Bill Nye’s Illogical attack of the Bible

[Excerpt from Unreliable: The Science and Logic of Bill Nye by Heath Henning. This book can be downloaded for free here.]

Bill Nye wrote, “about my recent debate with a creationist… I emphasize that I did not disparage anyone’s religion. I did not mention anything about The Bible.”¹⁾Bill Nye, (ed. Corey Powell), Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, St. Martin’s Press (New York), 2014, p. 9 This is perhaps the easiest statement in his book to evaluate because the debate was recorded in its entirety. The question is straightforward: Did Bill Nye mention the Bible? The answer is unequivocally yes. During the debate he stated:

Your assertion that all the animals were vegetarians before they got on the Ark, that’s really remarkable. I have not spent a lot of time with lions, but I can tell they have teeth that really aren’t set up for broccoli. That these animals were vegetarians until the Flood, is something that I would ask you to provide a little more proof for. I give you the lions’ teeth, you give me verses as translated in the English over 30 centuries, so that’s not enough evidence for me. If you’ve ever played telephone –I did, I remember very well in kindergarten where you have a secret, and you whisper it to the next person, to the next person, to the next person, things often go wrong. So it’s very reasonable to me that instead of lions being vegetarians on the Ark, lions are lions, and the information that you use to create your world view is not consistent with what I, as a reasonable man, would expect.

So, I want everybody to consider the implications of this. If we accept Mr. Ham’s point of view, that the Bible as translated into American English, serves as a science text, and that he and his followers will interpret that for you, I want you to consider what that means.²⁾Bill Nye’s 5-minute rebuttal during the Bill Nye Ken Ham debate, “Is Creation a Viable Model of Origin In Today’s Modern Scientific Era?” Feb. 4, 2014; transcript at http://www.youngearth.org/index.php/archives/rmcf-articles/item/21-transcript-of-ken-ham-vs-bill-nye-debate

By comparing the Bible to the children’s game of telephone, Nye argues that “things often go wrong,” thereby implying that the biblical text has undergone repeated corruption over time. His assertion directly contradicts his later claim that he “did not mention anything about the Bible.” In reality, his criticism was aimed at the trustworthiness of the biblical text itself.

Ironically, Nye repeatedly refers to himself as “a reasonable man,” yet within this brief statement he commits numerous logical fallacies while simultaneously demonstrating a misunderstanding of both biblical preservation and the creationist position.

When Nye characterizes himself as “a reasonable man,” he commits the fallacy of false dilemma (bifurcation). His argument implies that one must either accept evolutionary theory and be reasonable or believe the Bible and be irrational. This same dichotomy underlies the title of his book, Undeniable. As previously demonstrated, however, the founders of modern science were overwhelmingly men of Christian faith who believed that God’s orderly creation could be understood through rational investigation. Moreover, as discussed earlier, a purely materialistic evolutionary worldview struggles to account for the existence of objective rationality itself.

Nye repeats this false dilemma when he declares, “I give you the lions’ teeth, you give me verses.” Here he presents science and Scripture as mutually exclusive sources of knowledge, suggesting that a rational individual must choose between them. This false dichotomy permeates both the debate and his book. Ken Ham effectively challenged this assertion during the debate by presenting examples of credentialed scientists who accept the biblical creation account. Indeed, even several evolutionary commentators criticized Nye’s reasoning on this particular point.

Nye commits the same error again by assuming that lions must be either carnivorous or incapable of surviving on vegetation. This argument also constitutes a hasty generalization. Contrary to his assertion, history provides several well-documented examples of lions that lived primarily on vegetarian diets. Among these are the famous lioness Little Tyke, another vegetarian lion described by Paramahansa Yogananda in India, and Lea, a lioness that consumed a vegetarian diet during the first seven years of her life before gradually adapting to meat after being transferred to a South African wildlife preserve.³⁾See, Georges F. Westbeau, Little Tyke: True Story of a Gentle Vegetarian Lioness, Quest Books, 1986;or for short articles see, http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Saints/Authors/Stories/LittleTyke.htm

David Catchpoole, “The Lion that wouldn’t eat meat,” http://creation.com/the-lion-that-wouldnt-eat-meat

Bodie Hodge, “Unexpectedly Vegetarian Animals-What Does it Mean?” https://answersingenesis.org/animal-behavior/what-animals-eat/unexpectedly-vegetarian-animals-what-does-it-mean/

Dr. Georgia Purdom, “No Taste For Meat?” https://answersingenesis.org/animal-behavior/what-animals-eat/no-taste-for-meat/

“Vegetarian Lioness: Little Tyke” http://vegetarismus.com/vegepet/tyke.htm quotes Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, for the vegetarian lion he saw in India.

Nye’s appeal to lions’ dentition is likewise unpersuasive. Numerous omnivorous animals possess teeth capable of tearing flesh while consuming relatively little meat. Bears provide an obvious example. Although equipped with formidable canine teeth, many bear species derive most of their diet from vegetation, and the giant panda subsists almost entirely on bamboo despite possessing the same basic dental structure as other bears.

Nye’s statement, “Lions are lions,” contributes nothing to the discussion regarding the biological capabilities or original design of lions. The statement merely restates itself and therefore exemplifies the fallacy of tautology, employing circular reasoning instead of evidence.

He also commits an appeal to novelty when he dismisses biblical evidence as merely “verses as translated into English over thirty centuries,” implying that the Bible is outdated while evolutionary theory represents modern scientific progress. Curiously, however, Nye appeals to antiquity elsewhere in Undeniable by invoking the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander as an early advocate of evolutionary ideas.⁴⁾Bill Nye, (ed. Corey Powell), Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, St. Martin’s Press (New York), 2014, p. 5 Thus, the age of an idea appears to matter only when it supports his own position.

Nye further constructs a straw man by claiming that Ken Ham treats the Bible as a scientific textbook. Creationists have consistently denied this characterization. Their position has never been that Scripture functions as a modern scientific manual, but rather that, because God is the author of both Scripture and nature, genuine scientific discovery cannot ultimately contradict the biblical record.

Finally, Nye’s comparison of biblical transmission to the game of telephone represents a false analogy. The telephone game depends upon an unrecorded chain of oral transmission in which each participant relies solely upon memory. The Bible was transmitted through written manuscripts that can be compared across thousands of extant copies. Modern textual criticism is able to evaluate these manuscripts precisely because the biblical text was preserved in documentary form rather than by an uncontrolled oral tradition. Nye’s analogy therefore demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the biblical text has actually been transmitted throughout history.

This final point deserves particular attention because it lies at the heart of Nye’s criticism. Although he later claimed not to have spoken against the Bible, his comments were directed precisely at the reliability and authority of Scripture. His remarks therefore expose the real focus of his argument.

Nye himself admitted, “I am by no means an expert on most of this,” yet later asserted, “In this situation, our skeptical arguments are not the stuff of Ph.Ds. It’s elementary science and common sense.”⁵⁾Lovan, Dylan T. (April 16, 2014). “Bill Nye says he underestimated debate’s impact”. AP Online. Genuine common sense, however, must be governed by sound logic and informed by an adequate knowledge of the evidence. Neither criterion is consistently demonstrated in the arguments considered above. Instead, Nye dismisses the creationist position through rhetorical assertions while failing to provide sufficient justification for either rejecting biblical creation or establishing evolutionary theory as an exclusive explanation.

Indeed, the controversy began with Nye’s earlier statement:

“If we raise a generation of students who don’t believe in the process of science, who think everything that we’ve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, you’re not going to continue to innovate.”⁶⁾Lovan, Dylan (September 24, 2012). “Bill Nye warns: Creation views threaten US science”. AP Online.

This statement commits yet another slippery slope fallacy by appealing to fear rather than presenting evidence. Ironically, the “ancient text” he dismisses is the very worldview that historically gave rise to modern science and sustained its remarkable development for centuries. While Nye refuses to acknowledge this historical reality, many evolutionary historians and philosophers of science have been willing to concede the profound influence that the biblical worldview exerted upon the rise of scientific inquiry.

Bill Nye’s analogy of the telephone game collapses under the sheer weight of the manuscript evidence. Henry Morris writes concerning the New Testament manuscripts:

“Although there are probably available today over 5,000 handwritten manuscript copies in Greek and at least 15,000 more in other languages. Nothing remotely comparably to this abundance exists for any ancient writing.”⁷⁾Henry M. Morris with Henry M. Morris III, Many Infallible Proofs, Evidence for the Christian Faith, Master Books, 1990, p. 33

The New Testament affirms the creation account recorded in Genesis, and the Jewish nation painstakingly preserved the Old Testament Scriptures for centuries before the New Testament was ever written.

For thousands of years, God preserved the accuracy of His Holy Scriptures through the careful reproduction of the manuscripts by extraordinarily dedicated Jewish Masoretic scribes. Grant Jeffrey describes their remarkable precision:

For thousands of years, God had preserved the accuracy of His Holy Scriptures through the careful reproduction of the manuscripts by these extraordinarily dedicated Jewish Masoretic scribes. When the scribe copied the manuscript of Genesis (which contain 76,064 Hebrew letters), he would literally count out the precise number of times each of the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet occurred in the text. He would also make notations on the margin of the page to assure that no letters were added or taken away. If even one letter was missed or added improperly, the master scribe would destroy the imperfect copy, lest an error creep into the holy text of the Word of God.⁸⁾Grant Jeffrey, The Signature of God; The Hand Writing of God: Two Bestselling Works Complete in One Volume, Inspirational Press, 1999, p. 450

Legitimate Criticisms of Ken Ham

There are, however, two points in Nye’s criticism that deserve to be directed toward Ken Ham.

First, in an effort to appeal to a broader evangelical constituency, Ham has, over the last decade or two, rejected the Authorized King James Version in favor of a modern “Bible as translated into American English,” as Nye phrases it. Ironically, Nye is largely unaware of the significance of the point he inadvertently raises—and so are many Christians. Most modern Bible versions are not strictly translations but dynamic-equivalence versions or paraphrases based upon a revised Greek text produced by nineteenth-century textual critics.⁹⁾See David Cloud, For Love of the Bible: The Battle for the King James Version and the Received Text from 1800 to Present, Way of Life Literature, fifth edition 2008

Second, Ken Ham’s principal mistake during the debate was reinforcing the false “science versus religion” narrative by defending the doctrine of biblical inerrancy within the context of a scientific debate against an atheist. While Scripture certainly bears upon scientific questions, the debate was framed in such a way that Ham allowed Nye to portray biblical authority as though it were fundamentally opposed to scientific investigation.

Kangaroos and Worldview

Bill Nye further attacked the Bible indirectly by equating it with what he repeatedly called “Mr. Ham’s worldview.” One of his favorite examples involved the migration of kangaroos from the Ark to Australia. He argued:

one of the extraordinary claims associated with Mr. Ham’s worldview, is that this giant boat, a very large wooden ship went aground safely on a mountain in what we now call the Middle East. And so places like Australia, are populated, then by animals whose [ancestors] somehow managed to get from the Middle East all the way to Australia, in the last 4000 years. That to me is an extraordinary claim. We would expect then, somewhere between the Middle East and Australia, we would expect to find evidence of kangaroos. We would expect to find some fossils, some bones; sometime during the last 4000 years, somebody would’ve been hopping along there and died along the way, and we would find them.¹⁰⁾Bill Nye Presentation (30 minutes) during the Bill Nye Ken Ham debate, “Is Creation a Viable Model of Origin In Today’s Modern Scientific Era?” Feb. 4, 2014; transcript at http://www.youngearth.org/index.php/archives/rmcf-articles/item/21-transcript-of-ken-ham-vs-bill-nye-debate

Paul F. Taylor identifies the fundamental error underlying this argument—namely, its dependence upon uniformitarian assumptions:

But the expectation of such fossils is a presuppositional error. Such an expectation is predicated on the assumption that fossils form gradually and inevitably from animal populations. In fact, fossilization is by no means inevitable. It usually requires sudden, rapid burial. Otherwise the bones would decompose before permineralization. One ought likewise to ask why it is that, despite the fact that millions of bison used to roam the prairies of North America, hardly any bison fossils are found there. Similarly, lion fossils are not found in Israel even though we know that lions once lived there.¹¹⁾Paul F. Taylor, “How Did Animals Spread All Over The World from Where the Ark Landed,” The New Answers Book, (ed. Ken Ham) Master Books, 2007, vol. 1, p. 144

A Case of Special Pleading

The inconsistency in Nye’s argument becomes even more apparent when compared with what he himself writes elsewhere. While criticizing “Mr. Ham’s worldview,” he demands fossil evidence for migrating kangaroos. Yet in his own book he readily acknowledges: “Most living things never get fossilized, and most end up in places where they are impossible to discover.”¹²⁾Bill Nye, (ed. Corey Powell), Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, St. Martin’s Press (New York), 2014, p. 95 As an evolutionist, Nye recognizes that the fossil record contains enormous gaps. The absence of transitional fossils is routinely explained by arguing that fossilization is rare and that most organisms never become fossils. Yet when debating creationism, he suddenly insists that fossil evidence should exist for migrating kangaroos.

This is a textbook example of the logical fallacy known as special pleading. He applies one standard to evolution and an entirely different standard to creation.

The inconsistency becomes even clearer when Nye explains how fossils are formed:

“Let’s step back for a moment and consider what it takes to become a fossil. First of all, you have to get buried. …getting your specimens buried alive is the best thing for a paleontologist. The resting place generally has to be wet in order for the organism to get buried effectively. Then that wet sand or soil has to dry out completely… Then it has to sit there for years…generally millions of years, while minerals slowly trickle through and turn once-living structures to stone.”¹³⁾Bill Nye, (ed. Corey Powell), Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, St. Martin’s Press (New York), 2014, p. 96

Ironically, nearly every condition Nye identifies as favorable for fossilization—rapid burial, abundant water, and widespread sedimentation—is precisely what would be expected during the worldwide Flood described in Genesis, with the exception of his assumption that millions of years are required.

Elsewhere he admits: “In general, the difficulty of making fossils guarantees that the fossil record will be full of gaps… It could not be any other way.”¹⁴⁾Bill Nye, (ed. Corey Powell), Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, St. Martin’s Press (New York), 2014, p. 101 Unless, apparently, one is debating a creationist. In that case, he suddenly expects abundant fossil evidence of kangaroos “hopping along” between the Middle East and Australia.

The Question of Land Bridges

Nye also mocked the possibility of post-Flood migration by land bridges, stating:

“And furthermore, there is a claim that there was a land bridge that allowed these animals to get from Asia all the way to the continent of Australia, and that land bridge has [since] disappeared in the last 4000 years. No navigator, no diver, no U.S. Navy submarine, no one’s ever detected any evidence of this, let alone any fossils of kangaroos.”¹⁵⁾Bill Nye Presentation (30 minutes) during the Bill Nye Ken Ham debate, “Is Creation a Viable Model of Origin In Today’s Modern Scientific Era?” Feb. 4, 2014; transcript at http://www.youngearth.org/index.php/archives/rmcf-articles/item/21-transcript-of-ken-ham-vs-bill-nye-debate

Can Nye actually substantiate such an absolute claim? Has he consulted every navigator, diver, and submarine crew in existence? Once again, his argument borders on special pleading, if not outright hypocrisy.

Evolutionary theory itself frequently invokes now-vanished land bridges as mechanisms for migration—even in cases where human beings, capable of constructing boats, are involved. Nye himself writes: “people moved from northeast Asia (low ultraviolet) across the ice-age land bridge that is now the Bering Strait into North America…”¹⁶⁾Bill Nye, (ed. Corey Powell), Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, St. Martin’s Press (New York), 2014, p. 252 The “Ice Age land bridge” has likewise disappeared, leaving little direct evidence beyond the assumed migration itself. Furthermore, the evolutionary explanation presupposes that prehistoric humans lacked the technological ability to construct seaworthy vessels. By contrast, the creation model explains lower sea levels as a consequence of the post-Flood Ice Age, providing a natural mechanism for temporary land bridges.

Paul F. Taylor summarizes the creationist position:

Many of them [animals] could have floated on vast floating logs, left-overs from the massive pre-Flood forests that were ripped up during the Flood and likely remained afloat for many decades on the world’s oceans, transported by world currents. Others could later have been taken by people…. A third explanation of possible later migration is that animals could have crossed land bridges. This is, after all, how it is supposed by evolutionists that many animals and people migrated from Asia to the Americas—over a land bridge at the Bering Straits. For such land bridges to have existed, we may need to assume that sea levels were lower in the post-Flood period—an assumption based on a biblical model of the Ice Age.¹⁷⁾Paul F. Taylor, “How Did Animals Spread All Over The World from Where the Ark Landed,” The New Answers Book, (ed. Ken Ham) Master Books, 2007, vol. 1, p. 145

The principle is straightforward: the greater the volume of water locked in continental ice sheets, the lower the global sea level.

The Evolutionary Alternative

One final question deserves consideration: has Bill Nye ever subjected the evolutionary explanation for kangaroo migration to the same level of skepticism?

Nathaniel Jeanson summarizes the standard evolutionary model:

The evolutionary predictions for genetic similarity among these creatures derive from the evolutionary understanding of both the fossil record and of continental drift. The southern mole, the common wombat, the banded anteater, and the kangaroo are all classified as marsupials, and according to the dates that evolutionists assign to the marsupial fossil record, their ancestors existed in North America about 80 million years ago. The descendants of these creatures moved down through South America and across Antarctica around 35 million years ago, when the latter two continents were still connected, and finally crossed over to Australia about 10 million years ago when Australia and Antarctica were still linked. Since their arrival, these marsupial ancestors supposedly evolved into today’s wombats, marsupial moles, banded anteaters, kangaroos, and all other marsupial species that exist in Australia today.¹⁸⁾Nathaniel T. Jeanson, Ph.D. 2014. New Genetic Findings Tackle the Toughest Evolutionary Questions. Acts & Facts. 43 (3). p. 18

According to this model, the ancestors of modern marsupials migrated from North America through South America, traversed Antarctica while it was supposedly connected to Australia, survived there for millions of years, and ultimately diversified into the marsupial species found in Australia today.

Is this, by Nye’s own standard, truly the more “reasonable” explanation? Or has he simply subjected the creation model to a standard of scrutiny that he never applies to evolutionary theory? That question deserves careful consideration by anyone evaluating the debate objectively.