Hey Bill Nye, 'Can Science Eradicate Religion and Myth from Politics?' #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think

Hey Bill Nye, 'Can Science Eradicate Religion and Myth from Politics?'

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Religious practices run deep in many cultures and their influence will be slow to fade away. Bill Nye the Science Guy says that while religion can help make individuals deeper human beings, belief systems become counterproductive when they declare pseudoscience to be inviolable. But this shouldn't deter us from making practical decision with a scientific outlook. In fact, all claims worth investigating should be subjected to the scientific method. We've just got to keep nudging people in that direction, says Nye.

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BILL NYE:

Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life.

In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle’s home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live.” This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®” was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate.

While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children’s books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye’s Great Big Book of Tiny Germs.”

Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries” airs on the Science Channel. “The Eyes of Nye” airs on PBS stations across the country.

Bill’s latest project is hosting a show on Planet Green called “Stuff Happens.” It’s about environmentally responsible choices that consumers can make as they go about their day and their shopping. Also, you’ll see Nye in his good-natured rivalry with his neighbor Ed Begley. They compete to see who can save the most energy and produce the smallest carbon footprint. Nye has 4,000 watts of solar power and a solar-boosted hot water system. There’s also the low water use garden and underground watering system. It’s fun for him; he’s an engineer with an energy conservation hobby.

Nye is currently the Executive Director of The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest organization.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Aditya Bakshi: Hey Bill. This is Aditya Bakshi. I'm a mechanical engineer graduate from India. My question to you is why are so many people attracted to pseudoscience and what can we as a society do to stop pseudoscience if it has the support of religious fundamentalists and hyper nationalist? For example, the recently concluded Indian Science Congress was criticized heavily for featuring a lot of pseudoscience and mythology. Thank you.

Bill Nye: Greetings Aditya. I'm saying it as best I can. Aditya? I'm saying it as best I can. I have spent just about two weeks in India and I got to say I was very impressed with how much pseudoscience there is, how much spiritualism there is. I guess those aren't the same thing. And a lot of people - it's very common for people from my country, from the United States to go to India to get a new way of looking at life, to get a new spiritual prospective. And as you suggested these things, pseudoscience and the spiritual perspective seem to be tied together. But science, this process that humans have come up with where you make an observation; you come up with a hypothesis, a reason you think this observation happen, this phenomenon occurred, and then you come up with a way to test it. An experiment. You test it. You see what happened. You compare that to what you thought would happen and you know nature and this extraordinary way that enables us to have cars and trucks and the green revolution and feed everybody and clean water for a lot of people and electricity and spaceflight and putting things in orbit around Mars, the Mars Orbiting Mission, ISRO, Indian Space Research Organization's mission....

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