Bill Nye the raving lunatic?

My Sunday school class demonstrated today why I probably need to find a new hobby.  In the course of starting a discussion of Adam Hamiltons "Why?" (a standard theodicy apologetic) our class president brought up Bill Nye's recent video "slamming" creationism.  The response from those in attendance was self assured muttering about "can't combine faith and science" etc.  I suppose some of those who remained silent were as uncomfortable as I was but I wanted to scream, "You can't faith away the evidence - the earth is a couple of billions years old!!!"  Of course I had to hold my tongue and then sit on my hands while the class defended innocent suffering with silver-lining anecdotes.  Suffice it to say, I was in a bad mood akl day after that.

This afternoon, I decided to look at the Nye video to see just how much foam was actually flung from his lips.  I mean, based on the reaction, I thought that he must gone all Rush Limbaugh on them.  Well here it is.  Jeez, he is the calmest guy I have ever seen.  He is right; teaching that the evidence of scientific investigation is of no value when it contradicts faith is to devalue the scientific enterprise as a whole.  Not a good idea if you want a technologically advanced culture.

Edit: meant to say he "slammed" creationism, not evolution

Than are Dreamt of in Your Metaphysics

My problem with philosophers who sit so secure in the belief that they have a superior source of truth is that their output almost never has to face the test of actual reality.

I chuckled reading this story related by Carl Sagan in Demon Haunted World:

At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to the toast, "To physics and metaphysics." By "metaphysics," people then meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them. They could also have included pseudoscience.

Wood answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make. He consults the scientific literature. The more he reads, the more promising the idea becomes. Thus prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises an experiment to test it. The experiment is painstaking. Many
possibilities are checked. The accuracy of measurement is refined, the error bars reduced. He lets the chips fall where they may. He is devoted only to what the experiment teaches. At the end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea is found to be worthless. So the physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

(Read last night in Demon Haunted World but got text from Textuality)