The United States is alone among developed and technologically advanced countries in allowing creationists to influence or impede the teaching of evolution, science advocate and television personality Bill Nye told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
"It's unique to the U.S.," Nye, former host of the PBS children's program, "The Science Guy," said of the conflict between creationism and evolution that is playing out in some local school districts. "We don't have this problem anywhere else."
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Author of a new book,
"Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation," Nye has been campaigning in earnest this year for the unfettered teaching of evolution, arguing that to deny it to kids is to stunt their intellectual development and raise "a generation of young people that can't think."
In February, Nye
debated Ken Ham, founder of the Creationist Museum, in Ham's home base of Kentucky.
"I'm trying to spread the word," said Nye, adding that the Kentucky debate "was a case where I went in the lion's den, and my goal was to raise awareness of this extraordinary worldview that's in our midst here in the world's technologically most advanced society."
Nye said that Ham's operation spends large sums "indoctrinating" schoolchildren through DVD's, curriculum materials, posters, workbooks and quizzes meant to prove the world is 6,000 years old and was created as told in the Bible's Genesis chapters.
He said that resistance to evolution — which he called "a fact of life" and "the fundamental idea in all of biology" — is not limited to Kentucky.
"The problem is we have adults who have very strong, conservative views that are reluctant to let kids learn about evolution," Nye said, citing "people who get on school boards and want to introduce doubt about the main idea in biology."
Nye acknowledged that the concept of life evolving on a 4.5 billion-year-old planet "is just literally impossible for almost all of us to imagine," but he said that the refusal to try — and to object on religious grounds — is just a manifestation of humanity's unease with mortality.
"I think it's the troubling and compelling fact of life: We're all gonna die," he said.
"But whatever you believe," he said, "whatever deity or higher power you might believe in, the earth is not 6,000 years old."
School children taught creationism "will not be able to participate in the future" like children taught evolution, said Nye, "because they will not have this fundamental idea that you can question things, you can think critically, and you can use skeptical thought to learn about nature.
"These children will have to suppress everything they can see in nature to try to get a worldview that's compatible with the adults in whom they trust and rely on for subsistence," he said.
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