc.
Starlight and Time by Russell Humpheys
The key to the starlight and age of the universe is ‘gravitational time dilation’.
Your over thinking this one - read any two of the 450 translations and point out how much they differ - the basic message is there for all to see.
1. God requires perfection,
2. Mankind proves his imperfection time and time again he can never over come his sin nature on his own,
3. God provides a substitute to stand in our place if only,
4. Man can humble himself to study, worship, repent, and live as the great I AM proscribes for us to have the best life possible in the hereafter.
BIBLE ~ Blessed Intervention Begetting Life Everlasting
I have plenty of debt and zero savings but my retirement plan is out of this world!
You’re totally off base as to where the “content” came from.
There are HUNDREDS of original source manuscripts, including the Dead Sea scrolls, none of which varies in any important way...
unless you think that the Vatican and several other denominations found the Dead Sea Scrolls, found all the other 100’s of copies on 3 different continents, “controlled their content”, and re-deposited them.
I don’t know where you’re getting this “500 odd versions”, but it simply isn’t true. There are translations, but all translations were done from original manuscripts.
Sounds like ignorant atheist propaganda to me. (I actually used to believe exactly what you’re spouting, until I did the investigation myself.)
No, we don’t agree, but I know from whence my argument comes, from research. And in that research I saw all the arguments that you’re presenting, and saw that they were fallacious and basically wishful thinking on the part of humanists that wanted to “be their own boss”.
You, nor any other human, makes a good God. Only God fills that role.
Don’t Catholics and Jews generally believe in evolution?
But definitions matter.
Micro-evolution is better defined as adaptation within a species.
Macro-evolution has one species developing into another.
Once upon a time, a species was defined as being able to reproduce it's own kind.
Brown hair, blond hair, is simply a variation within a species.
If my pigmentation is darker than another’s, that is an adaptation.
Catholic teaching is fine with acceptance of evolution, as long as the basis is original creation by God.
The notion of infinite variation from a primordial soup, is an attempt to displace God from the process, as though it were some sort of accident, without purpose.
Yikes, Agamemnon! I, too, have questions and observations regarding the statements that Paradox has put into the record here.
Paradox self-identifies as an "evolutionist," and so is teaching her kids "about Evolution." The problem there, to my mind, is Darwin's evolution presupposes that "everything supervenes on the physical." That is to say,
Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis.... The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don't deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don't seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical.Instantly, a certain problem seems to arise here: If everything that exists is either "physical" (or "supervenes" on the physical) or "material," then how do we characterize mathematics? Scientific theories? The laws of Nature (the presupposition of which is absolutely essential for the conduct of science itself)? Has anyone ever seen any of these things running around on (physical) legs, so to speak?
No! They are non-physical, immaterial, and moreover universal.
Darwin's evolution theory is absolutely premised on the doctrine of physicalism, sometimes called materialism. As Jacques Monod put it, biological speciation is the product of "pure, blind chance." "Blind" here definitely connoting the idea that nothing in nature is purposeful. (Yet try to explain a biological function without the idea of a purpose to be achieved. As to biological functions, Darwinists at this point grudgingly admit an "apparent" purpose, in this context meaning not a really real purpose. To me, them be "weasel words!")
Darwin's speciation is the product of ceaseless, directionless change. Every now and then, natural selection will "freeze" a particular manifestation of this random change; and voila! We have a "speciation event!"
But this expectation begs a few questions. (1) What is inherent in physical matter that can lead to the emergence of non-physical mind? (2) If things are ceaselessly changing, how can they ever BE anything at all? (3) If nature is not purposeful, how can it be the way it is, why not some other way than what we actually see with our own eyes? (4) If nature — including human nature — has no purpose, what is the point of the exercise?
On this thesis, it would appear that all natural, biological, and specifically human existence IS a pointless exercise....
Yet as the distinguished evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out, even more remarkable than biological change is biological stasis:
Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome ... brings terrible distress.... They may get a little bigger or bumpier. But they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, it's not evolution so you don't talk about it.Jeepers, even Richard Dawkins recognizes this "stasis" in more honest moments:
...[T]he Cambrian strata of rocks ... are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.How does one reconcile such insights with what Darwin's evolution theory "predicts?" I personally do not see how it rationally can be done.
So home-schooler Paradox is filling up the young minds of her kids with this "junk," while disparaging any possibility of explanation of the natural world that are not premised in physicalism, materialism. But how can DNA be understood on such a premise? DNA is usually described as "a physical molecule." Okie-dokie, I can accept that premise and still insist that the "purpose" of this physical molecule is to mediate information processing — and that which it mediates — information — is not a physical quantity.
Dear Agamemnon, you wrote that "Darwinism is the lynch-pin of liberalism." True enough, to my mind. But more to the point, it seems to me it is the lynchpin of a materialist, secular religion explicitly promoted as a substitute for any view of the Universe that is not exclusively premised — that does not "supervene" — on the physical.
It is, in short, the great MYTH of our time — but unlike the great historical myths of mankind from the past, it is inauthentic, in that it is a revolt against the common experience of mankind as evidenced by human history, as captured by the arts and sciences of mankind from the dawn of history.
I'm grieved that Paradox equates "creationism" with "Intelligent Design." "Creationism" is the thesis that the universe had a beginning, which entails an end in time; that it had a creator (a First Cause, which is an uncaused cause, a "prime mover") — God. Creationists believe the universal Logos of God (Alpha to Omega) is what structures the natural world, such that it is intelligible to the thinking mind. On this definition, I am a "creationist."
But ID does not engage the "question" of God — at all. It remains "agnostic" on that point. It only seeks to discover the structuring principles of the universe, which it assumes (rightly, I think) are the result of the (intangible, immaterial) information loaded into it, as the "guides to the system."
Another thing that Darwin's theory does not explain is this: Either the universe is one, single, integrated, living being reflecting aspects of rational mind (as Plato thought) or at the very least, it is a system primed for life.
Darwinism doesn't have to say a single thing about Life, or how it came to be in our cosmic system.
Yet Paradox condescends to teach her kids "a little about Genesis, although I don't endorse it."
My question for Paradox would then be: How can you endorse or not endorse something you don't even understand? A person who closes his or her soul to God will never understand a word of Genesis....
Of course, certain folks nowadays propose that with advances in modern science, all the old "superstitions" and dumb "religious ideas" will evaporate into the fictional nothingness they always were.
But what I am finding, instead, is that the greatest advances in modern science of our era, rather than dispelling these foolish notions of a superstitious human past, are actually confirming the insights presented in Genesis.
For example: That the universe had a beginning in time; that though man has a material body, he does not reduce to physicalism (he was a spiritual creation before he was "incarnated" as a material body); the discovery of the Singularity; the inflationary expansion of the Universe; the common physical basis of all living and non-living existents in Nature (a major takeaway from quantum theory, IMHO); and so forth.
Well, just some thoughts, FWTW. Thank you ever so much for writing, dear Agamemnon, and for the ping!
WoW just read your essay in #71...
You are a thing to behold once “they” get you goin’..
I knew a preschool kid of a friend that knew all 50 State Capitals how to spell them and a little bit about what makes them special.. Home-schooled..
on a visit I taught the twins the Algebra game.. They loved it.. played it back at me..
1) If A + B = 10 and A is equal to 3 what is B?—>..
2) If A + B = 10 what is A AND B.?.. (like that)... (many answers)
Those girls are very smart kids today..
What does that have to with evolution?. EVERYTHING..
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ5-BTdcqjk
This physical chemist is one of those scientists.
Being "smart-ass" with a dumb@$$ is not a bad thing... As for YT, I carry my own protection, and need no pseudo-infallible human for that purpose.
For homeschool parents’ consideration if they use Bill Nye to supplement science.
Well that all depends on whose book is supplying the questions, doesn't it?
Urban VI was no dumbass and Galileo was a smartass about things he clearly did *not* understand. Galileo enjoyed favors and benefits from his relationship with the Pope and the Vatican, he squandered these foolishly.
What Nye, and other atheistic evolution pushers, seem to not grasp is that the greatest scientific progress was made in this country at a time BEFORE evolution was in the picture.
If it’s true that belief in creationism hinders scientific advance and progress, then any scientific progress should not have even been possible before Darwin proposed his theory.
The fact that it did gives lie to the claim they make that creationism harms scientific advance and will send us back into the Dark Ages.
Male Bovine Fecal Effluvia!
Please see post 78.
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