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I won't be copying the written questions, just responding, so feel free to follow along!
1. In my opinion, absolutely! I believe the argument is meant to imply that by steering children away from young Earth creationism, Bill Nye is also steering children away from God and all the good things that come from being religious. In his capacity, Bill is not attempting to banish religion, but rather strengthen science. It has only been recently (the past few centuries) that science has caught up to and been seriously able to compete logically with origin models of religions. Now that the best explanation for things does not come from religious text, it is time to accept these scientific models as our best theories to date, and teach them to our children.
2. I can't speak for Bill Nye, but I am not. I don't believe that if a Divine Creator existed, that He/She/His Noodly Appendage would take issue with the way that I choose to live my life.
3. No, that is not completely illogical. It does, however, become less logical by the second, as we see again and again that the laws governing the universe have not suddenly changed. If there is an all-powerful god, then I don't doubt that a mature Earth would be a sinch.
4. Bill Nye addressed this point. The second law of thermodynamics and evolution exist in harmony. Evolution brings variety and newness to species, which could be counted as entropy. How is it possible to create entropy without the addition of anything new in the system? The argument would be very compelling if we viewed Earth as a closed system, which it is not. Energy is being added to Earth, to quote the Science Guy, "day and night."
5. I think she's talking about the beauty of the sunset. I'll explain the whole thing though. Earth is roughly a sphere. It rotates on its axis about 365.25 times a year. From our perspective on the surface of Earth, as we rotate, the apparent location of the heavans changes. When the part of Earth we are standing on is turning away from the sun, the sun appears to fall in the sky until it sinks behind the horizon. At this point, the angle of the sun's photons through the atmosphere is such that there is more atmosphere between our eyes and the sun. This atmosphere is full of dirt, dust, and debris that deepen the apparent color of the sun to a redder hue. You'll notice that aboard the international space station, when the sun rises or sets behind Earth, there is not such a dramatic red tinting. This is because there is little to no atmosphere from that perspective between the ISS and the sun. The reason sunsets are beautiful, in my opinion, is because we get to see the sun and the world around us in a different, fleeting light. It is rarity and atmosphere that make the beauty.
6. Thermodynamics does not debunk evolution, as mentioned in number 4. I can't say I know what he's talking about with the big bang theory. Perhaps in his mind, the order in the universe today is not a result of ever-increasing entropy? The fallacy here is that order can be subjective or objective. Scientists do not place opinions on the amount of entropy in a system, they use numbers. The harmonic distribution of the bodies in the solar system may seem ordered, but this system does, in fact, have more entropy than it did a moment ago, and even more now. This is the way it has been since the big bang, so I think it's point proven here.
7. Noetics as the phenomenon of human minds altering the physical world is a fascinating subject. We do not fully understand it, but that does not mean that a god, let aloneyour god, is the only explanation.
8. I derive objective meaning in life from evolution. One point of evolution is to diversify and allow for the continuation of the species. This is the only objective meaning my life has. If a part of my DNA is not the best fit for survival in our current world, and that part of my DNA gets me killed before I reproduce, I will have done the species a favor by not passing along that gene. If the inverse is true, and I have a great fitting gene for our current world, I will do the species a favor by having children and potentially passing that trait along. The rest of the meaning of my life is all subjective.
9. Chance, the laws of the universe, and lots and lots of time!
10. That's cute.
11. The simple answer is that the evidence is more compelling.
12. I think she means we have not found a complete skeleton of homo sapiens' ancestors between ancient apes and us, citing Lucy as the most complete fossil. Firstly, Ardi holds that distinction. Gaps in fossil records are to be expected. Not all bones fossilize, and only few that do are ever discovered. Compare, for example, the availability of dinosaur fossils to human ancestors. There are many more dinosaur fossils, but this is mostly because there were many more dinosaurs. Dinosaurs walked the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, while humans have only been bipedaling around for a couple hundred thousand. Many other factors can account for fossil record gaps, but I think this is the most compelling.
13. Sure! The egg-larva-pupa-adult life cycle has many evolutionary advantages. I don't know if there's an argument that metamorphosis is evidence against evolution...*quick google search*...annnnd there is. Okay, the argument here is that systems so complex as metamorphosis could not possibly have occurred by a series of chance mutations in a genome. That's incorrect. I don't know how else to put it. That's how it happened. It happened little by little over several millions of generations, but it happened like that.
14. If evolution is taught as a fact, meaning that no other explanation will ever fit, and evolution will always be right, so we shouldn't bother trying to prove it wrong, then I have a serious problem with that as well. If science teachers do their jobs correctly, they will be able to emphasize the point that everything in science is a theory, and evolution is the best scientific theory for biology that we have yet. The reason evolution is taught in schools is because the theory further helps us understand our universe, and that is the point of schools.
15. All science is testable, observational, and repeatable. A theory is something that can be tested, observed, and repeated. Creationism is a theory as well. The reason I reject creationism or intelligent design being taught in school is because it is not the most robust, best-tested, most revealing theory available, and I want nothing less for our young students.
16. This point was harped upon by Ken Ham during the debate. He posited that in an event touted as evolution, bacteria were able to sustain themselves on a different substance not because of an evolutionary mechanism, but by a sort of switching-on of genes. In this model, no new genetic information was added. It was already there. I don't know if science has yet discovered evidence of an increase of genetic information through the evolutionary process, but I do understand that an increase of genetic information must needs be occurring over vast time periods, much greater than the time since we sequenced the first genome. It would not surprise me if this smoking gun goes on undetected for years to come.
17. I mentioned in #8 that my purpose is to contribute to the ultimate survival of the human species (or descendants thereof) through playing my small role in the big scope of evolution. Without a belief in salvation, life can seem pretty bleak, and death bleaker. My subjective purpose, as I understand it, is to make the world a better place for those that come after me, and be as happy as possible while doing so.
18. See #12. Just because it hasn't been found doesn't mean it never existed.
19. No, you can't. Belief in the big bang stems from evidence that took billions of years to reach us, and there is no absolute proof that during that time, the laws that govern the universe have not changed. We have to take a leap of faith that universal laws have been consistant since the big bang in order for it to be implicit from our current observations. That being said, for me, at least, that leap is easier than one that requires a divine creator.
20. I just do. However amazing the world is, with all its complexities and interconnectedness, I have yet to see any evidence that convinces me that all this could not have occurred by chance over 4.5 billion years.
21. I don't know if one would call all the energy in the universe condensed beyond the Planck length as an exploding star...but the answer is that I don't know, and it's one of the limitations of modern science that we do not have any tools to observe beyond a certain point in spacetime. Again, this does not disprove the big bang theory, and if anything, the fact that we don't know should make us thirst for that secret even more! If we turn to a creationist model, the answer is given to us in the form of the divine creator, and that sense of wonder and exploration is gone.
22. The theory of evolution does not assert that homo sapiens sapiens descended from the same species of monkeys we coexist with today. The theory of evolution as applied to human ancestry implies that there was a species from which all of today's primates are evolved. This species is now extinct, and its descendants are all that remain.
What do you think? Do you have any rebuttals for/against? Feel free to comment & share!
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