On Saturday, Bill Nye the Science Guy was interviewed by MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry on the partisan divide between attitudes toward science and religion. Nye said that teaching anything other than evolution would kill innovation and adversely effect the economy.

Nye assured the host that he does not have a problem with religion before mocking God, at least as understood by the mainstream of American Christians, as "mean spirited." He also suggests that, without evolution, there is no pathway for scientific advances and that failure to teach evolution would lead the economy to eventually collapse.

Here is what Nye said:

This is a strange phenomenon. Let me start by emphasizing again, I don't have a problem with anybody's religion, I mean, knock yourself out. The thing that's concerned is evolution is a fact -- it's how we all came to be. And the main thing for me is, the Earth is not 10,000 or 6,000 years old. It's not. The evidence is overwhelming. And if you have a deity that's going to put all this stuff here to trick you, that is one mean-spirited deity. And so, I have no problem with anyone's religion but we depend on our understanding of evolution to make flu vaccines, to breed our favorite kind of dog, to make all the food we eat. This is through our understanding of genetics and evolution. So, it is the fundamental idea in all of life science. And so when we slip behind, when we allow a generation of science students to not embrace it and not come to understand this sort of -- the bottom-up quality of it rather than the top-down perception of it -- this is troubling because it affects the economy. If we produce a class or several classes of students who don't understand the process of science, the United States will not innovate, it will not create, we will not invent, and we will be out-competed by those societies that do.

Host Harris-Perry had a pretty good snicker throughout the segment and even signed off with an apology to Nye for living in a world where she has to ask, "is the Earth round."

Bill Nye will debate Ken Ham of The Creation Museum in Kentucky on February 4, 2014.