Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

Bring the argument over here if you want it addressed.

Sorry, sometimes I forget to qualify the word "past" with PREHISTORIC or UNWITNESSED. I certainly am not ever talking about the past living people have all shared or the historical past for which there are multiple written witnesses.I've also acknowledged that some things about the past are knowable such as the sorts of creatures that once lived. ABE: You can point to their bones and reconstruct their bodies and know that nothing like that is living now. The objection is about all those theories about their age, when they lived and the imputing of time to a rock along with fanciful ideas about what that "era" was supposedly like, all determined from a few bits of things found in the rock, which are better explained in other ways. /ABE These things are all speculative and unprovable / untestable.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Robertson is not reliable on a lot of things. There are unfortunately plenty of Christians who cave in to the claims of what they think is unanswerable science, sad but true. There are quite a few of them here.

No, this is a crucial and central issue in this debate and it needs to be recognized.The accusations of creationists that we oppose Science are false and it's all related to the problem of the different kinds of science, the sciences of the PREHISTORIC UNWITNESSED past versus the testable hard sciences. This is a real and important distinction. Creationists have NO problem WHATEVER with the REAL hard sciences as I've said over and over and Ham argued in the debate as well, where he had video of creationist scientists who asserted their YEC beliefs although they do solid productive real science. THIS HAS TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED. It's a big fat lie to keep characterizing creationists as antiscientific.As for making a case, CS's example of the rocks on Mars works. Water MAY explain it but you have no way of proving it.The standard interpretation of the Supergroup beneath the Grand Canyon is an example I also brought up. You can't know or prove that it was ever the root of a mountain range and presenting that mere hypothesis as Fact is false science.You also cannot prove that humans and apes are genetically related, and treating THAT as fact is fraudulent science.You also cannot prove from a collection of different kinds of eyeballs possessed by a variety of different creatures that the human eye evolved, and to call it fact is fraudulent science.When you have an hypothesis call it a hypothesis. Stop pretending you know things you can't know. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What "multiplying species" are you talking about?I really didn't follow that part of the debate, sorry, so I have no idea what the issue is. Nye made a lot of remarks that didn't relate to anything I could see. If you want to make a case out of this, do so but you'll have to explain it all from scratch.All I'm interested in here is the general principle that creationists are not antiscientific and have no problem with actual testable science and that the false accusation of antiscience is due to the failure to recognize that there is a real difference between the sciences of the untestable unwitnessed prehistoric past and the HARD sciences where you can replicate and test their claims. This really should be acknowledged.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't know how to deal with Astronomy. Stick to physics, basic chemistry, what rocks are made of and where they are likely to be found, how DNA works, all the observable testable stuff. Astronomy is also testable because observations can be repeated and we can send rockets out there and know that the formulas work. Leave it at that. We don't have to reconcile it with the Bible. I just figure that time on that scale is a strange thing and that both the Biblical account and the astronomical calculations are true in different meanings of the idea of time. God is infinite and eternal, we are finite and can't understand eternity. He speaks to our weakness.But we do have to reconcile the age of the earth with the Bible.Let's just stick to this planet, where there is an important difference between historical interpretive sciences of the prehistoric past and testable sciences of the present.Also acknowledge that the billions of fossils and the form of the strata are excellent evidence for a worldwide Flood.

So OK you are going to misrepresent everything now. Goodbye.

How utterly ridiculous. The worldwide billions of fossils are terrific evidence for a worldwide catastrophe that buried them all at one time; the strata could only have been formed in water, and their immensity and existence throughout the world suggest an immense and worldwide catastrophe. This is so obvious it takes dishonesty to deny it. Or stupidity. Which is it in your case? Unbelievable denial in the face of fact. Unbelievable. The childish fable is clearly the cobweb-weaving you have to do to make anything out of the strata and the fossils OTHER than a worldwide catastrophe. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As I said, this could be true, it's not a complicated problem and there may not be competing interpretations (except I still think it looks more viscous than liquid). That's going to happen in many cases and that's fine, but it's not a test of the sort I'm talking about, like laboratory testing that can be done by anybody. All you have is people agreeing that it was caused by water. If ALL agree, fine, it was probably caused by water but it's still only a hypothesis until you have actual proof. This is simply the kind of problem you can answer without such tests for proof. But again, only if you don't have competing interpretations. But that's still only a hypothesis, it's not a test and it's not proof as I'm using these terms and trying to get you to notice. No, it has not been tested, that's not how the word "test" is used by me or in "laboratory test." You have people AGREEING on something SUBJECTIVELY, you do not have a test, you do not have proof.This becomes an issue when, for instance, genetic relatedness is claimed between fossils based only on subjective judgment. Calling such untestable unprovable assertions Fact is what I mean by FRAUD.

No, there isn't. I refer you again to the article Rox posted that says Geology is an INTERPRETIVE HISTORICAL science, and that because of that its claims to knowledge are in doubt -- by NONcreationists.I'd say PHYSICAL GEOLOGY may be a hard science, I certainly don't doubt most of your course in Geology for that reason. But where Geology presents hypotheses about the prehistoric past as if they were Facts, hypotheses that cannot be tested or proved but only argued subjectively, hypotheses that are subject to competing hypotheses, that's not hard science. Sorry, I'm talking about the PREHISTORIC past, way back before there were any human beings, where observation is impossible. As I've said, you can know some things about that past, such as what the bones can tell you about a kind of creature that is not living today, but you can't know such things as that any of those fossil creatures is GENETICALLY related to others, except of course those you already know ARE genetically related based on living creatures today. And you cannot know that a given rock represents a particular time period either. That's pure hypothesis for which there are no tests. Of COURSE you can tell that. I'm talking about the unprovable hypotheses. About what killed the dinosaurs. About what other creatures they were related to. THE THEORIES, that really don't even rise to the level of theory, but remain untestable unprovable hypotheses. Who says he was "unable" to address them? You can't answer everything that gets thrown at you in a debate, it takes up too much time. But all I was saying is that I wasn't following all that myself. If I listen back to the debate sometime maybe I'll have my own answers. But what interests me at the moment is the fact that the sciences of the UNWITNESSED, UNOBSERVABLE, PREHISTORIC past are untestable and unprovable and to pretend your hypotheses about such things are FACT is FRAUD. I've never run from any of it, liar. And I've never said that what I choose to talk about are the only legitimate things to talk about either. What I've said is that I personally CHOOSE to focus on certain things, and I kept at them because I want them acknowledged as the good arguments I know they are . Until they are acknowledged, forget the other stuff. It's a waste of time.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Since you're no doubt including plants and insects which propagate at a great rate, 11 new "species" a day may not be all that enormous a rate. Bacteria too perhaps?But since I haven't given any of this any thought I really can't have an opinion anyway. I haven't followed this stuff enough to have an opinion. Sorry, there are too many assumptions, undefined terms, etc., for me to have an opinion about this, except the one I ventured above.First you'd have to say what all is included in "species."

I didn't say you have to "conclude" anything, in fact I specifically said that acknowledging that the billions of fossils are "good evidence for the Flood" is not the same as saying it proves that the Flood occurred. Good evidence is simply good evidence. It's about time somebody acknowledged that there IS good evidence on the creationist side of this debate. Billions of fossils, the strata themselves, are GOOD EVIDENCE for the Flood.

Oh they certainly are. For all you scientifically trained minds not to recognize this simple obvious point just makes this discussion futile. You're all tied up in your revisionist definitions of science I guess, that must be a product of thinking things that can't be proved are in fact proved, that hypotheses are really Fact. Not what I was taught in science classes, not what I read in science books. Weird. Imputing motives to your opponents is very very very bad form Cut it out. You have no idea about how I feel about anything.And I never said you can't know ANYTHING about the UNWITNESSED PREHISTORIC UNOBSERVABLE PAST, it's your THEORIES about how it all happened that you cannot possibly know about that you nevertheless act as if you could that I'm talking about.Genetic relatedness of fossils.
Theory of Evolution
How old the Earth is, how old a particular rock layer is, how old a particular fossil is
All your radiometric dating (that's an untestable hypothesis too)
What killed the dinosaurs.
Etc Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Your evidence is also just untestable and unprovable hypothesis.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I was talking about science classes and science books I read BEFORE I became a Christian. Everybody here is claiming to know things for sure they couldn't possibly know for sure because they concern the untestable past, and that sort of thinking would have been laughed at by scientists fifty to sixty years ago.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.