What Bill Nye should have said

A transcript of Bill Nye's Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children can be found below the video. In contrast to what he said, here is something more like what should be said.

Denial of evolution isn't unique to the United States. We're the world's most advanced technological nation—generally, the United States is where most of the innovations still happen. People still move to the United States. And that's largely because of the liberty, freedom and prosperity we have, and the general understanding that faith and religion preserves those liberties. When you have a portion of the population that doesn't believe in that, it holds everybody back.

Creation is the fundamental idea in all of life. Trying to live without God is very much like trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You're just not going to get the right answer. Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place.

Carl Sagan said, "When you're in love you want to tell the world." Once in a while I hear people that claim they don't believe in God. And my response generally is "Well, why not? Really, why not?" Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in God. Here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. Here is love and faith and morality. The idea of God and creation explains all of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy--untenable, itself inconsistent.

And I say to the grownups, you are free to deny creation and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we know--but don't make your kids do it, because we need them. We need morally literate voters, citizens and taxpayers for the future. We need engineers that can build stuff and solve problems; we need teachers who can pass on to the next generation; we need preachers who can define morality.

You know, in another couple of centuries the belief in God and creation will remain a vibrant viable world view. Bill Nye will be mostly forgotten.