Bill Nye has built his career on making scientific concepts accessible to the public. But according to a well-known creationist, the beloved "Science Guy" doesn't really get the subject.
“Bill Nye still doesn’t understand the difference between historical science and observational science -- so he may be known as ‘Bill Nye the science guy’ -- but he doesn’t understand science correctly,” Ken Ham wrote on Facebook. "[Bill Maher and Nye] don't want the truth -- they continue to 'suppress the truth' as the Bible states in Romans 1 about such people in rebellion against God."
Hmm.
Ham, president/CEO and founder of Answers in Genesis-U.S. and the Creation Museum, made the comments on Tuesday while criticizing a recent appearance by Nye on Maher’s HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
As Raw Story noted, the Australian-born pastor was citing an argument creationists often make: science can only be proven if it has been "observed." Creationist Georgia Purdom explained the concept in a 2012 video produced for the Creation Museum:
Do we start with man's ideas about the past, who wasn't here during the supposed billions of years of Earth history, or do we start with the Bible -- the written revelation of the eyewitness account of the eternal God who created it all? Rather than being inconsistent as Bill Nye states, observational science confirms the literal history and genesis.
The creationists' argument, however, fails to take into account studies showing that evolution can occur in a laboratory setting. The argument also has been roundly discredited by scientists, including Nye, who has addressed such criticisms repeatedly in the past.
"'Creation Science' is not useful, because it can make no successful predictions about nature or the universe," Nye told The Huffington Post in an email last year. "So, it is reasonable to say the expression is an oxymoron, or simply: it's not science. It has no process of observation, hypothesis, experiment, then predicted outcome. A useful theory about time and organisms would make no distinction between 'observational' and 'historical' science."
Nye went on Maher's program to talk about the need for a strong science curriculum in American schools. The pair also talked about creationism, a topic that is steadily becoming one of Nye's favorite talking points.
"You have this situation in Texas, where people want creationism in textbooks," Nye told Maher. "I don't have a big deal about someone's religion, but if you claim that the earth is 10,000 years old, it's just wrong."
View the segment in the video below:
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