You would think Bill Nye would have a strong stake in reality. On his new Netflix show, however, Nye trots out the pseudo-scientific canard that increased population growth will doom the earth. His solution to the problem? To abort babies. I responded to this horrific material in a post entitled “Bill Nye Instructs Us All: Stop Having Kids” at the Center for Public Theology.
This isn’t Nye’s only major misstep of late. Another episode of “Bill Nye Saves the World” featured an unbelievably coarse song-and-dance number on “Sex Junk.” I apologize to my readers for even using that term, but I had to. The point of the “song” is that one’s biology does not determine one’s sexual desires; we are free to act on whatever impulses we feel coursing through us. Gender is malleable, not fixed, and so is sexuality. I refuse to link to the video of the song; it is not only Not Safe for Work, it is Not Safe for Human Flourishing.
By contrast, here is what he taught kids on his popular TV show two decades ago according to The Federalist: “Inside each of ourselves are these things called chromosomes, and they control whether we become a boy or a girl,” a teenage narrator explains. “There are only two possibilities: ‘XX,’ a girl, or ‘XY,’ a boy.” All this has changed. Nye has bowed to the mighty rushing tide of Invincible Popular Consensus, est. mere months ago.
We live in the strangest times. That which is science is said to be anti-science; that which is nonsense is presented as shimmering truth. I am no scholar of atomic theory, but I know that there are two sexes, male and female, and they are fixed, not fluid. Nye had it right 20 years ago on that point. Further, if you want to be scientific regarding human birth, you’re going to need to acknowledge that there’s a human growing in a woman’s womb, and that said human deserves to be treated as a human, not a mass of tissue. The pro-abortion views Nye espouses on his new series have nothing in common with basic realities of human development. A scientific understanding of humanity, in other words, demands that we correlate the baby’s life in the womb with its personhood outside of it.
When science is your god, you end up in strange territory. You think that Christians are the ones with bad arguments, while you’re trotting out extremist hypotheses debunked roughly 200 years ago. Christians can surely fall prey to lies and falsehoods, but sad trajectories like Bill Nye’s remind us never to underplay the explanatory power of the Christian worldview. Some may say it is foolishness, but it is truth, underwritten by God and defensible in public.
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(Image: Wikimedia Commons)