Bill’s science De-nye-al
So this guy is meant to be a scientist? Eeesh…
"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
So this guy is meant to be a scientist? Eeesh…
Earlier this week I shared the pilot episode of the video series which Matt and I recorded. Today I’d like to share the first main episode, which asks the question, “Is Faith blind?”
The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you
Werner Heisenberg (Father of Quantum Mechanics)
Okay, this is kind of hilarious… I introduce to you “The Philosophy Force Five”, fighting the forces of illogic and scientism!
I’ve been following How To Be Christian for quite some time now and really liked the alternative approach they take to apologetics. Today I would like to share a video they did concerning a media personality who has become increasingly vocal over the last couple of years, Bill Nye “The Science Guy”…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG9Kmj4cvk4
Last January I had a discussion on Facebook in which the person with whom I was speaking made the bold claim that the unborn “aren’t human yet”. An interesting assertion! I responded with two questions:
Question #1: “What kind of offspring do human parents have?”
Question #2: “What do you call an organism with human DNA?”
Of course, the answer to both of these questions is “human”. Unfortunately, my friend chose to ignore both of these questions, so I asked another:
“If a fetus in his mother’s womb isn’t human…what is he? To what species does he then belong?”
Once again, this question went answered. To assert that the unborn aren’t human requires that they be something else. I asked repeatedly what that “something else” was, but I never got an answer…
Eventually, my friend posted the following image:
From left-to-right, this picture shows embryos from different species: zebrafish, chicken, dog, human and skink. Although he didn’t articulate it, it appeared that he thought that being unable to visually identify the human fetus somehow proved that the it wasn’t human.
This is, of course, terrible logic. If I don’t know the answer to a question on a quiz show, does that mean that no answer exists? Of course not, it just means that I don’t have the right information at my fingertips.
There are lots of things which aren’t easy to identify with the naked eye. An unmarked bottle of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) can look very similar to a bottle of water (H20). If I placed an unmarked bottle of each liquid in front of you, would a visual inspection be enough to convince you to take a drink from one of them? Of course not! What would need to happen in order to make you drink with confidence? You’d want to run more conclusive tests than a simple visual inspection.
In the same way, just because I can’t easily see from an image whether or not a fetus is a human fetus, doesn’t change the fetus’ species. It’s true that the naked eye can’t easily give you the answer to that question, but appropriate scientific examination can! In this case, a simple DNA test could give you a conclusive answer as to the species of each of the above embryos.
Biologically speaking, it is impossible to declare that the unborn are anything less than human. If they are indeed human, it would follow that, as such, even the unborn should be treated with respect and dignity.