This is a good critique of the form of Bill Nye's anti-creationist screed: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/08/bill-nye-demonstrates-how-not-to-persuade-a-creatio

This is a good critique of the form of Bill Nye's anti-creationist screed: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/08/bill-nye-demonstrates-how-not-to-persuade-a-creationist/ http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/08/bill-nye-demonstrates-how-... The form of his argument only encourages the conflict. He clearly feels contempt towards creationists, and even towards those who sympathize with them. As soon as you've shown contempt you've given up on convincing anyone of anything, and are just cheering on your side. A serious attempt at promoting evolution would emphasize how you can resolve the tension between the theory of evolution and a strong belief in Christianity and The Bible. (There's no reason to pretend this is a general issue, it's a Christian issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#Support_for_evolution_by_religious_bodies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#...) I'm not a Christian, so I can't write something more authentic than what Bill Nye might (though I damn well could write something less offensive). But I can imagine what the intellectual tensions are. I made an attempt (https://plus.google.com/104537541227697934010/posts/TnMt9WgfJq6 https://plus.google.com/104537541227697934010/posts/TnMt9Wgf...), something like: To convince someone of evolution, as a Christian, I'd want to emphasize a reverence for the world as God created it, that He teaches us through the world around us, and that learning from and of that world could never be in contradiction with His word, in the Bible or as shown to us through our faith. The world is full of contradictory messages and lessons, we can't always expect to decide that one is right and another is wrong. I'd want to probe how the person has chosen to resolve the tension between Bible-as-fact and Bible-as-historical-document. For example, the Bible in many places talks freely and without condemnation about slavery, and clearly this does not fit with a modern understanding of Christian morality. I would hope that the person has seriously considered this problem and come to a resolution. I would hope to find a way to fit evolution, and ongoing scientific discovery in general, into that intellectual template. Some Creationists might claim, for instance, that something as complicated as the eye could not be made through the incremental changes of evolution – it had to be designed. But this is a terribly limited notion of God. Could not God create a mechanism that would lead to the design of His choosing? Is there a mechanism so complicated that He could not conceive of it and create it? There is a story of creation in the Bible. It is not a recipe of how to create a world. It is a message given to us to explain the world, a world that we cannot ever fully know. We've found tensions in that story. Consider for instance dinosaur fossils. Some people have considered this and read Genesis, and decided that dinosaurs must have lived in the Garden Of Eden, or been wiped out by the Great Flood. Does the Bible say this? No. There is more in the world than is in the Bible. Does the Bible talk of electricity, or about germs? No. Would we try to create a Biblical basis for this phenomena? No. The Bible covers the entirety of the creation of the Earth in one chapter, would we expect it to be comprehensive? It is our burden to resolve the world we see with the Bible as written. Some decide to ignore the world. This is a lazy approach, God did not give us the world in all its fullness just for us to ignore it.