1,256 words
I’m a bit old for Bill Nye. By the time his children’s science show came on in the early ’90’s, I had already graduated to reading Carl Sagan’s more advanced presentation of the vapid and vacuous “I Fucking Love Science!” worldview.
My love of critical thinking and the scientific method itself has only strengthened with time, which makes me despise all the more those who distort this elegant and powerful process and its findings in the service of their secular humanist agenda. William Saletan, a Jewish science columnist for the Leftist webzine Slate, said it best before being brutally checked by his colleagues and bosses for heresy: Bill Nye and his ilk are essentially “liberal creationists,” religious adherents of their own supernatural creation myth.
I don’t have any patience for Ken Ham and other Creation “scientists” who are feverishly trying to pitch Genesis as a literal record of what really happened. But Answers in Genesis and all those angry Kansans crashing school board meetings wouldn’t exist if science hadn’t been politically and philosophically weaponized against Christianity in the first place. “Science!” has been deployed as a battering ram in our public schools and universities, in our children’s programming, and in our Hollywood media, invariably conflating the scientific method and its fruits with secular humanism and its political agenda.
So, it’s with this bitter contempt for both parties that I sat down to watch Bill Nye “The Science Guy” debate Ken Ham “The Creationism Guy.”
Ken Ham begins by confirming that secularists have indeed hijacked the word “science,” concluding that Christian fundamentalists must instead hijack the word for themselves. His argument basically consists of trotting out some token scientists who endorse Young Earth Creationism and, more importantly, confirming the false premise that the natural sciences have decisive religious significance. Within the popular American milieu, dominated by Protestant Christians and secular humanist liberals, Ken Ham and Bill Nye cover the full spectrum of the public debate.
As a self-professed defender of Christianity, Ham lost the debate before he started because he agreed that a book written, edited, and translated by bronze-age Bedouins can be directly pitted against state-of-the-art scientific knowledge. As a self-professed defender of science, Nye lost the debate before he started because he offered a platform to a man whose pseudo-scientific shtick wins with its target audience of scientifically illiterate Christians by merely presenting his slick comic book attack on mainstream astronomy, geology, genetics, and anthropology.
Both Christianity and science lost in this exchange. As a friend, street fighter, and Creationist comrade of mine, Scott Terry, noted on Facebook, “The only thing Nye and Ham can agree on is how evil the old white European anthropologists were.” It took roughly half an hour before Ken Ham got around to calling evolutionists “racist.” Nye was quick to agree with Ham’s anti-racist position because he is no less guilty than Ham of mutilating and contorting his presentation of scientific research to cram it into his worldview.
His “Eyes of Nye” pop science episode covering the topic of race is at least as unscientific and ideology-driven as anything you’ll find in the Creation Museum.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YswvtG9GKNA
Bill Nye deployed just about all the deceptive tropes, insisting that “DNA proves we’re 99.9% the same.” It’s actually a bit closer to 99.5%, but what does that prove? Our genetic similarity to chimpanzees is just under 99%, so there’s a lot of room for very important differences within that one percent. He can be forgiven for repeating the Out of Africa myth that humanity is entirely descended from a recent common ancestor in Africa, as the data on Neanderthal, Denisovan, and other hominid admixture in modern populations wasn’t available when the show aired.
If he loved science as much as I do, he would issue a retraction of his false statements, admitting that there’s dramatically more genetic diversity in humans than he originally claimed. The debate would have been a great opportunity for him to publicly correct his sophomoric and pseudo-scientific statements, but he spent it on the defensive, confirming that the anthropologists who’ve argued those positions were not only incorrect but downright immoral for even entertaining these hypotheses.
Bill Nye and his selected expert for this episode walk us through the evolution of the only meaningful racial difference we’re allowed to acknowledge: skin color. The Founder Effect is trotted out to explain why we have all the supposedly meaningless racial differences like eye folds and blond hair. Magically, the Founder Effect only produces meaningless racial differences, and cannot influence anything like intelligence which would actually conflict with secular humanist egalitarianism. According to Bill Nye, intelligence, sexual attractiveness, and personality characteristics occupy a privileged position on the genome, immune to the laws of selection to which the rest of genes are subject.
The canard about there being more diversity within races than between races is trotted out. This alone should be enough to have Dr. Nye’s science card revoked. After all, there’s more variation within males and within females than between the average of males and females. The difference between the tallest male and the shortest male is indeed much greater than the difference between the male and female average. Yet, can we draw the conclusion that females are as tall as males?
Hardly.
That statement means absolutely nothing, and only exists to obscure the truth of meaningful racial differences, deliberately and obviously deceiving his audience. Toward the end, he shows us a “racist,” a fat stupid white guy in a wife-beater who’s devastated to learn that “science” proves that race doesn’t really exist and humanity is descended, one and all, from a very recent African ancestor. I doubt we’ll get to enjoy a sequel where the ironically racist stereotype of a fat stupid white guy strides into Dr. Mary-Claire King’s office with the wealth of recent peer-reviewed findings which completely destroy her Leftist religion of global brotherhood and human interchangeability.
William Shockley: My Science Guy
I fucking love science. I always have and I always will. From my earliest memories, I was asking questions and seeking answers about the planets, the stars, the canyons, the glaciers, and the evolutionary adaptations in the natural world surrounding me. In fact, I love science so much that I picked the lock on the gate of scientific inquiry which had been bolted and chained shut by the enforcers of secular egalitarian orthodoxy.
Watching those two self-important and self-promoting ideologues disguising their pursuit of their agenda as “science” reminded me how fortunate we were to have been blessed by heroic defenders of truth like William Shockley, J.P. Rushton, Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray, and Kevin MacDonald. With all due respect to the Royal Air Force, never was so much owed by so many to so few. These torch bearers stood for the forbidden truth in its darkest hour, introducing most of the men and women reading this to a realm of reality which the oligarchs struggled mightily to hide from us.
Faith in things beyond the material remains outside the scope of the scientific process. Any belief system, whether it’s Ken Ham’s sola scriptura literalism or Bill Nye’s radical humanism, which demands that we embrace falsehoods in defense of the belief system, leads us away from the Eternal. At the apex, scientific truth and religious Truth, knowledge and wisdom, faith and facts, all converge. Our duty is to stay the course, following the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom wherever the path leads over whatever obstacles are placed in our way.
19 comments
Good take down of Nye. But there is no difference in principle between sola scriptura literalists and other Christians when it comes to science. Broadly, both groups believe in that for which there is no evidence.
Lee,
There’s a critical distinction between believing in unfalsifiable, supernatural, and metaphysical things . . . and believing in counter-factual material things. If your belief system demands that you believe something which demonstrably isn’t so, then it’s necessary to wade back from your conclusions in search of a wrong turn.
Low Church sola scriptura Protestantism positively requires reading the Bible in a literal and direct manner. Lurching away from relying on this sacred text as an all-purpose astrophysical, biological, historical, and fortune-telling peeping stone lurches either toward Quakerish and Universalist relativism in one direction or some sort of traditional hierarchy of experts in the other direction. Baptists have no choice but to hold the Creationism hill.
Christian Creationism is actually less harmful than Liberal Creationism, as Ken Ham studiously avoids interfering with “real” science, hermetically compartmentalizing his magic science from science science. Meanwhile, both Ken Ham and Bill Nye actually apply Liberal Creationist magic science in their daily engagement with society and politics. They would rather deal with the epic decline and degeneration of their communities and cultures than deal with their false conclusions about human equality and interchangeability.
The facts don’t show that God didn’t create the universe 6,000 years. They show that God didn’t create the universe 6000 years ago or at any time in the remote past either. The same facts that disprove biblical literalism disprove the existence of the God of the Bible, supernatural realms, and metaphysics as a useful category.
I am mystified as to how you could say that. Given that that would require proving a negative and going outside of science, I am surprised you would say that even given you don’t believe in God.
Whenever Sagan et al. argue that it seems like overstepping the question entirely. How, for instance, could one disprove the existence of a soul or an afterlife as understood in Christianity? It is beyond me.
Burden of proof is on you, or, since you’re not a Protestant, the high priests at the top of your particular church hierarchy. What facts support the existence of supernatural realms or the God of Christianity’s classical theism?
I agree with much of the article. However, THIS statement is problematical: “The difference between the tallest male and the shortest male is indeed much greater than the difference between the male and female average.Yet, can we draw the conclusion that females are as tall as males?”
This is an attempt to draw a valid conclusion from, first, a collection of extremes by comparing them with, second, a collection of averages. To be a valid comparison, one would have to compare the average male height with the average female height, and then see whether or not one could claim that the more significant height differences lay within males or females. In other words, one set of averages versus another, competing set of averages. Thus, the average differences in a given race versus the average differences between ALL races is how the comparison should be made. Finally, no one but an illogical person would ever conclude from the example given that “males and females have the same average height”. It simply sounds like a strained attempt to bolster a point.
That’s the point. It’s strained, muddled, and pointless.
Anti-racist attempts to assert that there’s more diversity within groups than between groups is a strained, muddled, and pointless cloud of rhetorical squid ink.
Ben Stein’s movie No Intelligence Allowed is a pretty good introduction to the issue – and does not spare the rod towards the arrogant atheist school marms of Liberalism. Even ancient cells were incredibly complex. God has left signs of His presence throughout creation.
“God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man.” – Arthur Young.
It is the simple minded dividing of evolution and creation that causes confusion and misery.
Creationist “science” and “scientists” are some of the luniest, unscientific nutjobs I’ve ever met. Even the Catholic Church endorses evolution. There is no way you can take the Bible literally and have it make any sense.
Bill Nye’s anti-White “scientific” misinformation is much more harmful to us because it appears much more logical and is targeted towards the more intellectual, and reasoning mind.
The Catholic Church does not “accept” evolution so to speak. Pope John Paul II thought evolution “more than a theory,” but then again he made many heterodox statements in the midst of non-dogmatic discourses. Pope Pius XII more or less confirmed the Creation accounts as true, when he said that Adam and Eve were real individuals, without whom the Original Sin would not make sense.
I thought ‘Intelligent Design’ was the argument that the philosophers of the Enlightenment (namely David Hume in his ‘Dialogues on Natural Religion’, and Immanuel Kant in ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’) demolished; how was it resurrected and taken into the world of science?
[Personally, I’m inclined to regard Schopenhauer’s philosophy – what one might call, ‘the theory of unintelligent design’ as superior to both intelligent design and evolutionary theories. Humorously, as someone noted year ago, unintelligent design explains matters that would baffle both intelligent design and evolutionary schools:
http://rense.com/general67/vaenn.htm ]
It’s amazing how fast Hume takes apart the design argument. The Wikipedia summary of his points is very good:
One of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God is the design argument: that order and “purpose” in the world bespeaks a divine origin. Hume gave a criticism of the design argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Firstly, Hume argued that for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design. But order is often observed to result from presumably mindless processes like the generation of snowflakes and crystals. Design can account for only a tiny part of our experience of order.
Second, that the design argument is based on an incomplete analogy: because of our experience with objects, we can recognize human-designed ones, comparing for example a pile of stones and a brick wall. But in order to point to a designed universe, we would need to have an experience of a range of different universes. As we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied.
Next, even if the design argument is completely successful, it could not in and of itself establish a robust theism; one could easily reach the conclusion that the universe’s configuration is the result of some morally ambiguous, possibly unintelligent agent or agents whose method bears only a remote similarity to human design.
Furthermore, if a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God’s mind (being so well-ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind; but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world?
Finally, Hume advanced a version of the Anthropic Principle. Often, when it appears that an object has a particular feature in order to secure some goal, it is in fact the result of a filtering process. That is, the object wouldn’t be around did it not possess that feature, and the perceived purpose is only interesting to us as a human projection of goals onto nature. This mechanical explanation of teleology anticipated the notion of natural selection.
As a creationist, the only thing I find problematic with “creation science” is the “science” part. While I have found some of the points creation scientists make compelling, others rightly point out that the Bible is not a science textbook. Then again “science”, as Spengler pointed out, is a man-made worldview that reflects the subjective perspective of Western man in its understandings; it does not, so to speak, exist in the natural world, and only reflects our repeated experiences with nature.
Creation scientists assume that much of creation happened in ways comprehendible by science. However, if, for instance, God created the universe with the appearance of age (as the Scriptures present Adam and Eve upon their creation), scientific debate would be irrelevant because the natural world would have come about by miraculous means.
While I appreciate reading Kevin MacDonald from time to time (he has a habit of saying things like “evolutionary survival strategies” where “survival strategies” will do, as if the species/race in question were conscious of a bigger picture), I think Darwinism has been a big distraction to the racially aware Right. In the same way that Neo-Catholics believe the Church began at Vatican II, many racialists seem to believe race was discovered in the late 19th century, whereas there exists a great body of knowledge about race accumulated from ancient times, long before modern evolution theory, or indeed the cynical temptation to equate a man with his DNA.
Why love science? It is inseparable from materialism, cynicism, and hedonism, and however much science lovers try to deny it, following the Protestant Revolt the West has never been the as healthy as she was before the Scientific Revolution.
Many scientists were and are believers. As Pascal said, the heart has reasons that mind knows not of. It’s scientism, the belief that the scientific method can reveal all the secrets of the universe, that is the problem. Anything outside its scope is automatically discounted. That’s not good philosophy: anything outside the scope of science is simply outside the scope of science.
The great rationalist Martin Gardner converted to Christianity towards the end of his life. He simply developed an intuition that there was more than matter, that in fact there was a God, He/She was a Spirit – and so were we. Science said nothing about this – either for or against. He called this approach Fidelism.
I am surprised at how little effort those who defend religion and spiritual belief put on Counter-Currents. If you intend to defend religious belief in the face of atheist and materialist arguments, you are severely limiting yourself by relying on defending merely a creationist Catholic position. That is, excluding your reference to Spengler, who is correct to argue that scientific investigation is limited and cannot be the sole tool used to understand the world and life, but at the same time is incorrect to assume that science is entirely subjective and unreliable because it has successfully provided us with much valid knowledge and facts about our universe (the material one, of course, since the spiritual and supernatural realm is necessarily inaccessible to profane science) despite its limitations. Furthermore, I think it is clear by now that science is not merely a Western phenomenon, but rather a more universal one (in other words, you might want to use a philosopher other than Spengler to get a more balanced perspective on science).
If you want to truly challenge materialists and atheists, you need to read and reference a variety of religious philosophers, even go beyond creationist and intelligent design debates and into deeper religious philosophy. You should not limit yourself only to the Christian thinkers that are more commonly referenced such as, say, Alister McGrath or Alfred North Whitehead, but you should also look into those who study the very nature of religion itself (Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Rudolf Otto), and you will perhaps find further benefit even in the religious thought of non-Christian philosophers such as Julius Evola, Rene Guenon, and Alain de Benoist.
Also, I forgot to mention Thomas Molnar as a religious philosopher in my previous comment. He was a Catholic conservative, so he should be interesting to Christians, but he also collaborated with Alain de Benoist, so he is definitely interesting from a non-Christian perspective as well.
Excellent and humorous article. I find it significant that rather than provoking an argument in the comments section on the tools of rhetoric and deception that BOTH Creationists and Politically correct “orthodox” scientists employ to fool themselves and others, the same old argument (mostly) breaks out about the validity of creationism and Christianity, and the limits of science to explain the universe.
Clearly, this was an article on how to think about the illusions being perpetrated, not another invitation to buy into an illusion, once you’ve picked your poison!
But just to join the fun: on Creationism, as a child I was told God created the world in six days, but “we don’t know how long those days were”. I smelled a rat even then. As for Orthodox “race is mostly a social construct” scientists, I want them to field a basketball team against any given Negro squad. If they win, I’ll listen more intently when they tell me there aren’t any real differences between the races.
Excellent article; I never really thought about it that way, regarding secular humanism.
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