Bill Nye, famous for the children's TV program "Bill Nye the Science Guy", recently made a statement criticizing creationists. I never saw his TV show. I hope his science was better than his logic. Because his statement had two main points, and both were logically incoherent.

1. What to tell your children

Now let's think about this carefully for a moment. Someone either agrees with Mr Nye that creation theory is false, or they disagree and think it's true. (Or they might be undecided or seek some middle ground, but let's skip over those possibilities as they don't affect the logic here.) If they think creation theory is false, then they are not likely tell their children that it is true. Mr Nye's admonition is irrelevant. But of course Mr Nye isn't talking to people who think creation theory is false here: He's talking to people who think it's true. But if they think it's true, then why should they not teach it to their children? Mr Nye gives no reason. He just says they should. Why would someone tell his children something that he believes to be a lie just because Mr Nye says so? Lie for Nye?. Why?

2. How to be a winner

So let's try to follow the reasoning here: Point 1: The United States is the world leader in science and techology. Few other countries come close -- the only serious competitr that Mr Nye can think of is Japan. Point 2: The United States is the only country in the world where creation theory is strong.

And so Mr Nye comes to the obvious conclusion: if the United States wants to continue to excel, it should adopt the ideas of people who have consistently done less well. Umm ... what? If the U.S. is the world leader in science and technology, then doesn't it make more sense to say that other countries should imitate the U.S.? If you see that sports team A always wins and sports team B always loses, which team do you want to copy?

If the U.S. had only recently adopted creation theory, then you could theorize that the U.S. was still limping along on its past "intellectual capital". But creation theory has bene widely accepted in the U.S. since the country has existed. For as long as America has been a scientific leader, creationism has been strong. Interestingly enough, countries that were scientific leaders in the past, like Britain and Germany, were leaders when they were mostly creationist. It has only been since they "converted" to evolution that these countries lost their technological edge.

© 2012 by Jay Johansen

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