The battle between Bill Nye the "Science Guy" and the Creation Museum rages on.
Responding to the anti-evolution video that was posted by the Kentucky-based museum on YouTube last week, Nye told The Huffington Post in an email that he is troubled by the flawed logic that was employed in the clip and said that he hopes future generations of Americans will be more "scientifically literate."
"When I see reasoning like this, I often feel that we educators have failed to convey a fundamental idea in evolution," he wrote. "We humans, who design and build things, or who plant crops according to a calendar, think in what would be top-down style or method of design. Evolution works the other way; it's bottom-up design. The only designs that we observe in nature exist, because they have been successful from generation to generation."
Last week, the Creation Museum had "hit back" at the "Science Guy" with a video of its own after his clip about evolution, entitled "Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children," went viral on YouTube.
In the video, Nye, a mechanical engineer, speaks out against people who believe in creationism -- insisting instead that evolution is a "fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology."
According to a 2009 survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 97 percent of scientists believe that humans and other livings things have evolved over time.
Of the more than 2,500 scientists surveyed, only 2 percent said they believe human beings have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, while 87 percent said they believe that evolution is due to natural processes, such as natural selection.
"Creationism has no predictive ability or qualities, so it is not scientifically useful. Evolution allows us to understand how living things came to be as we see them today and as they were in both the distant and recent past. It allows us to predict the fate and behavior of populations," Nye wrote in his email.
Nye was responding to comments made by the speakers in the Creation Museum video, who had claimed creationism to be more verifiable than evolution.
Creationist Georgia Purdom, who is identified in the video as having a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Ohio State University, argues in the clip that evolution is a "historical science" that has not been observed directly, while creation can be verified by the Bible.
"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," she says in the video.
As was noted in an earlier HuffPost report, Purdom did not comment on studies that have shown that evolution has been observed in a laboratory setting.
In response to the arguments presented in the video, Nye said categorically that creationism is "not science" and that "its claims are completely refutable":
"Creation Science" is not useful, because it can make no successful predictions about nature or the universe. 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.
In terms of critical thinking, its claims are completely refutable. When creationists assert that the Earth is 6,000 years old. That claim can be evaluated and shown to be untrue or simply wrong. If creationists claim that ancient dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, that can be shown to be false. Judge John E. Jones in Dover, Pennsylvania used the expression "breathtaking inanity" to describe creationists' arguments, i.e. claims so silly that they took his breath away.
Reiterating a point he made in his video, Nye added that a continued belief in creationism by the majority of Americans may prove detrimental to the scientific progress of the country.
"My concern again is that we cannot afford to raise a substantial fraction of the next generation of students, who do not have the skills to think scientifically. We are at a crossroads in the history of the U.S. Without scientifically literate kids, we will fall behind other countries as inventors and innovators. We will lose our edge," he told the HuffPost.
According to a recent Gallup Poll, 46 percent of Americans believe in creationism, 32 percent believe in evolution guided by God, and 15 percent believe in atheistic evolution.
WATCH Bill Nye talk about evolution: