I Never Thought I'd Be Writing About Bill Nye

Note:  I came to this by reading Digby's post on the Waco incident from the other day.  At first I thought it just happened, but it was a rehashing of an old "Think Atheist" post from 2009 which, I found out while researching this post,  rehashed the incident from 2006.   Clearly Bill Nye's great stand for science is destined to become an evergreen of anti-religious invective.

Bill "the science guy "Nye is one of those pop culture figures who one is apparently supposed to automatically consider as above question and a figure of veneration*.  Like a soap opera hero or something.   I never got it.  His pencil neck geek "sci-guy" persona was all right to carry a kiddie's show but he doesn't even approach the watered down public face of science condescendingly given to the masses in the 1970s and 80s.  The lab coat and bow tie are looking old.   I strongly suspect that TV is not a useful venue for gaining knowledge about the vast majority of science topics.

The reason I'm even thinking about Bill Nye is the use that's being made of an incident that happened in Waco Texas, where Nye was hired to give a couple of lectures as part of McLennan Community College's Distinguished Lecture Series.  His lecture topics are reported to have been energy consumption and global warming and Mars exploration.  All well and good, and fine and groovy, all things we need to know more about, all things about which science is equipped to tell us what can be found out about.

I'd never heard of a controversy that happened when Nye seems to have interjected a comment that Genesis 1:16, "God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars."  is wrong because the moon only reflects the light of the sun.   It's an old Bible debunker's bromide, one which I've heard for decades.  How it fit in to the lectures, I'd like to know, if it was not the answer to a direct question from the audience.  I haven't been able to find out how the line was brought into the discussion.  That Nye wouldn't have known that particular line might have excited controversy in an audience in Waco,  I don't believe that for a second.  The line got the just about 100% predictable response, walk outs by angry audience members who, instead of being educated by "the science guy" were pissed off because they're smart enough to know when they're being mocked.  Which is the real meaning of so many of those atheist bromides, "you're stupid" "you're ignorant yahoos from the Bible Belt", etc.

It's a point that the atheist, materialist, evolution espousing geneticist, Richard Lewontin, warned wouldn't produce the allegedly desired results:


The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.7 The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education. 

This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children.

The result was a fundamentalist revolt, the invention of "Creation Science," and successful popular pressure on local school boards and state textbook purchasing agencies to revise subversive curricula and boycott blasphemous textbooks. In their parochial hubris, intellectuals call the struggle between cultural relativists and traditionalists in the universities and small circulation journals "The Culture Wars." The real war is between the traditional culture of those who think of themselves as powerless and the rationalizing materialism of the modern Leviathan. There are indeed Two Cultures at Cambridge. One is in the Senior Common Room, and the other is in the Porter's Lodge.


Lewontin is very unusual among big name scientists because of his extensive and wide ranging reading of history and politics.  But he's even more unusual among public scientists in that he is remarkably without scorn for the great unwashed, even those whose culture is radically opposed to his own point of view.  He is almost uniquely and analytically critical of his own cultural melieu and of the culture of scientists.

Nye was one of Carl Sagan's students at Cornell University, where he studied engineering after a rather elite preparatory education in Washington, D.C.  Since then he's followed Sagan's career in science popularization, presenting watered down, I'd say dumbed down, science to what they obviously see as the ignorant masses in much the way that a stereotypical missionary brought true religion to the savage heathen.

As Lewontin's review of Sagans' "Demon Haunted World", began with an account of his first meeting Sagan when they were sent to debate evolution at  a Christian college in Arkansas, criticizing Sagan's approach due to condescension for the public and an unrealistically idealistic presentation of science, Nye would seem to have repeated his teacher's approach.  It is an approach that will get the reaction that it got.  As will the rehashing of it throughout the atheist blogs and other media.

I'm left with wondering why the light reflected off of the moon onto the Earth wouldn't make the moon "a great light", in the sense that the author of Genesis would mean it.  No one knew the nature of the moon at that time or even for quite a while later.  Even the proto-scientists of the classical period were unclear about things like that.   I'm not aware of when it was that they figured out that moonlight was reflected from the sun, it would be interesting to know when that first became the uniform educated viewpoint.

But, wait, isn't anyone who uses the word "moonlight" as much at fault as those people who walked out in Waco?  I'd love to know if Bill Nye, Digby, Morgan Matthew, or any of the others snarking about this incident have ever used similarly inaccurate but entirely understandable language about the moon.  Nye's walk outs probably didn't care at all about the issue of reflected light off of the moon, but they are the ones who heard what Nye was really saying, they knew the real message behind the words,  "You're stupid, I'm not", if not "I'm smarter than you are because of where I grew up and went to school. Not some community college in Texas".   Even if Nye is unsophisticated enough to not realize that's what was heard, I will guarantee you that is the message he delivered.

So much for the role of TV and popular science educator in the hands of the new atheists.  When they do this kind of stuff, call me skeptical, but I don't really believe that science education is the goal.  It's the coercive enforcement of cultural superiority.

* I will only resist the temptation of analyzing his bizarre seven week long non-marriage and the reason Blair Tindall, his estranged non-wife,  gave for an, admittedly, brutal attack on his flower garden onlyh because neither of them have revealed the reason that their very public marriage - at the Skirball Center! officiated by RICK  WARREN! and with YO YO MA PLAYING! - only because neither of them have revealed why their marriage was legally invalid.   I will note that she gave her reason as, "Bill commented [on Ed Begley's TV SHOW!] that life would be perfect ... if only he had a woman with whom to share the house — a house I'd found, fixed up, and assumed I'd enjoy married life and motherhood as 'Mrs. Nye' within."

I'd never approve of the murder of innocent flowers and certainly not with weed poison, but I'd have merely revealed why Bill bailed on the marriage, unless there was some pre-nup that prevented me from telling the truth.  Still, a tell-all is preferable to the way she handled it.

And that's as close as I ever expect to get to being a gossip columnist.

Update:  I mistyped.  Lewontin and Sagan were sent to Arkansas, not Texas, though the scientist they were debating had a PhD in Zoology from the University of Texas.