Bill Nye: Creationism is Bad for Kids

I was raised C of E and actually confirmed at age 14. I stopped believing at around 17 having had years of asking questions and not really liking the answers.

I was...well I don't know what I was actually for about 5-6 years, although being a bit unhealthily obsessed with the Orient through martial arts I read a lot of the Tao Te Ching, I Ching etc

I fell into my path gradually, but found a teacher around 1996 that I stayed with (occasionally more on than off) until he died in 2010. I now walk my own path and occasionally find it intersects with others

As it was once said in the Matrix -

"Dammit! not everyone believes as you do!"
"My beliefs do not require them to"

 

I was raised in the church. My mother was the church music director and sometime youth director, and so my family was very involved in the church from my earliest years. I happened upon a good church that never tried to brainwash me or shame me (the United Methodist Church, if you were wondering), and so my Christian background remains a source of inspiration and comfort for me, even though I can't honestly call myself a believer anymore.

I had a good experience overall with religion, but it's hard to ignore the arguments people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson make that religion is a stumbling block to scientific progress.

 

Yeah, evolution doesn't have any more plan than gravity does. It is pure, dumb luck that produces favorable genes for a specific environment and selects against expressions of genes not favorable to said environment. It is incremental change through mass death as the small minority of survivors expressing favorable traits produce viable offspring. The surviving species aren't smartest, or strongest, or fastest, they are just momentarily well-suited for one environment. Should that environment radically change, most species would face extinction.

I am curious, what are some methods you imagine one would reconcile this lack of evolutionary "planning" for the Christian patchwork explanation?

 

Couple of my evo bio friends are religious actually. I think that they'd say that even in seemingly random coincidences, god is at work. Personally, I'm an atheist.

 

I was raised Christian and predominately used my time to corrupt the golden boy Pastor's son. We used to throw eggs at passing cars from the church roof, watch R-rated movies from the same roof at the drive-in theater across the street, draw comic book illustrations the entire duration of church while never paying attention to the sermon, and sneak out of the sermon to "help" in the daycare, which was code for break into his father's office and drink sacramental wine and eat wafers out of his little portable Jesus kit. I think I stopped believing at 10ish, but I stayed on till 12 and completed a year of Bible school to make my mother happy. She thought it was the last chance to save my soul. All it did was serve to make me bitter about hanging out with hypocritical and judgmental old people who were too dumb to realize they were adults who believed in fairy tales and behaved condescendingly towards the adults (or in my case, the 10-year-old) with more critical thinking skills than they possessed. They gave me a pocket Bible and cross for graduating Bible study, and I ceremoniously lit them on fire and urinated out the flames to commemorate the petroleum I would no longer combust during my absence from future God houses and/or pedo sanctuaries.

Recently I attended an Agnostic/Atheist community event to meet a famous non-theist author writing about ideas for fairer non-theistic American political system whom I had questions for, but none of my questions were addressed because he ran out of time answering important questions from the been-a-non-theist-for-five-seconds crowd. Admittedly, my questions weren't as well constructed as say the woman who had a burning desire to ask "are you sure that funny feelin' in my tummy isn't God?" Or the guy who needed to know when this author stopped believing in God and decided to chatter on about his own recent revelation for five minutes. It was at that event that I realized I don't even fit in at No God Church.

 

It seems to me that the question of whether or not evolution as it has happened is the result of a divine plan isn't really a scientific question at all. For a scientist to say there's no plan to evolution is pretty much the same as for him to say there's no God. He's probably right, but he's not equipped to prove it.

 

Correct, its a philosophical question eg; metaphysics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics

 

Not really - when a scientist says that evolution is random and unplanned, she or he generally means that evolution does not occur with an end product in mind. If a mutation becomes fixed in a population, that is the allele is held by all members of the population, then it has become fixed by one of two ways. Either the allele confers a reproductive advantage to the carrier of that allele or it has randomly drifted to fixation. I can go more into this if you like, but essentially neither of these processes have an end product in mind.

In a broader sense, it's possible that there is a god planning out each step of the universe, each death of whatever gene carrying individual he or she wants to eliminate, etc., but these theories do not require his or her intervention. You might as well believe in a god of thunder who simply acts through known mechanisms.

 

Your A does not naturally lead to B. The fact that some mutations lead to reproductive advantages and some do not doesn't disprove a divine plan unless you can claim to know the mind of God and show that reality deviates from that plan.

Note that I'm not here advocating belief in God or in evolution as a divine plan. I'm just saying that science is out of its element with a question like this. If the theist asserts, "Evolution isn't real," the scientist can reply, "Yes it is, and here's how I know." But the assertion that evolution is some deity's plan is not something that can be refuted by a mere recitation of scientific facts, since the assertion doesn't really question science as we know it.

Many people believe something very close to this, in fact. It's like when Bender met God:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrqPYvO4qCE"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrqPYvO4qCE[/ame]
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

 

Not speaking to that, speaking to the assertion that a scientist can't prove that there is no plan to evolution. Evolution acts without purpose - a population won't evolve a trait because it could lead to another trait that would benefit it for example - the evolved trait will either become fixated within a population on its own merits or through genetic drift, but it will not become fixated so that the population could complete some design. When a scientist says that evolution acts without a plan, this is what they mean.

I think that we have different definitions of planned and unplanned, random and designed. I would say that an earthquake occurs through plate tectonics without any purpose, but many people might say something along the lines of 'god has his ways.' I find fault with their reasoning. 8]

We do have evidence that evolution operates without an endgoal, or indeed any future awareness at all - an important conservation phenomena that occurs due to this is an evolutionary trap. Dragonfly, for example, will attempt to lay their eggs on hot roads or or glass buildings, as these surfaces send the same sensory signals that cause them to lay their eggs in water. Although this behavior was an elegant solution to 'how do you get a very stupid creature to lay its eggs in water' it did not show any planning for the mammals that were constructing shiny things.

Sure, I rely on cartoons for my religious philosophy as well. No but in all seriousness I love Futurama and it is a legit show - you heard where they wrote a mathematical theorem just so they could complete an episode? My one contention about this sort of god is that its essentially irrelevant to our understanding of the world; sure it could exist, but there's no evidence to support such an assertion nor any necessity to invoke such a critter to explain what we see in the world. The difference between such a god existing and such a god not existing would be negligible. <--- This though is a philosophical argument.

 

Owlmatt keep in mind that it can be shown that evolution is order from chaos. However those who claim that evolution is the will of some all powerful being cannot even prove the existence of said being.

And keep in mind two of the most important tenets of science:

1. the burden of proof is on the person making the claim
2. Any theory put forth must be falsifiable

 

Except that evolution is not random.

 

Evolution by means of natural selection is not random. Evolution = allele change / time. If I fire a shotgun into a group of five white birds and five black birds, and I hit two white birds and one black bird, I have changed the allele frequency of that population (assuming that it is a population and their black and white coloration is due to an allele). Before white bird gene had a frequency of 0.5, afterwards it has a gene frequency of 0.43. Evolution has occurred, it just occurred completely independently of the animal's fitness. So no, it's not safe to say that evolution is not random, sometimes it is!

 

Random is the wrong word. It is order through chaos. Traits increase in frequency when they increase the adaptive fitness or an organism, decrease when they are detrimental, and remain unchanged if they have no influence (ex. Vestigial structures).

Evolution depends upon the chaos and randomness of genetic recombination during mating and the savage and ever changing nature of survival in the natural world.

 

I think order through chaos and such are philosophical concepts that don't really pertain to evolution. Just because a rabbit is faster doesn't mean it's more ordered. Vestigial structures often have an influence on a creatures fitness, but have simply reduced or lost their original function - for example, flightless birds will use their wings to balance while running. Their wings are still vestigial, even though losing them might be quite disadvantageous to the animal.

No it does not. Asexual organisms reproduce and evolve quite well without any mating involved!

 

Ummm okay you've lost me with how a rabbit can be "ordered."
I don't mean individual organisms. I mean that the process of evolution is a very concrete, ordered, and mathematical process of selection for and against traits but that very orderly process relies on the chaos of death, an ever changing environment and the randomized recombination of genes (for non asexual organisms).

I was referring, you will note, to vestigial structures which no longer impact the adaptive fitness of the organism as an example of the fact that traits are selected for when beneficial, against when not, and ignored if neither.

I was trying to keep the discussion more simple for folks who may not be able to follow. And what you're saying is true but you have to keep in mind that the genetic structure of those organisms will still mutate, and that because it survives by fulfilling a niche in the ecosystem in a way the organism has been selected for rather than necessarily smaller mutations. So same process but at a different rate and with less randomization... But still chaos. They've just found a convenient eye in the storm. Still windy but less so.

 

That's just not true. There is a high degree of randomness and disorder involved in genetic drift, for example, which is a very significant part of evolution, particularly in small populations, such as most vertebrates. Mutations that can be hugely significant, such as gene duplication, are random. Natural selection may act predictably on some traits, but this is only one portion of the equation. Evolution doesn't really depend upon death, things can evolve and dominate due to differential rates of reproduction as well.

Sure, I just wanted to point out that vestigial structures often do have an effect on an organism's fitness.

I don't really follow what you're saying with these storm and metaphors and such. Evolution doesn't depend on sex, that's all I was saying

 

True. I just meant that it is an influencing factor, death as well. And with the above paragraph you're proving my point. It is an order born out of chaos. These numerous conflicting factors and influences which all act to weed out those who are not adaptively fit enough to survive.

And my storm metaphor had to do with the fact that asexual organisms survive because they usually have an ecological niche within which they survive so they do not need to adapt in quite the same way.

 

I just wanted to be clear, because a lot of people (not just creationists) think that evolution is just some random chance happening where one day in 1973 a chimp gave birth to a human.

 

I'm going to be honest - I don't really know what you're talking about when you say ordered and chaos. What genetically or biologically do you mean by ordered and chaotic?

You're right, creationists do take that stance a lot. Kinda weirds me out. Like wouldn't that chimp freak out? I'm kind of insanely pedantic about this sort of thing I'm sorry - I am a biologist.