Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

Many thanks for posting that.
You obviously need to be well prepared for this sort of public debate. I wonder whether debating evolution should be the topic but rather age issues. Establish a good case for long age then some sort of evolution follows be it deistic, theistic, or atheistic. Hammering ice layers might be good because apart from the several means of establishing that the layers are annual, lead levels reflect its use in the Industrial Revolution, and the beginning of its use by the Greeks BC, by being present at the right count, and the volcanic layer at about 65,000 BC brings in support for RM dating.
Of course, as is often demonstrated here, some YEC are so rusted on that a visit from an angel telling them it was wrong would not change them.

I was glad that Ken Ham hit the "you weren't there" theme as hard as he did, which is basic to the very important distinction between testable science and the sciences of the past which are purely interpretive, which I've been trying to get across here forever.

Rather, this pseudo-demarcation is the transcendental failure of Ken Ham's epistemology. It demonstrates an a priori incapacity to understand how or why science works.

Well, now I've had some sleep.So what happened?He argued that creation account is not viable. Of course he also argued evolution isn't either.His argument was that unless we were there, you can't know the past. So there goes creationism as a viable scientific theory. And thus losing the debate which was meant to be him arguing in the affirmative that YEC is viable in the modern era instead of why it isn't.I think he mentioned that he had travelled to the future - and back! Huh? Well he said that he trusts in the constancy of logic and the laws of nature and SCIENCE and that what we learn today will be true tomorrow. But was he there? Well by his own epistemology he must have been, how else would he know?I liked his 'we trust god would create laws of nature that are constant and logic that doesn't alter' line (not exact quote), because it completely undermined his other associated point. If god can be trusted to give consistent laws of nature and logic - how can we not use the knowledge of constant laws of nature and logic to infer facts about the past? Did observational science prove that the future laws of physics are more reliable than the past ones?

It is indeed one of the foundational stupidities of creationism. But as Modulous points out, deploying this bit of idiocy in this debate is shooting himself in the foot. He was meant to be pretending that creationism is good science, instead he pretended that there can be no good science of the past. For this debate, it was absolutely the wrong lie to tell.

While I do not think that debate will have any effect on the hardcore Creationists (Indeed, already individuals who were older in the audience have claimed they were more strongly in belief of the Bible even though the evidence says otherwise), I think that Bill Nye may have achieved the purpose he set out to do. Funny enough, I think he used a version of the Gish Gallop against Ken Ham throughout the debate. Instead of pointless facts that need to be refuted, Bill Nye simply kept throwing out relevant evidence that has to be discounted in order to accept the creation model.Ken Ham was left with no time to answer the multiple lines of evidence and had to fall back on "I trust in God" and "All the facts were already given to us in the Bible". Plus, his admittion that nothing evidence wise was enough to change his viewpoint, versus Bill Nye's show me evidence and I will change my views right away, showed the fact that creationists will refuse evidence bluntly if it contradicts their beliefs, thus there is no chance to predict any future outcomes.The best thing I think that came out of this debate were the facts that Bill Nye kept giving, which I believe achieved his purpose of planting a seed of doubt for those who were on the fence in regards to creation, especially the younger generation. Also, he did it with his normal sense of whimsy and humor, something that the younger generation (at least for me when I was younger) can connect to more readily. I think that Bill benefitted from looking at this not as a college level debate, nor a high school level debate, but rather as a debate against someone denying items in elementary school science. In other words, science that can be witnessed and how it can be applied to previous situations. Offering the option of trusting Ken Ham's views or the evidence you can replicate with your own eyes could drive some individuals to question why they must deny, as Ham even put it, observational science.All in all, I will say Bill Nye won, but Ken Ham did offer some decent points early in the debate until he began having to simply fall back on because that's the way God said.ABE - Oh! And definitely agree that Bill missed an excellent opportunity to point out the misuse of carbon dating on the piece of wood in the 60 million year old rock from Australia. Ken Ham even blatantly said, "They tested the basalt with K-AR dating and the wood with Carbon dating." It would have been simple for Bill to point out that of course Carbon dating showed a younger age because it is only accurate up to so long ago before the carbon in the sample cannot be distinguished from background. Oh well, I will give Bill this mistake because it has be refuted a thousand times.Edited by Tempe 12ft Chicken, : No reason given.

Indeed. And if he adheres to that logic, as Faith does, then they have to admit they cannot have any veracity to their own interpretations of what scripture has stated. If the 'you weren't there' argument was as sound as Faith or Ken Ham stipulate, then they should not have such a dogmatic adherence to what is indicated in the story of Genesis. Because they weren't there either. It's a moronic viewpoint and is tantamount to the 'I know you are but what am I' tactic that I remember from the 2nd grade.

Well now I have watched Ken Ham's 30 minute presentationGish Gallop all over the place about many things not related to originsRedefining scienceAsserting falsehoodsNot providing any basis for scientific predictions other than what is is what is.Nothing new there. Nothing unexpected.

Or a simpler thought: if Ken Ham is so determined to discredit the idea that we can find out what happened in the past from the physical evidence, it seems clear that he knows that evidence is against him.

And now I have watched Bill Nye's half hour presentation.Lots of factsLots of emphasis on prediction being the purpose of scienceLots of questions for KenHe missed some points that I might have included

• uranium halos and the time needed for them to form
• sn1987a
• lake varves (link between tree rings and ice cores
• the lack of a single genetic bottleneck across all species at the same time.
• the genetic information regarding DNA comparisons between chimps, orangs, gorilla and human and the fused chromosome 2 with internal telomeres and a second centromere that has been disabled -- predicted from the fusion of the ape chromosomes: if they had fused then there would be evidence of their previous separation.
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  This Picture Has Creationists Terrified – Mother Jones
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  quote:

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  ... the image above, which was originally published in a landmark paper in the journal Science in 1982. What you are looking at are highly magnified photographs of the chromosomes of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, aligned in that order for each chromosome.

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  ... the ancestral equivalents of chromosomes 2p and 2q fused together over the course of evolution and became human chromosome 2. In other words, this is sort of the genetic version of the missing link.

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  How do we know that this fusion occurred? The proof is written, indelibly, in the genetic material itself. ...

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  In a 2005 study published in Nature, however, the "precise fusion site" was located on human chromosome 2. The paper noted the presence of "multiple subtelomeric duplications" in this location (i.e., the expected telomere DNA) and also the vestiges of a second centromere on the chromosome that has since been "inactivated" (represented by the orange region above). ...

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Oops Bill missed on the 45,000 year old wood -- that is the limit of 14C dating and would have been reported as >45,000 years, and Ken is misrepresenting that fact. He should have looked at the PRATTs commonly used.Ken is now pulling out more of the standard PRATTS -- the buried airplanes -- confusing snow fall quantity with annual layers marked by different formation of ice at different times of the year.Edited by RAZD, : +Edited by RAZD, : +

Nothing new from HamNo real startling things from Nye eitherPeople will tend to take from this "debate" (two people talking past each other) is what they believed\accepted before.

That is usually the case. And for the most part, debates such as these yield little in the way of any real progress one way or the other. Debates are often 'won' by who is the best talker, not who necessarily produces the most sound arguments and evidence. That is how lawyers function.

No, he's quite right, historical science is not subject to testing and verification as the hard sciences are, so that the whole Old Earth edifice is nothing but an elaborated shared fantasy.

The point about the prehistoric past is not that you can't formulate ideas about it, even sensible ideas, but that you cannot test them and verify them. Creationism is in the same boat on that one, yes, it's all a war of plausibilities built on imagination and interpretation, it's not testable science like all the hard sciences that Creationists do just as well as evolutionists do. It's time that ridiculous accusation that Creationists are opposed to "Science," which was the pre-debate quote from Bill Nye, was put to rest, because it's ONLY the untestable unprovable sciences about the unwitnessed past that Creationists have a problem with and that was what Ham kept emphasizing.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, this accusation that Creationists are opposed to Science needs to be put down because THAT's the lie, and it persists only because you all refuse to recognize that there IS an important difference between the historical sciences about the unwitnessed past and science that can be subjected to testing in the present. That's a crucial point that has to be made and I'm glad Ham made it.