Voices
know Ken Ham’s insistence on
“biblical origins” is as phony as
the rest of creation science. I had
never known creationism was
only invented a scant 50 years
ago (six-day-young-earth creationism was never a fundamentalist dogma until the 1960s).
I had never known that most
Christians accepted the Bible’s
creation account as deliberate
allegory many centuries before
scientists even knew the earth
revolved around the sun.
I hope Bill Nye doesn’t underestimate creationists. Between their strident religious
confidence and the way they
painstakingly dumb-down and
oversimplify evidence to fit into
6,000 years, people like Ken
Ham can be tough nuts to crack.
We were raised with false ideas
about biology, geology, and history itself. Relearning all these
things from the ground up is a
tall order to begin with; the influence of religious dogma only
make it that much more difficult.
In a debate like this one, demonstrating even the most elementary facts about evolution and
the age of the universe would be
a great success.
Creationism has spread an in-
DAVID
MACMILLAN
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
credible amount of misinformation over the past half-century. I
hope Nye can cut through the accumulated falsehoods and teach
about the actual evidence. I want
people to be free to learn, free to
understand, free to explore the
fantastic mysteries of the universe without being tied down to
phony dogma that wasn’t even
part of Christianity until the last
fifty years. I want children to
Despite four years
of physics, it still took
me a long time before
I actually came to
understand evolution,
geology, and cosmology.”
learn how to trust the scientific
method... and, even more importantly, how to use the scientific
method so their creativity and
imagination won’t be wasted trying to defend pseudoscience. The
universe has so much more to offer than could ever fit into
a few thousand years.
David MacMillan works in
energy policy in the Midwestern
United States.