"Bill Nye is not a real scientist because he has a degree in mechanical engineering." Have you ever heard or read those words before? Sadly, I have heard them, or words like them, used in arguments against Nye more than once. I say sadly not because Nye is a beacon of rationality, but because these attacks are fallacious and misguided. First, I will prove several facts about the relevance of degrees to knowledge. Then I will show why accusations against Nye on the basis of his degree are ironically uninformed.
Being a professional scientist, as several seconds of critical thinking can unveil, is not incompatible with making many logical and scientific errors. Likewise, not being a professional scientist does not mean that one is not highly knowledgeable about scientific developments. The veracity of Nye's claims and worldview, therefore, hinge on whether or not they accurately reflect reality, not on the exact type of degree he obtained.
You can have a degree in science and not actually be a scientist--and vice versa. A degree is not a logical requirement to understanding something intimately. Having a degree in philosophy does not make you an intelligent, self-educated person, much less one who grasps concepts well or cares about accurately understanding reality. I have yet to hear of a single professional or historical philosopher that did not use obvious, major fallacies. Their backgrounds did not nullify the the fact that they are irrational. The only people I know who are thorough rationalists are other people who, like me, simply care about reality enough to wield actual rationality in pursuit of knowledge. There is no degree involved; there is no concern with trivial, empty formalities like appealing to a degree.
One also does not need to be a scientist or have a science-related degree of any kind to be an accurate, effective science educator. It is entirely possible to educate people about something without having taken extensive college courses about the subject (or any college courses on it at all). Do schoolteachers always have degrees in every matter they teach? I have never heard anyone claim that this by necessity means that they are wrong and should not teach on those areas. Have you? I would expect not!
As it turns out, the BS in Nye's BS of mechanical engineering actually is an abbreviation for "Bachelor of Science," not bullshit. What a shocking revelation! Mechanical engineering, which deals with the design and creation of machinery, certainly involves science in some key ways. Ensuring that a machine will operate a certain way does involve the scientific method, since logic alone cannot guarantee that a machine will behave in a specific manner. Repeat observation is required. A machine's success must be tested, and it is impossible to know a priori--from logic alone--that a machine-based project will be effective. There must be scientific experimentation and observation.
People who genuinely rely on another person's degree to determine their beliefs are, to put it simply, living unintelligently. If they intelligently appraised the matter, they would see that logic and reality, not a degree, render a claim true or untrue. A degree has nothing to do with it. Bill Nye might sometimes be a shit logician and a shit philosopher, and as a result his scientific claims might be erroneous at times. But this has nothing to do with him having a degree in mechanical engineering. It has to do with the common tragedy of intellectual incompetence. His degree is a red herring to whether or not he is right on a given point, so it is absolutely pointless to use it as a counterpoint against him--even if his degree did have nothing at all to do with science.
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