Tuesday with Bill-‘Can Science Eradicate Religion and Myth from Politics?

(Transcript – Aditya Bakshi: Hey Bill. This is Aditya Bakshi. I’m a mechanical engineer graduate from India. My question to you is why are so many people attracted to pseudoscience and what can we as a society do to stop pseudoscience if it has the support of religious fundamentalists and hyper nationalist? For example, the recently concluded Indian Science Congress was criticized heavily for featuring a lot of pseudoscience and mythology. Thank you.

Bill Nye: Greetings Aditya. I’m saying it as best I can. Aditya? I’m saying it as best I can. I have spent just about two weeks in India and I got to say I was very impressed with how much pseudoscience there is, how much spiritualism there is. I guess those aren’t the same thing. And a lot of people – it’s very common for people from my country, from the United States to go to India to get a new way of looking at life, to get a new spiritual prospective. And as you suggested these things, pseudoscience and the spiritual perspective seem to be tied together. But science, this process that humans have come up with where you make an observation; you come up with a hypothesis, a reason you think this observation happen, this phenomenon occurred, and then you come up with a way to test it. An experiment. You test it. You see what happened. You compare that to what you thought would happen and you know nature and this extraordinary way that enables us to have cars and trucks and the green revolution and feed everybody and clean water for a lot of people and electricity and spaceflight and putting things in orbit around Mars, the Mars Orbiting Mission, ISRO, Indian Space Research Organization’s mission. Very cool. This is a great concern. All I can say is, well not all I can say, but something I will say about pseudoscience. Well, in the United States it’s very common to use the phrase critical thinking, being critical of claims is that it’s a process)