Before I get started with this post, let me first say that I was a big fan of "Bill Nye, the Science Guy" when my kids were young -- anything remotely educational was better than "Pokemon" or "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" -- cartoons that weren't mercifully killing brain cells, they were torturing them to death. It's virtually impossible to dislike the public persona. As an added benefit was the catchy jingle for the show intro: "Bill Nye the science guy -- Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!" turned out to be infinitely more pleasant to have permanently etched into your brain than "...heroes on a half shell - Turtle power!" However, even back then I realized that Bill Nye was not actually a science guy, but a television personality playing the role of a science educator of young children. Bill Nye had been an engineer before he entered the world of entertainment as a stand-up comic. "Bill Nye the Science Guy" was literally born on a comedy ensemble show -- it was a character he created that turned out to be a long running joke that people now take very seriously. At a website called Big Think where Nye answers questions from viewers, he is listed in their roster of "experts" as Television Host and Science Educator -- and that catchy, rhyming title of "Bill Nye the Science Guy" appears to give him instant credibility. Basically, Bill Nye merely regurgitates what he's learned from reading popular science books and tries to sound really smart while occasionally reminding his followers that he once was a student of Carl Sagan, presumably to borrow from Sagan's credibility as … [Read more...]
Questioning Darwin
This month HBO is airing a program that it promotes as a documentary, called Questioning Darwin. Somewhat predictably, the program paints the picture that Ken Ham and his museum for Young Earth Creationism should be considered the only viable and true alternative philosophy to Darwinism, completely ignoring brilliant thinkers such as John Lennox, Francis Collins, Connor Cunningham, Stephen C. Meyer and Frank Turek, as well as competing ideas such as Intelligent Design and Old Earth Creationism. The documentary dredges up the old, tired creationism versus evolution debate once more, reinforcing many of the known, misleading stereotypes and repeating the same mistaken assumptions that have pretty much been hashed to death already. The narrator begins by claiming that Christians who insist the Bible must be accepted as the literal Word of God are creationists who consider Darwin the antichrist. This was news to me. Based on my limited knowledge mostly gleaned from biographies of his personal life, I was sort of under the impression that Darwin was sort of a spoiled, petulant rich guy who married his cousin and never really had to work for a living. Curiously, the documentary described creationism as a growing branch of Christianity, as if "Creationist" was comparable to Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic. On the whole, the documentary depicted creationists as stubborn, ignorant and silly deniers of science, while the scientists were portrayed as calm, soft-spoken, rational people. There simply wasn't an option offered that didn't fit those two somewhat … [Read more...]
