As Deb said, our main concern with Nye’s rhetoric (both in the interview, the book, and the Ham/Nye) is the way in which he interweaves scientific data with personal comments about religion. His book is ostensibly just an explanation of the science of evolution, but he frequently segues into his personal views about how science makes religion implausible, sometimes without any indication that he’s moved from science to opinion. Here’s some more examples from his book:
Page 55: “Configuring [giraffe] necks this way is almost certainly not how a designer or engineer would design the world. But the details all make perfect sense once you embrace the idea that evolution does not work the way a human designer or engineer would.”
Page 78: If there was a designer, why did he or she or it create all those fossils of things that aren’t living anymore?..In short, why mess around with all this messiness? If you’re a creationist reading this, and you want to remark something like, “Well, that’s the way he did it,” I tell you right back, that is just not reasonable, nor is it satisfactory…Another thing: If there were a designer, I’d expect some better results. I’d expect no common cold viruses, for example. Or, if are an unavoidable or accidental viruses. If the argument is, “Well, that was all part of the plan,” then I have to ask: How can you take the lack of evidence of a plan as evidence of a plan? That makes no sense.”
Page 282: Asking the big question [of life’s origin] sounds an awful lot like asking, “Is there a god who runs the show?” There is an essential difference, however. Every other aspect of life that was once attributed to divine intent is now elegantly and completely explained in the context of evolutionary science.
Again, the issue here is that Nye is making rather broad (and completely un-nuanced) statements about religion and science without any caveats. We don’t Nye is purposely trying to ruin anyone’s faith, or that his offers of good will towards those of religious faith are disingenuous, but it doesn’t make this rhetoric any less unhelpful. A reader of Nye’s book (not to mention his interviews and the debate) is given a clear sense that to accept mainstream science is to deny any sort of Divine intentionality anywhere in nature. To us, that’s troubling rhetoric.
I will be writing a bit more about this on Wednesday, as Deb mentioned.