Bill Nye’s “Christianity vs. the Big Universe” myth

Big Bang/NASA

Mike Keas, author of Unbelievable,offers some thoughts on the idea that Christians have a problem with the universe being really big. 

Scientists from centuries past, including Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), recognized that the universe is vast. They saw in this no contradiction with their Christian beliefs. Yet celebrity TV science educator Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” is among those who suggest that the sheer scale of the cosmos means humans are insignificant. In the last minutes of his 2010 “Humanist of the Year” acceptance speech, Nye — speaking for science and all humanity — delighted the American Humanist Association with this:

I’m insignificant. … I am just another speck of sand. And the earth really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck. And the sun an unremarkable star. … And the galaxy is a speck. I’m a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.

Nye’s audience laughed approvingly, no doubt because they believed that “I suck” really means “religion sucks.”

But Bill Nye isn’t so much the science guy as he is the scientism guy. Scientism is atheistic dogma masquerading as objective science.

Mike Keas, “Myth: A Big Universe Is a Problem for Christianity” at Evolution News and Science Today

 

In the current culture, Bill Nye doesn’t need to worry about the facts catching up with him. “The big universe is a problem for Christianity” is a claim something like “They’re out there” (meaning ET).

It has nothing to do with facts; it is pure social positioning (or posturing). As with the Cosmos’s series’s “artistic license to lie,” it is a way of indicating that their social position is so powerful that they can misrepresent people and 1) demand that their assertions be taken for truths – and 2) even wonder publicly what’s the matter with people who don’t believe them.

Today’s media love that sort of thing. They can’t keep up with the internet and it certainly beats thinking of a killer comeback on Twitter or (no! no!) working on a real story (no! no!), something they do less and less, it would seem. And just think,  all they want is our trust and our money.

See also: Astrophysicist: Climate Change Killed The ET Civilizations

SETI finds more creative ways to keep looking. As long as there’s an Out There, They’ll always be Out There, of course.

SETI reacts to the study that says not to wait up for the extraterrestrials

Researchers: We have dissolved the Fermi Paradox!

Extraterrestrial civilizations: When all else fails, try Bayesianism. The good news is, no one can ever prove They’re Not Out There.

and

How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?

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