Bill Nye’s Incoherency
Big Think’s Science Guy needs to start thinking a lot bigger and more often.
In late February, the YouTube channel Big Think posted another Bill Nye the Science Guy answer to a submitted question. The question was from a young philosophy student, and he asked a relatively straightforward question:
Some scientists, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins, have brushed philosophy off as a meaningless topic. What do you think about it?
Nye replied with an objectively painful display of ignorance.
With self contradictions, fallacious logic, and just bizarre wandering throughout his three minute answer, there really should be a #sendBillbacktoschool trend on Twitter. Unfortunately no trend exists. Instead, what remains are the immortalized digital remnants of a secular priest preaching a philosophy that is fully bankrupt on its own terms.
Fr. Nye’s answer is one that pervades common culture; precisely because curriculums, both implicitly and explicitly, advocate it. Average students aren’t being educated on how to think rationally per se. They are learning how to think “science” from an early age — which is good — without learning the nuances of its indispensable prerequisite and foundation.
Robert Barron wrote a succinct reply to Nye’s popular dogmatism. In one particularly poignant section, the Los Angeles bishop writes:
The physical sciences can reveal the chemical composition of ink and paper, but they cannot, even in principle, tell us anything about the meaning of Moby Dick or The Wasteland. Biology might inform us regarding the process by which nerves stimulate muscles in order to produce human action, but it could never tell us anything about whether a human act is morally right or wrong. Optics might disclose how light and color are processed by the eye, but it cannot possibly tell us what makes the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling beautiful. Speculative astrophysics might tell us truths about the unfolding of the universe from the singularity of the Big Bang, but it cannot say a word about why there is something rather than nothing or how contingent being relates to non-contingent being.
How desperately sad if questions regarding truth, morality, beauty, and existence qua existence are dismissed as irrational or pre-scientific.
Barron also links the flaw in thinking to an even deeper problem in education, which I think is a real issue:
The scientism that I’ve been describing and criticizing is but a symptom of a more far-reaching problem, namely, the fading away of the humanities in our schools. If the study of literature, the arts, and philosophy is regarded as impractical and “soft” in comparison to the study of the sciences, we will produce a generation of prisoners chained inside of Plato’s cave.
Read Barron’s full piece here, and reflect on your own educational experience. Oh, and don’t get apathetically lost in the populist cave — even if those inside are wearing lab coats.
