Bill Nye Calls Ark Encounter 'Disturbing,' Argues 'Every Science Exhibit Absolutely Wrong' After Visit
“Ham also talked about Nye’s visit in a Facebook post, and said that it turned into an ‘almost two hour debate’ as they walked through the three decks of exhibits at the Ark.”
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Probably the best endorsement yet
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
….is that the “Science Guy”, while certainly a smart guy (holds several patents, child of WWII code breakers), is actually trained as a mechanical engineer—and what he’s saying here is not really that from a sober view of the evidence, he’s come to the conclusion that the exhibits are wrong. What he’s saying is that he accepts the majority evolutionist hypotheses and is not afraid to speak up on that in very concrete, black and white terms. The nuances of the science, even on the evolutionary side, are completely lost when Nye talks.
Which is why, really, even a lot of evolutionists admit that Ham mopped the floor with Nye in their debate. Tripping him up with evidence is at times child’s play.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Nye might not be wrong in a few areas here. One thing we have to keep in mind is that there are things at both the creation museum and the Ark Encounter have elements that are conceptualized. We do not know what much of the Garden, dinosaurs, the ark and other elements looked like. We build something which fits within 10% of the constraints outlined in Scripture, but which 90% are just guesses at what could have existed between these constraints. With that said, I also fully understand that Nye’s concerns are much more fundamental than that.
[dgszweda]Nye might not be wrong in a few areas here. One thing we have to keep in mind is that there are things at both the creation museum and the Ark Encounter have elements that are conceptualized. We do not know what much of the Garden, dinosaurs, the ark and other elements looked like. We build something which fits within 10% of the constraints outlined in Scripture, but which 90% are just guesses at what could have existed between these constraints. With that said, I also fully understand that Nye’s concerns are much more fundamental than that.
There are certainly places where Nye gets it right—the trouble I have with him is not in his biases (though in many places I do disagree), but rather in his dogmatism that refuses to admit nuances that certainly exist. This is also the reason I stopped subscribing to National Geographic—they’d always had their biases, but around 2000 they started presenting a bunch of important issues as if there was no possible contrary view. In my view this is getting more and more endemic.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
The problem is the general consensus in the public is the scientific one: that ONLY natural causes led to the universe and life. It is now their total world view, not just a tool to help understand the natural world. So, anything contrary to that view is rejected a priori.
[Mark_Smith]The problem is the general consensus in the public is the scientific one: that ONLY natural causes led to the universe and life. It is now their total world view, not just a tool to help understand the natural world. So, anything contrary to that view is rejected a priori.
Certainly philosophical materialism and naturalism is a factor, as you note, but “consensus science” (yes, an oxymoron, but bear with me) also maintains that we need to honor consensus even where there are two competing naturalistic theories in play—for example, the camps of positive and negative climate feedback regarding global climate change. Nye is big on that one, to put it mildly. But that said, one way I can explain this is that the hypothesis of positive feedback—runaway global temperatures—puts man in the drivers’s seat for climate, more or less making him a demi-god. So that would be consistent with your approach.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
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