Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

creationists like ken ham will never change their minds about the age of the earth. never. their position comes from their assumptions about the bible, its origin, and its meaning. it is senseless to debate the science with them, because their worldview does not begin with a question for truth, but with the bible. ken ham said as much.this affirms the stance i took more than a decade ago: debate the bible, not the science.bill nye dodged it, mostly, and took a few jabs at, paraphrasing, "a book written 3,000 years ago, as translated into modern english". i think it really left a lot wanting in the debate. ken ham wanted to talk about the bible. a lot. and bill nye didn't. it would have been way more interesting to see someone knowledgeable about the bible slam into him on the topics of exegesis, interpretation, biblical history, linguistics, etc.for instance, one "as translated into modern english" point was particularly overlooked: ken ham stated that the bible has an answer to where matter comes from. though his answer, "god did it!" is rather unsatisfying, it's interesting because it's only traditional english translations that say that "in beginning, god created the heaven and the earth". in hebrew, it says that "when god began to create the heaven and the earth, the earth was shapeless and empty" and covered by water. and it never tells us where the water came from. and this is a pretty common theme in ancient neareastern cosmologies and religious texts. in "unique" creation story in genesis shares this with the enuma elish, from sumeria. i think, probably due to his area of expertise, bill nye really struck out on this one.on that topic, ken ham contradicted himself a few times. for instance, he noted (as above) that genesis was totally unique... and then said that we found similar creation stories in other cultures just as genesis predicted. he also liked to claim that consistency of natural laws was a creationist concept, and we get that idea from a christian worldview. except when we're talking about the past, then all bets are off. bill nye really should have called him out on this one.

were you bothered, btw, about the "no death before man sinned" and "man was vegetarian before the flood" points?aren't plants alive? do they like, not count?

marine animals? their habitat just got bigger! clearly there weren't fresh water species until after the flood. if t. rex ate coconuts before the flood, surely that's no big deal. well, no, i mean... if there's no death before man's sin, man couldn't have been eating plants either, since those are alive. let's not even get into bacteria and such required for digestion!

this seems pretty arbitrary.i admit, of course, that this is entirely consistent with the bible, which describes all creatures (and man) as "living", and never once mentions plants as being alive also. but creationism, at least as ken ham described it, is a mixing of "science" and faith. do creationists reject the scientific fact that plants are alive, to justify the religious idea that there was no death before man sinned?

i've always had a problem with this argument. it's actually going the other way around, like many creationist arguments. you start with the assumption of a flood, and find a way to fit the geological evidence (layers of strata) with the assumption. this itself is a big problem; science seeks to go the other way. start with the evidence, and draw conclusions.the other big problem is that it ignores the details. we know what flood strata look like. this is not a foreign concept to geology; considering that many fossils are, in fact, deposited by flooding events. here's a rather famous instance: that's dinosaur national monument, in utah/colorado, which features alluvial fossil beds, deposited by repeated flooding events. that's what flooding does to fossils. it doesn't do this: that's the berlin specimen of archaeopteryx lithographica, so named because the details were so fine in the feather impressions that it might have been a lithograph. most of the 7 specimens of archaeopteryx were from the solnhofen lagoon limestone, preserved by extremely fine grained silt drying out. this is what fossils formed by water receding look like.and even without big obvious beds of jumbled dinosaur bones, the kind of rock laid down by flooding, evaporation, or other water-related events is very different than rock created in other manners. that there are strata that are laid down in other manners is pretty solid evidence that strata in general are not evidence for the flood.if there was a global worldwide flood, we would expect to see one massive layer of extremely turbulent sedimentary rock, followed by another layer of sedimentary rock showing signs of settling and evaporation. followed by whatever's formed since. that is the reasonable and testable hypothesis you could make from the assumption, based on our knowledge of geological laws about sedimentation, lithification, and superposition. but this is not what we see. instead, we see a myriad different layers, flood plains on top of rock formed by evaporation. we see all kinds of other rock formations interspersed.flood plains from a single event do not stratify, and they certainly do not stratify in a way that suggests many hundreds of thousands different lithification events many of which are not related to water. you cannot arrive at this statement by studying the geological record, or even knowing the first thing about geology. you have to arrive at it by trying to fit what little of the evidence you're aware of to your preconceptions, while being unaware of the details of the field of study, like what a flood plain looks like.

that plants aren't alive? they grow and reproduce. i'd think it's intuitively obvious that they are? he described the bible as "historical science". did you watch a different debate than i did? i feel like we should take a survey. i'm not debating that. clearly, the bible only regards things that have "breath" or "souls" (same concept) to be alive. but science has progressed a little bit since 900-500 BCE, and i didn't think the question of whether or not plants count as life would be at all controversial. i mean, if we found something like plants, or even fungi on mars, the scientific community would be ecstatic at discovering life on another planet.

let's leave the dating aside for a minute, and just talk about the order (and the law of superposition). i feel like the dating methods are kind of a red herring here that will just get her off track on the standard creationist objections to dating methods. it might be better to just discuss the different kinds of lithification, the difference between sedimentay and other kinds of rocks, and how the geologic column doesn't match what we'd expect to see from one massive flood event. after we've established that these layers were laid down separately, by different events and in different manners, we can talk about how the dates for those layers are determined. probably because it's very hard to live in today's world and totally reject science.

that's not quite true.certainly, there is no evidence of modern humans or civilization, but there are plenty of essentially modern plants and animals that go all the way back to the cretaceous. your overall point is correct though, of course; the fossil record presents an evolutionary organization.extra points for using "iron age" to describe the bible, but i have to take them away because hypothetical noah would have lived in the bronze age.

multiple apparent layers being formed by multiple lithification events is ridiculous? why isn't the geologic column a giant flood plain, then? i agree that a world wide flood would provide a special fossilization condition en masse, but the problem is that it would be at best three such conditions, depending on how long we're supposing the water stuck around for, and form a typical marine transgression event. what about the other layers, which are not flood related? not even remotely at all. let's look at a popular rock formation. this is the grand canyon. i'm going to go from bottom to top (oldest to newest):

1. zoroaster granite, an igneous layer, laid down by vulcanism; and vishnu schist, a metamorphic layer, resulting from volcanic minerals collected by submarine sedimentation and distorted by geologic forces.
2. an angular unconformity, indicating that the layers below were solid rock prior to the deposition of the layers above.
3. bass limestone, a separate sedimentary formation (as indicated by the unconformity) of mostly sandstone and limestone.
4. hakatai shale, again sedimentary, but shale is primarily made after the largest particulates have settled. if this were the flood, we'd be nearing the end; shale is made in shallow water.
5. shinumo quartzite, metamorphic rock, the lower layers of which are sandstones generally formed by mudflats. the upper levels are soft-structure deformations of similar rock.
6. dox sandstone, starting again with a marine sedimentation, and trending towards coastal and mudflat deposition towards the top.
7. cardens basalt, igneous (volcanic) rock.
8. nankoweap formation, sedimentary again. weathering indicates most layers formed exposed to air, and not in a marine environment.
9. chuar group (kwagunt and galeros formations), primarily sedimentary mudrock.
10. sixty mile formation, sedimentary in standing waters (a lake).
11. the great unconformity, again indicating that all the layers below were solid before the next layers were deposited.
12. tapeats sandstone,
13. bright angel shale, and
14. muav limestone, comprising a third marine transgression series, where the rock layers were formed first by a submarine environment, then by a drying sea. if we were counting floods, this would be the third one.
15. temple butte limestone, marine sediment. four floods.
16. redwall limestone, again marine sediment.
17. the suppai group (watchamigi, manakacha, wescogame formations, esplanade sandstone). a series of more marine transgressions: flooding, receding, drying. we're at like 8 floods, so far.
18. hermit shale, sediment formed by running water, probably streams. mud and silt formations.
19. coconino sandstone, dry sedimentation, formed by desert sand dunes.
20. toroweap formation, gypsum shale and sandstone, formed by multiple shoreline transgressions as the coastline of the inland sea moved in an out of the area.
21. kaibab limestone, again marine sedimentation.

as i hope you can see by this list, the geologic column and what we know about physical geology shows a history of water coming and going from this area many times, and not one massive flood/marine transgression event. we have multiple layers that show water invading the area, followed by layers that can only deposited by water receding, layers that can only be deposited by mud, layers that can only be deposited by dry methods or vulcanism... followed by more marine sedimentation. which one of these many marine transgression events was the flood of noah? they can't all be it; you can't form sandstone dry while it's under water. and those angular unconformities don't really jive with the idea that all the layers were formed roughly concurrently. the layers below have to be rock before the layers above; it demonstrates the law of superposition; that the layers on top have to be newer.i'll leave the animals for another post. let's talk about the rock layers and how they got there first.Edited by arachnophilia, : i accidentally a word.

well, the issue is that species identified by fossils and living species tend to be identified by different characters, so you never really get an exact match. from an evolutionary perspective, we wouldn't expect an exact match. surely some genetic drift happens over time. and you'll never get exact replicas unless you're dealing with asexual reproduction.so, for instance, here's a xiphosuran from the solnhofen limestone, and one that was alive pretty recently. they're different genera, but only because i'm too lazy to find a fossil one from the same genus as the living one. they're not exact replicas, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the difference. the fossil one's from the jurassic, but you can find "essentially" identical xiphosurans all the way down to the triassic.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

what a thoroughly underwhelming answer. you seriously can't expect to hand-wave away counter evidence to your claims like that. just because you talked a lot in some other thread doesn't mean that you can plant your flag and declare victory in this one. and you can't expect someone to not bring up obvious counter evidence just because you're tired of explaining yourself. again, this is not a guess. we know what flood plains and marine incursions look like. they look like the kinds of rocks deposited by water on top of the kinds of rock that are not deposited by water.i realize you think we've done the grand canyon to death. would you rather i picked some other area where the geologic column is obvious and easily studied? because the fact that there are multiple layers of rock that are all deposited by different methods, and show evidence of about a dozen separate marine incursions in north america, is not unique to the grand canyon. fantastic. now please explain the mechanism associated with the flood that caused a marine incursion series (flooding, receding, drying formations of rock) followed by dry deposition or volcanic deposition, followed by another marine incursion series. because that would be two floods. now explain why that happens more than 8 times in the geologic column in north america. because dry deposition layers between wet ones isn't really good evidence for all of them coming from a flood.

nope, you'd expect to see stuff like evaporite. there are kinds of sedimentary rock that show signs of water evaporating, or signs that area was a mud flat (eg: certain kinds of cracking or rippling or soft sediment deformation). water violently entering an area leaves tell-tale signs in the rock, but water going away also leaves evidence. quite. i was a bit more charitable in my second geology post, in allowing the assumption that a flood might conceivably produce a marine environment, so long as we're compressing geologic time in a YEC kind of way. in reality, violent flood events in flood plains leave very different kinds of rocks behind than marine transgressions. but the different is subtle enough that it's likely to be lost on someone who can't even see how a flood can't deposit sedimentary rock that forms in dry environments.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

well, sometimes it does. it's one of about a dozen depositional environments. her flaw may be in thinking that all rock forms this way, but rock certainly can be formed by evaporation. mudstone or mudrock is also a thing, though those are actually not evaporites. they're formed by pressure in wet depositional environments. sedimentary rocks generally also expel their connate fluids during lithification, which is kind of like drying out, but that's not really quite the same thing as forming by drying out.edit: in any case, my point was that you'd expect to see a major marine transgression series, if you're assuming there was a world-wide flood and that it would present as multiple strata (and not just a simple flood plain):

quote:

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Sedimentary facies changes may indicate transgressions and regressions and are often easily identified, because of the unique conditions required to deposit each type of sediment. For instance, coarse-grained clastics like sand are usually deposited in nearshore, high-energy environments; fine-grained sediments however, such as silt and carbonate muds, are deposited farther offshore, in deep, low-energy waters.[1]

​

Thus, a transgression reveals itself in the sedimentary column when there is a change from nearshore facies (such as sandstone) to offshore ones (such as marl), from the oldest to the youngest rocks. A regression will feature the opposite pattern, with offshore facies changing to nearshore ones.[1] The strata represent regressions less clearly, as their upper layers are often marked by an erosional unconformity.

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you would expect to see rock uniquely formed by deep marine environments, followed by rock formed by shallow marine environments, possibly followed by coastal, lagoon, mudflat, or even river/lake environments, followed by dry environments. and you'd expect to see this once, all at a very massive level, and globally. you wouldn't expect to see it nearly a dozen times in the geologic column, all in a specific area, if the flood accounted for the entire geologic column.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

not on a global scale. but in the general case of local floods, i'd be high skeptical that there isn't evidence of humans in flood depositional rocks. for instance, the omo kibish formation was formed by annual fluvial flooding and contains some of the oldest modern homo sapiens. granted, that's more like 100,000-200,000 years ago, and not 4,000. but... you don't see many rocks that young in general. you certainly see lots of archaeological evidence of civilizations impacted by flooding events.but your point is correct: what we don't see is evidence for humans lower in the fossil record than we'd expect otherwise. if a flood accounted for the entire geologic column, we should see human (pre-flood) civilization mixed in with the fossils of the precambrian, etc. and we just don't. instead, we see a timeline ordered about how evolutionary theory predicted. and humans exist only very near the top. well, sure. if you have a pet dog, and it has a little of puppies, the puppies are going to be just a little different than their mother, and from each other. that's sort of how evolution works: heritable features vary from one generation to the next. as long as there is mutation and genetic drift, you will not get precise replicas even in asexual species, over durations this long. but then there are things like this species of triops well represented in jurassic (and even upper triassic). the same species. that's a pretty insignificant change even if you're not a lay person.

shoreline deposition, deep marine deposition, and shallow marine deposition all bear different geological markers. what you should see is the kind of deposition that happens in deep marine environments, followed by shallow deposition, followed by shoreline deposition. that's what a typical marine transgression and regression series looks like. each of those major segments are made up of individual layers.instead, what you see is repeated marine transgression and regression, like the flood came and went a dozen times, with totally dry periods in between. right. and the entire geologic column would then have to be:

• sedimentary rock
• deposited by water
• in the correct order, and
• with all layers, or if i'm being extremely generous, all of the lowest layers, showing the turbulent signs associated with flooding

but this is not what we see. instead, we see

• other kinds of rock interspersed between sedimentary formations
• other depositional environments interspersed between those associated with water
• the water layers in the wrong order, or repeating
• and no global flood plain.

it's really pretty clear: if you take the laws of physical geology, and make predictions based on the argument that there was a global flood and the assumption that it represents the entire geologic column, you get a testable hypothesis. you get a picture of what the geologic column should look like.and the geologic column does not look like that. i don't see why. we know how flooding deposits fossils. i posted a picture of such a flood plain earlier in this thread. it's you that's not granting that we know what this special fossilization condition looks like. the deserts in the middle of your flood are kind troublesome, yes. uh, no. water leaves evidence. the rocks either show evidence of water, either in their composition or in their weathering, or they do not. this is not an assumption. we know what deposition methods associated with water create in terms of rocks, and we know what water erosion looks like.also please note that nowhere in my argument did i refer to a time scale. this assumption is simply not part of determining the physical geology of how these rocks are formed. frankly, the flood arguments are "we don't understand physical geology, and we're just going to ignore stuff like uniformity, the law of superposition, depositional environments, weathering, and all this evidence that's pretty damned inconvenient to our worldview." i do not think you are understanding the finer points here about how not all lithification is aqueous, or how the order matters, or how the properties we know about rocks and weathering as they exist today applied in the past as well. you are simply claiming a special exception -- a miracle. and that's fine; but just say it's a miracle, and it defies the laws of physics, rather than claiming that the physical evidence supports it so long as you ignore all of the details and make ridiculous assumptions about how the rules must have changed. i chose it because the geology of the grand canyon area is extremely well documented on wikipedia. feel free to look up any of those rock formations. at least 75% of them have lengthy, individual pages detailing their depositional environments and how we know what they were. with citations. yes. in science, the conclusions proceed from the evidence. the rock layers show evidence of the sea rising and falling multiple times, so it's pretty reasonable to think that the sea level rose and fell multiple times. you can start with an assumption, and then use it to make a hypothesis -- a testable claim -- but if the evidence contradicts that hypothesis you have to discard it. that's how the scientific method works.it is not reasonable to start with the assumption, and then try to force the evidence to fit that assumption. if you believe that all the rocks in the geologic column were formed in one event of the sea level rising dramatically and then falling away dramatically, and instead the geologic column shows evidence for the sea level rising and falling many times with lots of dry spells in between... then you must reject that hypothesis. something about it is clearly incorrect, or there must be some other explanation as to how the initially ordered layers became jumbled, and how the law of superposition (and angular unconformities) no longer matter. and that's a pretty extraordinary claim, that would need extraordinary evidence. the problem with the global flood is that, by definition (or at least creationist claim) it covered the entire surface of the planet simultaneously. that requires more water than exists on this planet. sea level rising and falling globally does not require this, and that does indeed vary over time. additionally, in this particular example, it seems to be the whole tectonic plate shifting that caused it, not necessarily an increase in liquid water on the planet's surface. Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.