'Hey Bill Nye, If There Is a God, Should We Obey It?' #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think

Hi Bill. My name’s Cameron and I am a junior at Libertyville High School in Washington. And I was just wondering, on this hypothetical question, if there was a completely intelligent all-knowing entity, whether it was human or otherwise, that if it existed and it was our leader, if we should be completely subservient and submit to its governance if it really truly had our best interest at heart.

This super entity that we should serve, I don’t know. I see, for me, there’s no evidence of a super entity with a plan for everybody’s life. And this goes way back. Charles Darwin wrote about this, speculated about this. And another way to express it: if there is a super entity running things, why is everything so screwed up? The reasons seem to be that humans are all interacting, all trying to get food, shelter, and raise their kids, and there’s conflict among us. It’s just the way humans are.

And so, if there is a super entity, I would prefer that she or he was just a little more organized, just took care of things a little better. And the thing to be careful of, in my opinion, is when people you meet are sure that they have a super entity that’s telling them what to do that affects you. That is to say, when they tell you you can’t do this or you can’t do that because the super entity of mine is telling me that I should tell you that you can’t do that. That’s when there’s conflict.

And I presume you’re in Washington State, and you know Washington State is way in the west of North America. A lot of the people that came from Europe came here to get away from certain religions which, by modern standards, were received as strife in wars around the world, were pretty tame. The religious expectations were not that onerous. Yet they were onerous enough to make people leave. Don’t tell me what to do, kind of thing.

So I’m open-minded, but as we say, you can’t prove a negative. And by that, I mean if you say, or if someone says, “well can you prove that there is no super entity?” you can’t. Because whatever proof you’d offer as that there’s no super entity, the other side would say, “well that’s just what the super entity wants you to think. The super entity is hiding from you. The super entity is making it so you can’t find the super entity.”

Anyway, that’s arguing in a circle. You’ll never be able to resolve that. So whether or not you should serve the super entity is up to you. But I strongly encourage you to look for evidence of the super entity before you get caught up in trying to serve it, him, or her.

It’s a fantastic question. You’re asking a deep question. But for me, understanding nature and the world around us and how I should interact with our fellow humans, I get a lot more satisfying answers from the process of science than I do from people claiming to have a super entity that’s going to tell me, or us, what to do.

And the troubling thing in science: pretty quickly you figure out that you can’t figure it all out. That there are unknowns. There are things that you just do not know. And for some people, that’s really troubling. But for people like me, it’s empowering because we have a process. The process that we call science enables us to learn about nature.

And the example that everybody’s all excited about right now, everywhere I go, is: are there other universes? Are there multiverses? Universes beyond our universe. And the big argument for the existence of these multiverses is that there isn’t any real good way to exclude them. There’s no way to make sure that they don’t exist. So maybe they do. And that’s cool and exciting.

And by the way, you were alive when people discovered dark matter. Apparently there’s five times as much dark matter as there is regular matter. And do you know why? Nobody knows why. But in your lifetime, maybe discoveries will be made that will tell us about dark matter and dark energy.

In my grandfather’s lifetime, there was no such thing as relativity. People didn’t know about relativity. Yet if you have a smartphone and it tells you which side of the street you’re on, that information comes from spacecraft in orbit around the Earth that have to be adjusted for both special relativity, the speed of the spacecraft relative to the Earth’s surface, and general relativity, the effect that the Earth’s gravity has on clocks, on time—the speed of time, as I like to say.

So who knows what discoveries will be made soon? And the thing I’m saying here is that science carries with it this uncertainty. We don’t know it all. We accept that we don’t know it all, but we have a process for trying to find out. And that, to me, is elegant and beautiful. Carry on.