Answering Bill Nye, the Science Guy on a few points

1) Newspeak in Nineteen - Eighty ... er Sorry ... Ninety-Four, 2) Mark Shea Recommended David Palm Who Misconstrues Bible Commission of 1909, 3) Would GKC have Agreed with MkSh that KH was a Bible Idolater?, 4) Correspondence of Hans-Georg Lundahl : With Jonathan Sarfati PhD on Fall and Inquisition, 5) New blog on the kid : Quarterlife is a Bad Term, 5b) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Answering Bill Nye, the Science Guy on a few points, 5c) New blog on the kid : Phil Provaznik/Dalrymple on Potassium-Argon and on Principle, more on Fission Track and Isochrons (a debunking of...), 6) [Back to Creation vs. Evolution :] Scenario impossible, 7) Karl Keating Out of His Depth?, 8) Three Kinds of Proposition, 9) Is Flat Earth Belief Heretical?, 10) HGL's F.B. writings : Between Palm and Sungenis, 11a) HGL's F.B. writings : On Helios in Christian Geocentrism, 11b) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Rivers Clapping Hands, Anaximander, Greek Philosophy at time of Ecclesiasticus ... , 12) Assorted retorts : ... on Geocentrism with Raymond Doetjes and "Imdor"

Video with Bill Nye:

CRUClEFICTION : Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaKMAhPQ54g

I

This video was cited in an endcomment on my essay on my blog:

New blog on the kid : Quarterlife is a Bad Term
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/01/quarterlife-is-bad-term.html

II

HGL's F.B. writings : Thrown Out of Group
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.fr/2013/12/thrown-out-of-group.html

LAM told me:

"IE culture transmits to IE fairly easily, but it can also transmit to non-IE if the conditions are correct. All you need is a good storyteller and technology that someone else wants. The technology transmits and at least part of the time so do the stories about how it developed, what god created it, where the idea came from, where the materials came from, whatever. Same works for hygiene, etc. People repeat the stories to explain whatever needs explaining, and suddenly you have a God or an entire set of gods or something else where s/he/it/they doesn't/don't belong because someone did not realize that the technology/rules/whatever did not need the story in order to work. What worked for technology worked for people, too: "I get to rule over you because of thus and such tale." The transmission is not always IE to IE or IE-to non-IE. "The Kingship in Heaven" is a Hittite story that bounces around the Mediterranean with no regard to culture."

Yes, this attitude exists today as well ... as examplied by Bill Nye.

III

As to the judge who used the words "breathtaking inanity", it is a political issue that people so biassed for a flawed certainty of a flawed scientific method can be a judge. Except they are so many - thanks to tax dollars spent on "teaching" (or pumping out) evolution, that getting such judges off the bench might raise hard opposotion too.

IV

But of course, behind that you have science people trying to give the impression that creationism is stupid, like, in this case, Nye.

He does one good thing in admitting it is extremely easy to prove the earth is not flat and a bit more difficult (what an understatement!) to prove it is billions of years old.

But as for the rest, his appeal to saying "creationism means stifling reason and ingenuity" is very clearly over the top. It does not only mean evolutionists have sufficient ingenuity and creationists insufficient, it cannot work as an argument until you assume evolutionists have ALL the available ingenuity and creationists NONE, at least none at work while they are reasoning out creationism. And that is of course over the top. No wonder he can find a judge - eager to seem reasonable to scientists like himself - who also gets over the top.

"However, by 1951 that tone was changing, and Lewis wrote to the same Captain Acworth: ‘What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.’"

Reference given as:

C.S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1944–1960’,

C. S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1944-1960
by Gary B. Ferngren
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1996/PSCF3-96Ferngren.html

Quoted in:

CMI : C.S. Lewis and evolution
by Peter Barnes
http://creation.com/cs-lewis-and-evolution

Bill, you mentioned fire warners, will be back in a moment ...

V

I said "fire warners"? I meant smoke detectors. Swedish translates the name of the object as a compound word meaning "fire warner".

Thanks to Swedish wikipedia, I know that the ionising smoke detectors work thanks to Americium-241. Now, the isotope in question has no halflife anywhere close to millions let alone billions of years.

It has a half life of 432.2 years. Very much easier to detect correctly even in a laboratory. Even than Carbon 14 would have been without samples.