'Hey Bill Nye, Can We Bridge the Gap Between Science and Religion?' #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think
Hi Bill. My name is Chris Slade and one of my goals in life is to help bridge the gap between science and the modern Christian. What is there that I could say to help convince others that the creation story is likely just a story that was told to people who wouldn’t have understood the complexities of science as we do today? I just want to show people that their religious beliefs don’t need to be dependent on ignoring science.
Chris. Your religious beliefs don’t depend on ignoring science. Well, I hope not. So just from my point of view, Chris, keep in mind I’m a mechanical engineer. I took nothing but physics. I love science. Science is what enabled us to create this computer communication system in this electronic infrastructure. Without science, you couldn’t do this.
And you use the word Christian so specifically—there’s nothing in the New Testament of the Bible about electrons or protons or transistor-transistor logic or even modern, or maybe most especially, modern agriculture or genes or DNA and so on. So the question is, if you have a religious tenet, if you hold a point of view that excludes something about modern science, I don’t think the burden is on scientists or engineers to provide you a comfortable link. The link is for you. You have to reckon the facts, as we call them, with some belief system that is incompatible with it.
An example that I think everybody would eventually find ourselves discussing would be geology. The age of the Earth. You know, a couple of years ago I debated a guy who insists that the Earth is 6,000 years old. That’s completely wrong. That’s obviously wrong. And the way we know it is wrong was a result of centuries of study. People found layers of rocks, figured out where the layers came from. People found radioactive elements which chemically substitute into certain crystals in exchange like rubidium and strontium substitute for potassium and calcium and argon and so on.
And this led us to an understanding of the age of the Earth. So if you have a belief system that is incompatible with modern geology, really, Chris, the problem is for the person trying to argue the Earth is extraordinarily young, not for the people who have studied the world around us and understand it.
With that said, religions, in my experience, give people this important sense of community. The reason, in my experience, that people my age or whatever go to church is to be with other people. At least let’s say once a week. And that is of great value. A community is of great value. But there’s nothing there that I have seen in the Bible that informs modern science, with one possible exception.
There’s, in some translations that I’ve read, there’s reference to 22 sevenths for being the distance around a circle, the value of pi. And that’s pretty close. It doesn’t go past three digits, but it’s pretty close. Okay. So the people who wrote the Bible, they were literate but they were not literate in the modern scientific sense.
So you have to reckon that, man. I can’t get in there. The Earth’s not 6,000 years old. Never going to be. And share your community and celebrate it. Carry on.