Netflix began streaming the third season of "Bill Nye Saves the World" last Friday, May 11, where the host pits religion versus science.
Featured in the series' fifth episode, titled "Evolution: A Fact of Life," was a former Dominican priest who Francisco Ayala who left the clergy to become a scientist. He currently works as a biologist in the University of California, Irvine.
Nye and Ayala discussed the supposed tension between evolution and the Christian belief of creation. The former priest disagreed with the host when Nye argued that the two concepts about how the world began couldn't go together.
"There are people who see evolution as antagonistic to religion. There's some people who see them as independent," Ayala said. "I see them mostly as two ways of looking at the world which are complementary rather than antagonistic," he further explained. "They are complementary in a very good way."
Ayala said that the Catholic Church acknowledged the validity of the theory of evolution. He said that even Pope Francis endorsed the scientific theory, as did Pope John Paul II in 1996.
It's not the first time the TV show has addressed religion. In the third episode of "Bill Nye Saves the World," Nye spoke to comedian Maria Bamford who said she didn't like 12-step addiction programs that refer to God.
Bamford said that she's an atheist and when faith and a "higher power" crop up in her group therapy, she thinks of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as her higher power. Incidentally, Tyson said in a 2017 interview that God does not exist.
The show's sixth episode, on the other hand, discussed if animals have thoughts about religion and morality. Nye said that since religion gives people a sense of community as they worship and look out for each other, he wondered if animals behave the same way.
Anthropologist and primatologist Natalia Reagan, who also dabbles in comedy writing, joked that she has not seen a baboon in church for sometime. She pointed out, however, that it's possible animals could have a semblance of spiritualism.
Nye has explored climate change and death in other episodes. "Bill Nye Saves the World" season 3 remains streaming on Netflix, along with the first two seasons.
