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Bill Nye’s “Christianity vs. the Big Universe” myth

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This image represents the evolution of the Universe, starting with the Big Bang. The red arrow marks the flow of time.
Big Bang/NASA

Mike Keas, author of Unbelievable,offers some thoughts on the idea that Christians have a problem with the universe being really big. 

Scientists from centuries past, including Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), recognized that the universe is vast. They saw in this no contradiction with their Christian beliefs. Yet celebrity TV science educator Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” is among those who suggest that the sheer scale of the cosmos means humans are insignificant. In the last minutes of his 2010 “Humanist of the Year” acceptance speech, Nye — speaking for science and all humanity — delighted the American Humanist Association with this:

I’m insignificant. … I am just another speck of sand. And the earth really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck. And the sun an unremarkable star. … And the galaxy is a speck. I’m a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.

Nye’s audience laughed approvingly, no doubt because they believed that “I suck” really means “religion sucks.”

But Bill Nye isn’t so much the science guy as he is the scientism guy. Scientism is atheistic dogma masquerading as objective science.

Mike Keas, “Myth: A Big Universe Is a Problem for Christianity” at Evolution News and Science Today

 

In the current culture, Bill Nye doesn’t need to worry about the facts catching up with him. “The big universe is a problem for Christianity” is a claim something like “They’re out there” (meaning ET).

It has nothing to do with facts; it is pure social positioning (or posturing). As with the Cosmos’s series’s “artistic license to lie,” it is a way of indicating that their social position is so powerful that they can misrepresent people and 1) demand that their assertions be taken for truths – and 2) even wonder publicly what’s the matter with people who don’t believe them.

Today’s media love that sort of thing. They can’t keep up with the internet and it certainly beats thinking of a killer comeback on Twitter or (no! no!) working on a real story (no! no!), something they do less and less, it would seem. And just think,  all they want is our trust and our money.

See also: Astrophysicist: Climate Change Killed The ET Civilizations

SETI finds more creative ways to keep looking. As long as there’s an Out There, They’ll always be Out There, of course.

SETI reacts to the study that says not to wait up for the extraterrestrials

Researchers: We have dissolved the Fermi Paradox!

Extraterrestrial civilizations: When all else fails, try Bayesianism. The good news is, no one can ever prove They’re Not Out There.

and

How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?

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Comments
People making this supposed argument against God and creation make a number of questionable assumptions: 1. Although they don't (usually) believe in God, they seem to "know" how He would think and how He would do things; i.e. they are "atheistic theologians", if you'll pardon the oxymoron and the mental hiccup it causes. 2. They assume that size is somehow the most important attribute in creation, despite the fact that most of the Universe is a vacuum. However, if God considered complexity as more important than mere 3D extension, then any human being is a more complex and interesting creation than any galaxy. That puts the extent or the Universe in a different light. 3. They sometimes then revert to the, "Universe is 13.8 billion years old, while humans have been around for less than one million" argument. But then we know that, "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." (2 Peter 3:8) That represents a range factor of more than 100 billion between God's timeline and ours! Besides, God has all eternity to do His good will. One could go on, but enough for now...Fasteddious
January 21, 2019
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I've been meaning to look up the quote and finally did: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. " ("Hamlet" by Willie Shakespeare) It is a VAST pomposity for someone, even with a good deal of knowledge in the field, to DECLARE that "thus and so is TRUE, always and forever". It's in fact the practical definition of being an ANTI-intellectual. We wake up each day to confirm half a dozen simple things we knew to be true yesterday (um, I should probably wear SHOES again today. They have many practical advantages...) and then go about discovering, as my grandchildren discover, some very few of the multitudinous and spendiferous that fill the world. There are of course lots of fools out there, but since I retired, I no longer have to go to meetings with bureaucrats.vmahuna
January 20, 2019
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He forgets the universe was not always this big.buffalo
January 20, 2019
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actually a big bang and prevalent CR of distant starlight is a problem not just for Neo-Darwin doctrine, but all deep-time dependent scientific hypotheses and assumptions, as explained in/by SPIRAL cosmological redshift (CR) hypothesis and model. reference: www.amazon.com/dp/1519262205Pearlman
January 20, 2019
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