Recently I saw on MSNBC’s “Today’s Entertainment” a blog post titled “Bill Nye the Science Guy asks parents not to raise creationist kids.” Nye’s title, “the Science Guy,” comes from his popular science program for children, “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” that ran from 1993–98. In this blog entry attention is called to Nye’s YouTube video “Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children.” While appealing to parents not to teach their children creationism, Nye strongly encourages adults to embrace and teach evolution. Consider the following two quotes from his transcript:
As my old professor, Carl Sagan, said, “When you’re in love you want to tell the world.” So, once in a while I get people that really—or that claim—they don’t believe in evolution. And my response generally is “Well, why not? Really, why not?” Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don’t believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they’re at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.
And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.
Needless to say, I was very disappointed with video and glad to see Answers in Genesis’s response to Nye. Let me encourage you to check out AIG’s excellent response: “A Week of Bill Nye the Humanist Guy.”
