Comments on: Bill Nye on creationism: "Your world view just becomes crazy"

By: centralmidfield

centralmidfield — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 03:47:00 +0000

We’re talking about taking life-instruction from a FICTIONAL BOOK, here people. The Bible has absolutely NOTHING factual to support it’s story and is frankly ridiculous in it’s content. If you have a mental disorder or were indoctrined at a very young age and believe that tripe, then seek help now. You cannot argue with Science – YOU HAVE NOTHING TO ARGUE WITH. (e.g. if God created everything… WHO CREATED GOD?)

By: chgoliz

chgoliz — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 03:36:00 +0000

Or you could just accept the knowledge of millions of actual scientists who have a much simpler and proven explanation that does not require such mental gymnastics.

By: gloriana232

gloriana232 — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 03:28:00 +0000

Even as an atheist, I figured that God created stuff, and science just explains how it works. I mean, even if you MADE something, it still have some kind of internal working. Can’t God create the universe via the Big Bang?

By: Daniel Van Koughnett

Daniel Van Koughnett — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 20:38:00 +0000

How did you get to be an engineer and yet remain so ignorant of science? Methinks you are pulling our leg. I’ll bet the closest you ever got to an engineer was when you cleaned his office.

By: Bladewalker56

Bladewalker56 — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 20:03:00 +0000

I see plenty of inconsistency in the bible, as well and I’ve read and studied the bible extensively. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons that I became an atheist. Since the god of the bible refuses to make an personal appearance and clear up the controversy, any claim that your understanding is somehow superior to any other person’s understanding is dubious at best.

By: wizardru

wizardru — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 19:41:00 +0000

“It’s on a different level then going to a park and sharing a game of cricket or whatever with some other family. Maybe you should get out to more churches so you understand what we are talking about here.”

Some of us have been to churches plenty of times and have raised kids as well and STILL disagree with you. Churches, synagogues, temples and mosques are not special snowflakes of social gatherings. Just because you don’t envision people making friends at 5K runs for Autism Awareness or at the local community day doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Are these really cohesive groups that promote socialization within their community? Of course they are. But if you don’t think there aren’t similar communities is secular social constructs, you’re deluding yourself.

I have been in these situations, made friends and invited them out to dinner or a date. I have been in these situations and met people like my wife, the best man at my wedding, a former roommate and lifelong friend, my best friend and others in EXACTLY these situations. I met one friend at a freshman mixer where we found we could finish Monty Python sketches from memory together: we’ve been friends for 25 years now. Another I met during a fire drill. My wife I met at a club meeting. And so on.

The point is this: we understand that you find your experience with your church to be spiritually fulfilling, rewarding and a safe place to socialize. No one wants to take that away from you. What we’re telling you is that these experiences are not the exclusive purview of religious institutions and that many of us HAVE experienced them and found that they did not offer us what they offer you, but that we have secular institutions and situations that DO offer those things to us.

By: Bladewalker56

Bladewalker56 — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 19:16:00 +0000

In other words, get the funk outta my faith. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun

By: retepslluerb

retepslluerb — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:57:00 +0000

Wait, what? You have a degree in astronomy, i.e. fully understand that the universe is fifteen billlion years old, the Earth about 5 billion years and you still adhere to the belief that God placed humans on this earth around 6.000 years ago?

By: New Rulz

New Rulz — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 14:46:00 +0000

A bunch of illiterate desert dwellers made the crap up. Believing in god is simply stupid. You want to believe in god, fine, but don’t tell me that I have to live my life based on some rules you make up in an effort to kiss your god’s ass

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 06:45:00 +0000

If you want to explain anything involving biology, not having evolution as a tool really makes things tough – it’s a lot worse than having to do planetary astronomy using epicycles to explain why planets sometimes move backwards in the sky because you think they’re revolving around the Earth instead of the sun. Sometimes evolution is a pretty crude tool, e.g. “This animal has this trait because some random cosmic ray hit one of its ancestors, causing a mutation that changed this gene to make that protein instead of the other one, and nobody ate the ancestor before it got around to reproducing”, while other times it gives you a lot more detailed explanation.

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 06:38:00 +0000

Let’s see, you’re trying to use that pick-up line to get people interested in a philosophy that says people will be nicer to each other if there aren’t any principles at all? How’s that working out for you? Because if you don’t have any supernatural entities telling people to be decent human beings, everybody’s going to have to figure out how to do it for themselves, and some just never will.

By: Lyle Hopwood

Lyle Hopwood — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 05:56:00 +0000

Donny, you have independently come up with a theory attributed to Philip Gosse and discussed at great length in his book Omphalos (1857). In a nutshell (so to speak) he believed trees were created full grown, and so had dozens of tree rings and therefore *looked* to be many years old – and similarly all sorts of newly created things appeared to be old. I’m an biologist myself, and think it’s rubbish, but I’ve always liked the idea of it.

By: chinneths bao

chinneths bao — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 05:53:00 +0000

“I’m a faithless man of science of course, but I fail to see how faith can’t jibe with our advancement of human understanding.”

Umm how about by nuking whole countries under the leadership of Zionist Freaks or Jihadists or even Irish Catholics… Yeah religious and ethic differences don’t jibe anything in countries like Yugoslavia. I bet dem kids got lots of science learning done when they were being ripped out of their homes and murdered… I bet they sure did dudes.. just like the Palestinian children are doing a great job of learning in schools that are exploding.. yeah faith doesn’t jibe anything now does it?

By: Timmy Corkery

Timmy Corkery — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 05:22:00 +0000

Pfft. You chemists are so obvious.

(EDIT: Sorry. XKCD joke (xkcd.com/435/); less obvious than I’d hoped.)

By: benher

benher — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 04:04:00 +0000

I enjoy mocking the religious faithful.

I take pleasure in watching them bend over backwards to make the natural world fit into the fables of their fantasy book by employing excuse and compromise!
They weep and rave into the void, longing for their god that will never come to save them.

Consider that it serves our evolved human sense of humor.

By: paulio

paulio — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:48:00 +0000

I get out plenty. All the places you talk about aren’t really similar at all. When you go to the places you mention, unless you meet someone there, you won’t talk to anyone else. I said there are plenty of specialty hobbyist clubs, like theater, sports, RC cars, hacker spaces, way too many to mention, but they aren’t open to everyone, well they are, but you need specific interests to join. With a church all you need is some vaguely similar idea with the people around you, and that’s enough. It’s on a different level then going to a park and sharing a game of cricket or whatever with some other family. Maybe you should get out to more churches so you understand what we are talking about here.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:30:00 +0000

Yeah, the field of “Biology” really is a backwater of scientific endeavor when you get right down to it.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:27:00 +0000

Others point to Genesis, and how the order in which things were created mirrors what we now have discovered about evolution.

And they’d be wrong. The bible’s order in which things were created has no relation to what we have now discovered about evolution. I’m sure you can tease meaning out it (knowing what the right answers are), but that’s about it.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:24:00 +0000

You think? Proselytization is hard-wired into any meme, or it wouldn’t continue to exist. Evolution, you know ….

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 02:58:00 +0000

I’m sorry, but if you’re thinking of the problems here in terms of being #1, you’re part of the problem. As a society, we’ve got a huge number of problems that need to be dealt with, and people constantly have to make decisions, and while not all of them require specific skills in the Life Sciences, but most of them require critical thinking, and it matters whether you’ve spent your education in school and beyond learning how to do that, or learning how to Not Do That.

By: danimagoo

danimagoo — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 02:58:00 +0000

I looked at his Wikipedia entry. “Nye began his career in Seattle at Boeing, where, among other things, he starred in training films and developed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor still used in the 747. Later, he worked as a consultant in the aeronautics industry.” I don’t think you’re giving him enough credit for his science and engineering chops.

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 02:50:00 +0000

My wife and I were at Cornell around the same time Bill Nye was, but we didn’t know him, and of course he hadn’t become The Science Guy yet. Neither of us took Carl Sagan’s course (too popular, so it was hard to get into, and there were lots of other cool courses to take as well), but she took one summer seminar from one of Sagan’s department heads who was named something like Tenzin.

On the other hand, Nye is sort of name-dropping there, since according to Wikipedia, he was a MechE, not an astronomer…

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 02:43:00 +0000

One of the valuable things I learned from Objectivism (yeah, yeah, but I got better!) was how much of our belief system we consider to be perfectly Rational and Reasonable and Obviously True when it isn’t, and we’re just telling ourselves that the stuff we like or want must be right because we like it or want it. Ayn Rand’s tastes in music, art, and drugs were Obviously Rationally Based, because She said so, so her followers were expected to agree or get excommunicated.

So while I really like philosophies that are based on evidence and reason, I’m also skeptical about them and some of their followers. And after all, if you don’t have a supernatural being telling you how to be a decent human being, you have to figure it out for yourself, and a lot of people really aren’t very good at it, even if they know they’re not going to get a second chance to fix their mistakes. So we end up with most atheists who can have a perfectly decent conversation with people who believe in irrational things, and others who like the attention they get from loudly proclaiming that anybody who disagrees with them are Fools! Who are Ruining The World! Including any atheists who aren’t as loudly anti-world-ruiner as they are! They really sound a lot like the more annoying preachers they’re complaining about.

By: Scurra

Scurra — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 02:08:00 +0000

Yeah, because the police, the medical profession and politicians have never been involved in that (as the most obvious “trusted professionals” in our society – well, maybe not the last…)

By: Scurra

Scurra — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 02:05:00 +0000

Now you see your response is a good example of what I was saying. You are drawing conclusions about me without knowing anything about me beyond the fact that I have said that I believe in God*. You are imposing your own interpretation and/or expectation of what that statement means, presuming that it is self-evidently correct, and then proceeding to a conclusion of your own (including a little bit of personal abuse, although it’s fairly minor) that pleases you but has no real connection with what I said.
I might say that you’re the one who sounds a little irrational, pressing a case against a simple statement that is surely hardly threatening to your solid rational understanding?This is why internet arguments end up as flamewars of course.*well, I’m excluding things you might know about me based on postings on other BB threads or, indeed, elsewhere on the interwebs. I’m fairly sure you don’t know me personally though.

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 02:04:00 +0000

Nietzsche’s fate includes ending up being widely and rabidly quoted and misquoted by lots of people who don’t understand what he was talking about, and having consonants and vowels randomly rearranged in his name. On the other hand, a lot of his crazier stuff near the end of his life was because of the mental effects of syphilis (though some will argue that it’s also the result of bad lifestyle choices.)

One of my German classes in high school included translating short passages from a wide range of German-speaking authors. Goethe was fine, Beethoven was a bit tough, but Nietzsche? (“Let’s see, he seems to be talking about the destruction of the human race as a good thing here; did I mistranslate one of the words, or is it just Nietzsche?”) Really shouldn’t do that to high school students…

By: j9c

j9c — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 01:59:00 +0000

Just gonna leave this here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHEqCXY2B-w

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 01:52:00 +0000

Yes, but these are brilliant scientists who don’t want to rule the world, and are probably too smart to be tricked into doing so. It’s kind of like becoming Department Chairman at a university – you get stuck doing lots of bureaucracy instead of research or teaching.

By: billstewart

billstewart — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 01:47:00 +0000

For the political right-wingers, it’s not just because they want to get the religious right-wingers to be politically active (and to give them something to pay attention to that doesn’t include feeding the hungry, healing the sick, or providing hospitality to strangers.)

It’s also because getting people to rabidly Believe The Party Line is politically useful, and the more opposition they get for believing it, the more tightly they identify with the party, their community, and their leaders.

And it’s because getting them to Not Believe in Evolutionary Science makes it easier for them to Not Believe In Climate Change Science. And unlike evolution, climate change is a critical issue for the Republican party’s corporate sponsors, because any legislation about climate change is going to interfere with their business.

By: Roger Dodger

Roger Dodger — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 01:42:00 +0000

Donny – the issue of context seems to apply in one case but not another (evolution). How is that?