Bill Nye, The Science Guy, Goes Ideological

Recently Bill Nye, “the Science Guy”, stepped out of science and into the ideology of Scientism. In a video on YouTube he starts with an incorrect claim and veers off from there.

“Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology.”

There is no biology being done which requires evolution as a premise in its hypothesis, and without which premise the science could not proceed. To claim that it is fundamental and imply that it is necessary to biological science is a Genetic Fallacy. As Nye progresses we can see why he wants us to believe this fundamental “truth”, even though it is false: Nye wants us to think that we are anti-science and therefore irrational if we don’t accept evolution; that is certainly what he believes.

“Equivalent of trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates.”

Tectonic plates exist in the current time frame and have been proven empirically to actually exist. Evolution is extrapolatory from entities which do not exist in the current time frame, and is not comparable to tectonic plates in its inability to be empirically verified experimentally. False Analogy.

“You're just not gonna get the right answer; your whole world will be a mystery instead of an exciting place.”

Absolutely false. The Example of the booming field of Stem Cell biology falsifies this statement. The right answer is provided by observation, hypothesis and experimentation, not by attachment to evolution.

“As my old professor, Carl Sagan said, when you’re in love you want to tell the world.”

Yes, evolution is a highly emotional attachment. It is believed despite the flaws that are required in order to fill out the entire worldview, including the inability to answer the question of what life actually is, what the source of first life was, why life perpetuates itself despite being subject to entropy, what is the source of mind, rationality, agency and self-awareness, as well as many other questions. It is patently obvious that evolution is not fundamental at all, when it can’t answer the fundamental issues.

“Your world becomes fantastically complicated when you don’t believe in evolution. Here are these ancient dinosaur bones, these fossils; here is radio activity; here are distant stars which are just like our star but are at a distant point in their life cycle. The idea of Deep Time, of billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your worldview just becomes crazy, it’s just untenable, it’s self-inconsistent.”

Here Nye demonstrates that he doesn’t even understand the competition, which is not necessarily “young earth”. There are a great many old earth creationists who can demonstrate that it is evolution which is untenable and non-coherent when taken as an entire worldview. That demonstration involves logic, which is not beholden to science in any fashion. So not only is evolution not fundamental to science, science is not fundamental to rational thought and discourse. Science reveals factoids about material "things" in our universe, not fundamental Truths.

“And I say to the grownups, if you wanna deny evolution and live 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! We need people that can build stuff and solve problems.”

Nye is a Scientismist; his heroes, if not his gods, are involved in a process which he apparently is non-critical of, himself. Taking the non-critical philosophizing of an “in love” science worshipper as anything other than devout religious cant is itself hazardous to mental processing. Science is built on doubt, discovery, rediscovery, hypothesis, experiment, and re-experiment, not on evolution as religion. Modern Atheism is built on evolution as religion, and Nye’s teacher was the Atheist true believer, Carl Sagan, who also substituted science love-worship for common sense and dispassionate logic.

Further, his implied claim that evolution must be accepted in order to be an engineer or solve problems is simply ludicrous, outrageously so.

“It, it’s really just a hard thing, hard thing. You know, in another couple of centuries that world view will be… it just won’t exist. There’s no evidence for it.”

Because Nye doesn’t even understand what creationism actually is, he is not qualified to declare that it will not exist. Nye doesn’t even hint at the limitations of science which actually do exist, and his concept of evolution as Truth runs afoul of anything that an experienced scientist would claim. Science commonly experiences overthrows of accepted positions. There is no scientific knowledge which is not vulnerable to overthrow, and there is no such thing as scientific Truth. There are only contingent scientific factoids, and to imply or claim otherwise is either irresponsible, ignorant, or stupidly attached to a reverenced ideology which requires an inviolable Truth and needs science as its moral authority. And what Nye is claiming is a moral concept: it is Wrong to teach your children that evolution is not necessarily the only answer. He is preaching the Atheist morality of Scientism as Truth. And the rather hysterical claim is that if you don’t accept evolution, then you have rejected all of science and are morally Wrong.

I reject Nye as the bearer of Truth. It was an error for him to step out of science and into ideology. He doesn’t know enough factually or logically about his own ideology or that of the Other.

Hat tip to Steven Satak

Science vs. Sagan

The hunt for planets moves ahead, using the Kepler space telescope. As reported by the Associated Press,

“The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it is a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they are even finding them in the strangest of places.

And they have only begun to count.

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society's conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are a lot of stars in our galaxy — about 100 billion — that means a lot of planets.

"We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker's home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

"We're awash in planets where 17 years ago we weren't even sure there were planets" outside our solar system, said Kaltenegger, who wasn't involved in the new research.”

Carl Sagan used his idea of a Pale Blue Dot to conceptualize the loneliness of the earth, unique and lost in the vast, barren cosmos. It is arrogant to think that humans are of any value in such a huge, dead and uncaring system, he suggested. There is no reason to think that humans have any significance, when they are so alone. The Pale Blue Dot was a metaphor for Materialism and by extension, Atheism.

What Sagan was appealing to was Scientism. He thought that what he observed, telescopically, was the scientific Truth which should be applied to everyone’s worldview.

The recent discoveries, just outside of Sagan’s lifespan, of “more planets than stars”, possibly 100’s of billions in our galaxy alone, illuminates the fallacy of relying on science to provide metaphysical answers for questions outside the ability of science to actually address. Sagan had made an improper deductive leap, one designed to satisfy his existing worldview, an exercise in rationalization to support a presupposed conclusion. He deduced that a lack of knowledge of other planets meant a lack of planets, a logical slip with a huge impact on the thought process of many people.

If one were to follow Sagan’s reasoning – and one should not – then the existence of billions of planets means the opposite of Sagan’s claim for purposes of worldviews.

But Scientism is not a proper brick for the construction of knowledge of why what is, is.

What the scientists should be presenting is not false deductions. They should present the objective process of logical deduction based on axiomatic groundings which is embedded in the scientific method, and the contingency and probabilism inherent in every scientific finding. And I suspect that many of them do just that. But it is the Sagans and Dawkinses who promote Scientism and Atheism who get the headlines and coverage, as they prescribe their Scientistic ideology.

Contingency and probabilism demonstrate that science is not the authority that some of its practitioners seem to crave. The appeals to Dawkins and Sagan et al are Appeals to Authority of the worst kind: false authority. That authority is seemingly addictive to those who indulge in it; after all, no one would have heard of either Sagan or Dawkins had they stuck to actual science.

Scientism is no less an ideological evangelism than is an old time tent camp revival.

None of the new findings indicate, yet, that life exists beyond earth. But it is not impossible, especially if one grants that life need not necessarily be anything like our own. But the point here is that science doesn’t know, and virtually every question answered by science opens another batch of questions. Thinking that science is an authority on every question is not justified, especially considering that there are few questions that science has actually settled. Even Einstein’s universal speed limit of light speed, C, is now being questioned, and Einstein doubtless would approve. That’s how real scientists behave.

Carl Sagan and the Cult of Scientism

Atheists celebrated Carl Sagan Day yesterday. Sagan is a patron saint of the Scientism Denomination of Materialist Atheism. Over at sandwalk, Prof. Moran posted the following paragraphs from one of Sagan’s books:

”In every such society there is a cherished world of myth and metaphor which co-exists with the workaday world. Efforts to reconcile the two are made, and any rough edges at the joints are tend to be off-limits and ignored. We compartmentalize. Some scientists do this too, effortlessly stepping between the skeptical world of science and the credulous world of belief without skipping a beat. Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both.

”In a life short and uncertain, it seems heartless to do anything that might deprive people of the consolation of faith when science cannot remedy their anguish. Those who cannot bear the burden of science are free to ignore its precepts. But we cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying it where we feel safe and ignoring it where we feel threatened—again, because we are not wise enough to do so. Except by sealing the brain off into separate compartments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995) P. 297.”

Now if you haven’t already spotted the false presuppositions which Sagan embedded in these two famous paragraphs, then re-read them with that in mind.

Done? Good. Here’s my take. Sagan, like many Atheists, presumes that there are two separate magesteria a la Stephen J Gould, completely separate and incompatible, one of which is totally factual and rational, the other of which is non-factual and irrational to the point of insanity. Hence this statement:

” Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both.”

Never mind that there is no physical, material lump called “conscience” or that there is no scientific experiment capable of providing the morality to tweak the conscience, Sagan declares that there is a moral mismatch, not just a physical or intellectual mismatch between the magesteria. Perhaps his moral statement goes like this:

”No knowledge should ever be accepted that is not scientifically derived, whatever that means”

Now if this statement is a truth statement, and it is, and if it is an imperative, and it is, then there must be a scientific derivation for the statement itself. But of course there is not. The statement, and the Saganesque thinking behind it, is internally contradictory: therefore it is logically false, and intellectually non-coherent.

But Sagan’s entire career in philosophizing is based on this premise. And Sagan’s entire appeal to Atheists of the world is the fact that he promotes this premise. For the Saganites, science and Materialism are actually moral imperatives. This is an obvious feature of a religion, one which is based on a false ideology.

But that was just the first paragraph. Let’s move on to the second:

” In a life short and uncertain, it seems heartless to do anything that might deprive people of the consolation of faith when science cannot remedy their anguish.”

Presupposition: the irrational magisterium has a purpose: to provide consolation and remedy anguish.

Under this assumption there is no rational reason or reasoning involved with the second magesterium; it is predefined as irrational, serving desperate emotional needs that are not assuaged by mere experimental data.

” Those who cannot bear the burden of science are free to ignore its precepts.”

Because the two magesteria cannot overlap in any way, those who engage the bad magisterium must be rejecting science. This presupposition goes counter to the prior sentence which gives an actual purpose to the bad magisterium, a purpose which science cannot fulfill, not a rejection of science but stepping outside of its grasp to access something more. One might presume that Sagan is obliquely referring to creationism / ID here, but that is not what he actually says: his statement refers to the entirety of the non-scientistic realm of intellectual thought.

Of course on the surface, he is correct. One may safely ignore science as a source of moral instruction, purpose for one’s life, and answers to the question, “what sort of person should be?” But that again is not what he meant. What he meant is that the bad magisterium is a science-free zone, a fact-free zone where only fiction and “myth and metaphor” exist: a zone that is fully fallacious, a zone where one takes leave of one's sanity if one goes there.

” But we cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying it where we feel safe and ignoring it where we feel threatened—again, because we are not wise enough to do so. Except by sealing the brain off into separate compartments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?”

Those who access the bad magisterium cannot fly in airplanes? Here is the crux of Sagan’s belief, finally surfacing from the deep like a whale breeching and blowing. If a person accesses the bad magisterium, then by Sagan’s lights that person has rejected rationality and science in toto. There is no continuum between technology and a first cause. And to think that there actually is continuity is a violation of scientism, which brings us full circle back to Sagan’s Moral Law:

”No knowledge should ever be accepted that is not scientifically derived, whatever that means”

So deeply embedded is this fallacious entreaty that it is not necessary to state it, even in Sagan's philosophist articles like these. It is a firmly believed axiom, a moral First Principle for Atheism, Philosophical Materialism, and Scientism. But under the First Principles of Logic – those principles which secretly underlie actual science, logic and rational thought – Sagan’s Moral Law is so obviously a logical failure that its non-coherence place Sagan and Saganism into a separate magisterium yet, a third zone where irrational is declared rational, and not just rational: it is called moral, based on its own irrational moral principles. This magisterium might well be called the Realm of Moral Self-Delusion as Scientific Factism.