Bill Nye the Anti-Creationism Guy

Watch the video. Trust me.

Here’s a synopsis:

• Evolution denial is mostly unique to the United States, among the more technologically innovative nations.
• When a portion of the population doesn’t believe in evolution (science), it holds the whole nation back.
• Life science is strictly incomplete without evolution. Without evolution, explaining life becomes fantastically complicated. Without the idea of billion-year timescales, the universe itself is untenable.
• Don’t indoctrinate your kids with creationism – we need scientific children to grow up and support our nation.
• In a couple of centuries, Bill is confident that worldview won’t exist, because there’s no evidence for it.

I have to say, he manages to say this in a much friendlier manner than I can. Evolution deniers really anger me.

The Star Nearest Us

If you go outside at night, and it’s dark enough, you will see a seemingly endless number of twinkles in the sky. It’s easy for us to think that those twinkles have no relation to the sun. After all, the sun is a large, ever-present and hugely impactful part of our lives. We owe liquid water and most likely life on our planet itself, purely to its existence.

The truth is, the sun is just another twinkle when you look from any other position in the universe (the speed of light not withstanding). Furthermore, the sun isn’t even that interesting of a star. While it may be 110x the diameter of the Earth, it is more than 1,000x smaller than the largest stars we know of. It’s even too small to explode or form a black hole.

So, what does make our Sun special? It harbors us, and we, as Carl Sagan so eloquently put it, “are a way the universe can know itself”.

I encourage everyone to consider that our sun is one among approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. We should all seek to have an appreciation of it as a link to the cosmic scale. Aside from the Earth we live on, it is by far the most imposing and obvious component of the universe from our perspective.

It’s difficult not to marvel at the sheer scope of reality. Even acknowledging that the universe is incomprehensibly large, and that a quark is incomprehensibly small.. is incredibly humbling. Here’s a jumpstart for you:

Higgs Boson Might Be the “No God” Particle, Instead

“Something can’t come from nothing” – Any random theist arguing that god created the universe

It’s amazing how often I hear it. It’s an incredibly naive argument – if something can’t come from nothing, where did god come from?

Most stories I’ve read about the higgs boson lament the usage of the term “god particle”. The media has latched on to it with such a fervor that it’s hard to ignore, and it’s generally unscientific.

However, The Daily Beast has released an excellent article: How the Higgs Boson Posits a New Story of our Creation, which explains how the term is not only inaccurate, but also how the discovery of this new particle may further support a godless creation of the universe. Definitely recommend that you give it a read!

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The Thinking Atheist’s “Pale Blue Dot”

Carl Sagan had an amazing talent for adding a sense of wonder and awe to science. In this video, The Thinking Atheist has taken an excerpt of Carl talking about “The Pale Blue Dot” – a photo Voyager 1 took of earth from 3.7 billion miles away.

I watch this video at least once a week, just to remind myself of the amazing scale of the universe and of how petty we can be.