by Bill Nye
I get it, though. People want certainty in the world, but they also want a sense of mystery. Science provides a way through that paradox. Every mystery is a path toward more knowledge. That idea excited me in high-school physics class, and the feeling has never gone away. We will never attain total all-knowing knowledge, admittedly, but what we learn will be real and would be equally real to anyone on the planet (or any intelligent being throughout the universe). That is a level of certainty that no religion can offer. Science can elevate us and soothe us in ways that religion cannot even imagine. The scientist starts from the premise that the natural world is knowable—that reality is real. We can use observation, hypothesis, experiment, result, new hypothesis, new experiment, new result, and so on, to learn more about nature and about ourselves. When we observe something that doesn’t fit in with existing knowledge, then we have an opportunity to learn something new. A mystery is not an endgame but rather an opening to a deeper level of understanding. And deep understanding is essential if you want to change the world.
I’m reminded of a wonderful quote from Isaac Asimov (another Isaac), one of the all-time great science explainers. He wrote, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but rather ‘Hmmm . . . that’s funny . . .’” The implication is that a discovery awaits. It’s science. This whole system of thought would fall apart if we could not trust the things we see or, more accurately, observe. Whether you call it a miracle or a magic trick, as an explanation for natural phenomena, it is a dead end. It would be something that, by definition, lies completely beyond rational explanation. With a miracle as an explanation for something, there is no rational way to filter information and test hypotheses. In science, the premise is: We have a process that can enable us to use reason to know nature. The key words are “can” and “know.”
You might reasonably ask: When we encounter something completely new and unexpected, isn’t it arrogant to start out assuming science is always the right way to go? Well, every good mystery demands investigation, sometimes a thorough investigation. Again and again through history, great and seemingly unsolvable mysteries—from the cause of disease to the movements of the planets—have given way to rich, fascinating, verifiable, and clearly correct scientific explanations.
People at the Reason Rally will tell you that so far through human history, every miracle, effect, or even feeling attributed to religion is much more readily and satisfactorily explained by science. Use your critical-thinking ability and flip the question around: Suppose you observe some confusing new thing and decide it’s so strange that science can’t possibly explain it. The only way you could reach that conclusion is if you believe that you already know everything there is to know about nature, every possible explanation that could ever be found in the world and cosmos we live in, and that you are the first person in history to bump up against science’s outer limit. Now, that would be arrogant. (Right, wine bar scholars?)
If we ever do come up against a mystery that is not susceptible to the scientific method, that will be a truly thrilling moment. We will know then that we have encountered some heretofore-unknown force or entity capable of suspending the laws of nature. But if we start attributing familiar events to divine action, we run into big, big problems. People more knowledgeable about philosophy and logic than I am can paint you into a thought-corner pretty quick. If there is a deity who responds to prayer, why does bad stuff keep happening to my family and friends? These days, it’s common to see an athlete acknowledge a heavenly deity after he makes a good play. Have you ever seen any of those athletes get angry with a deity when they make a bad play? (Even once?) And what about people who have no knowledge of your deity—what becomes of them? If your deity controls all natural law, how can you count on anything? I’m thinking here again about my companions in the bar, Ken Ham, and their flocks. How can you know when the deity is tinkering with your reality and when you can trust that things are happening in a nominal, normal, predictable way? The questions keep coming, and unlike what we can do with the process of science, there are no good acceptable, or accepted, answers.
I want to emphasize here that I generally have no problem with religious faith; my concern is about using faith to hide from the world rather than engage it. Many religious people get a wonderful sense of community and support from like-minded families and friends. They find inspiration in their faiths to be kind, to be generous to their neighbors, to think in terms of the global good. I respect and admire that, but I long ago realized that the religious approach is not for me. I find my sense of community with my fellow Reason Rally attendees, the ones who get as excited as I do about using our scientific knowledge to make a better world. They are the people I want to hang out with. They are the people I turn to the most for insights on design and filtering. They are the people I see as catalysts for change.
With all this in mind, I thought very carefully about what I wanted to say at the rally. It was quite an honor to be on the stage there, since the other attendees included renowned cosmologists, scientists, and, perhaps most important, magicians (professional foolers of us, foolers for fun). The pressure was on. We were standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, for cryin’ out loud. I put my heart and soul into this thing—in a way that reminds me what we really mean and feel when we say “heart and soul.”
The rally took place on June 4, which was not quite summer from an astronomical perspective (the season officially begins with the solstice on June 21), but it sure felt like a Washington, DC, summer-heat kinda day. People largely stayed out of the sun by standing under the trees along the north and south sides of the Washington Monument’s reflecting pool. It was an unsettling metaphor for humankind’s first reaction to our changing climates: run and hide. But there is no place to run. We have a pressing responsibility right now to be aware, to be bold, and to take charge of our planet. So here is a revised and updated version of what I said to the estimated 15,000 people gathered there. I hope it inspires you to join up with us, or to redouble your efforts, or just to think more deeply about the time we’re living in, and put your nerd skills to work.
I started out like this:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, skeptics, nontheists, and especially the believers who may be here, thank you all for including me in the events today. As we stand before this shrine to Abraham Lincoln, one of history’s most thoughtful critical thinkers, I cannot help but feel that we are at a critical time, a turning point in the history of my beloved United States and the history of humankind. Our ability to reason has helped us provide clean water, reliable electricity, and access to an electronic information infrastructure to a large fraction of people in the developed world. Critical thinking, reason, and science got us here. And these traditions will help us bring these technical advantages to everyone on Earth and, dare I say it, change the world.” (From here on, I have adapted parts of my speech to include additional thoughts specific to this book.)
Today citizens around the globe are dealing with enormous costs and extraordinary hardships associated with rapidly rising waters and weather events of the extreme kind. We have floods in Texas, terrifying windstorms in the central United States, flooding in southern Germany and Paris, the city that hosted the most recent 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) climate summit. There were over 190 nations in attendance, all hoping to work together to resolve this global-scale problem of atmospheric and oceanic warming—climate change—that has been heretofore largely ignored by most of us in the United States.
Through our industry and agriculture, we have loaded the Earth’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. We are digging up and burning fossil fuels that are warming our world 10 to the 6th, one million times, faster than nature created them. Humankind has brought this on; humankind must address it. Today, our efforts have barely begun. As an engineer and a citizen of the United States, I cannot help but wonder why this is so. Why is this c
ountry, which for over a century was the world leader in science, engineering, and innovation, not the world’s leader in the renewable-energy technologies, and especially the carbon-curtailing policies, that we must create and put in place as soon as we can?
A handful of climate-change deniers have managed to hoodwink us, to lead us to believe that there is some doubt among the overwhelming majority of scientists about the seriousness and consequences of global climate change, even as our rivers overflow their banks. Without thinking much about it, we allow climate-change deniers to equate routine scientific uncertainty—plus or minus 2 percent, say—with doubt about the observed global changes altogether: plus or minus 100 percent. When I express the situation with these percentages, we all can see that the deniers are obviously wrong or very much misled. Some of the most vocal deniers often suggest that there is a worldwide conspiracy of scientists out to drive coal miners out of work. A conspiracy? Of 30,000 scientists? Have you ever spent any time with these people? They are a competitive bunch. A scientist longs to show that his or her colleagues are wrong. A conspiracy of these people is just not reasonable. Yet a large fraction of us has gone along with the deniers, hardly questioning their inane arguments and obstructionist policy proposals. I have to point out here that nearly half of the country sided with the obstructionists in the last US election. It is troubling, but it may also be galvanizing; it may get us all working together at last.
Climate-change denial is strongly generational. Very few young people embrace those silly ideas. But what kind of future will those kids face? By the time they are old enough to take action, it may be too late. We cannot let them down. We have to meet climate change with change of our own.
The deniers get one thing right: The Earth’s climate changes. But the change that is hurtling toward us now is caused by us humans. It’s happening fast, and it is not nature working on its own. My grandfather rode into World War I on a horse. It sounds almost unbelievable to many of us now. He was, by all accounts, a skilled horseman. He rode around trenches, in the dark, and under enemy fire. Today, very few soldiers need the skills of horseback riding. The tasks needed to conduct a war have changed. In analogous fashion, a great many jobs will change. People in the extraction industries—those who mine coal or drill for oil and gas—will one day soon be doing something else in the energy sector, welding wind turbine masts, manufacturing photo-voltaic systems, or connecting neighbors to the Internet. They won’t be out of work. They will be making the future. We can do this.
First, though, we have to get past those who don’t believe in a future shaped by science. A consortium of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, under the aegis of Answers in Genesis, recently opened an amusement park with a religious theme in the commonwealth of Kentucky. You may have heard about its activities. This “ministry,” as it refers to itself, preaches that evolution is not real and, more worrisome, insists that our world is not warming. The ministry promotes this fiction among its followers. To work at its Creation Museum or Ark Encounter Bible-literal theme park, you have to testify to your faith in the ministry’s faith. That might seem like a violation of our First Amendment, which you can read from the original text just a few blocks east of here (east of the Lincoln Memorial) in another beautiful building, the National Archives.
To finance these attractions, the Answers in Genesis ministry apparently relies on a consortium of legal entities. It claims religious affiliation when it comes to discrimination in hiring. It relies on Crosswater Canyon, a not-for-profit entity, when it wants to claim the facility will attract tourists to the area, and thereby it should be entitled to tax breaks and virtually free real estate from Kentucky and her taxpayers. While the entities of the consortium have passed legal tests in Kentucky, they did so only because the governor, the tourism cabinet members, and a key judge are all believers. They accept that their religion is not separated from their state or commonwealth, as it would be under other circumstances. I encourage Kentuckians and all of us to imagine if the consortium were about to open something like the Mosque Kiosk, an amusement park or tourist attraction designed to promote the Muslim faith. Do you think that such a project would be defended by the officials who are enabling these biblical businesses to be established? I’m pretty sure the answer would be, roughly, “Hell no.”
The story of the Ark Park might seem like an unfortunate but inconsequential, maybe even somewhat quaint, bit of Americana. Never theless, there is something very big at stake here: the future. The Ark Project is just one example of a much wider antiscience, antiprogress movement. It is easy to overlook if you live in parts of the country where the influence of this weird worldview is not ubiquitous. But in many other areas, the movement is widespread and persistent. I strongly feel that if parts of this country raise a generation of people trained not to think for themselves, we are all going to pay the price. We are all going to be burdened with reeducating these kids and young adults. The workers in these nearby economies will not have been brought up with the processes of science and reason that help us all understand the world. They will not grow up with the tradition of innovation that has led to the creation of search engines, smartphones, magnetic resonance images, and electric sports cars.
The Ark Park and its associated entities exploit modern technologies as much as any major corporation or business. It’s a weird irony. They are using email lists, Web sites, and social media to build a virtual community of believers. They are exploiting the work of scientifically trained engineers and technicians to indoctrinate their flock in ideas that are hostile to scientific and technological progress. And they are appealing to workers in some of the most economically troubled parts of the country, steering them in a direction that will only make their suffering worse and worse. It is frustrating, thoughtless, and heartbreaking.
There is also some positive news here, however. Most religious people do not share a hard-line creationist ideology. Overwhelmingly, people in the United States and around the world want better lives for their children, and they implicitly understand that science and technology are the most effective tools for bringing that about. The Answers in Genesis leaders are trying to escalate that into a broader modern war on science. But, we don’t have to play their game. We can expand our fact-based, data-driven movement into something big enough, powerful enough, and appealing enough to overwhelm the forces that don’t want or believe in scientific progress.
It is no trouble to find common ground when the environment of the whole Earth is at stake. Pope Francis’s recent encyclical “On the Care of Our Common Home” stands out as a commonsense assessment of our planet and its future. It’s an example—perhaps the most important example we can readily imagine—of religious people and science-first people finding that they not only have shared goals but also shared methods and even shared philosophies. By any measure, the Pope is an important leader in our world. Just think of all that we can accomplish by working with his people to end extreme poverty, provide education to girls and women, and address as quickly as we can the global need for renewable energy, clean water, and Internet access. As I often say, if you like to worry about things, you’re living at a great time. We have suicide bombers, nuclear proliferation, and the Zika virus. But this is also a time of tremendous possibilities and optimism, or it should be.
There will be those who say we don’t need to worry because the world is in a deity’s hands, not ours. They don’t acknowledge how thoroughly the Earth is in our hands now. We just have to disagree with the apostles of inaction and respond forcefully that we take responsibility for our own actions. We have to step up and make a better future. That’s our Reason Rally way of thinking, but you certainly don’t need to be an atheist to embrace it. There are also those who are skeptical of renewable energy and even actively fight to suppress its incorporation into our electrical energy grid. Sometimes they are motivated by old-fashioned financial incentives, as in the case of the West Virginia mining executives: “We sell coa
l. That’s what we do. Why should we stop?” Sometimes they are motivated by a lingering fear that green-energy proponents haven’t thought through all the challenges, such as electricity storage and the unreliability of wind and sunshine. They worry, too, that renewables won’t be able to supply our needs and sustain our current quality of life.
To those who think we can’t get renewable sources in place quickly enough, I give you this response. As I’ve often mentioned, both my parents were in World War II; their ashes are interred across the river from here (the Lincoln Memorial) in the Arlington National Cemetery. My father survived nearly 4 years as a prisoner of war captured from Wake Island. My mother was recruited by the US Navy to work deciphering the Nazi Enigma code. They were part of what came to be called the Greatest Generation, but they didn’t set out to be great. They just played the hand they were dealt. In barely 5 years, their generation resolved a global conflict and started building a new, democratic, technologically advancing world. With an emphatic sense of purpose, they embraced progress.
The current generation must employ critical thinking and our powers of reason just as they did. This time, the global challenge is climate change. We also must play the hand we have been dealt and get on with it. Together, we can change the world. Thank you.