Bill Nye warns: Creation beliefs threaten U.S. science

Nye, who is prone to inject dry humor into scientific discussions, said Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

“What I find troubling, when you listen to these people … once in a while I get the impression that they’re not kidding,” Nye said.

Ken Ham, a co-founder of Answers in Genesis, said dating methods used by scientists to measure the age of the earth are contradictory.

“We say the only dating method that is absolute is the Word of God,” Ham said. “Time is the crucial factor for Bill Nye. Without the time of millions of years, you can’t postulate evolution change.”

America is home to the world’s biggest creationist following, Ham said, and the $27 million Creation Museum has averaged about 330,000 visitors a year since it opened just south of Cincinnati in 2007.

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Nye can’t talk for long about science without mentioning his current passion: speaking out against proposed government cuts to NASA’s planetary sciences division. Nye is CEO of The Planetary Society, an organization in Pasadena, Calif., that promotes space exploration.

NASA’s landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars last month is the kind of technological achievement that get kids interested in science, Nye said, but funding cuts would endanger future missions.

He said if Curiosity is able to find evidence of life on Mars—perhaps in the form of fossilized microorganisms—it would “change the world.”

“It would change the way everybody feels about his or her place in space,” he said. “And we do that for $300 million a year, which is not even a buck a person. We don’t want to cut that.”