Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

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.

This is, of course, not true.

But it is manifestly true. Ken Ham couldn't have displayed more contempt for the scientific method if he'd burned it in effigy, and as for the results of science, he rejects any that conflict with his preconceived dogma. That is not a difference. All the historical sciences can be tested in the present. That's how they're done.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes there is. For example, geology is a hard testable science based on the laws of nature. So if someone were to say that you died last Tuesday ... ? OK, so if someone were to say that there were once living stegosauruses ... ? So we should ignore Nye's points ... because Ham was unable to address them?We've seen this in your own half-baked attempts to debate. You seem to think that the only legitimate things to talk about are the things creationists want to talk about, rather than the things that make them want to run away and hide.

OK, so you agree in principle that it's possible to learn about the unwitnessed prehistoric past by looking at evidence in the present. But obviously we can test those ideas in the same way, by looking at the evidence that remains to us in the present. And this is, in fact, how these things are known.

Or geology.

Perhaps you shouldn't read "science books" by religious apologists, and read science books written by scientists instead. Then you'd know the same things about science that scientifically trained minds know. Wouldn't that be something?

So I suppose quoting some of them would be out of the question? Like your claim that there were once living stegosauruses? Even fifty to sixty years ago, scientists knew that there were once living stegosauruses. Also that the Earth was more than 6,000 years old. Are you going to try to change the history of science now?

And since sedimentary rocks were caused by the flood, all the intermediate forms would be in unlithified sediment, correct? And not in the rocks?

It seemed simple enough.You and Ham suppose that there was quite a lot of evolution packed in to the few thousand years after the flood, as in this picture from AiG: Unless you and Ham are extreme saltationists, who think that one day a lion gave birth to a tiger, etc, then there must have been intermediate forms.Since sedimentary rocks were formed at the Flood, they were formed before this burst of evolution. Consequently, if the Floodists are right, we would expect to see intermediate forms, but not in the rocks; rather, we would expect to find them in the sediments laid down post-Flood by non-magical processes.Correct?

My post did not contain the word "STRATA". I said "sediments laid down post-Flood by non-magical processes."

* sigh *You know the sediments in which we find, for example, Roman coins? Babylonian pottery? Anglo-Saxon beadwork? The ruins of Pompeii? Those sediments would be post-Flood, would they not?Now, since you and Ham believe that superduperevolution happened after the Flood, the intermediate forms should be in these post-Flood sediments, correct? And not in lithified sediment, which the two of you ascribe to the Flood, right?

Perhaps on this one occasion you could get over your lifelong suspicion of correct things long enough to answer the question. Well, I call it "superevolution" because it would be much faster than ordinary evolutionists say evolution can go. Call it what you like, "mega-evolution", perhaps, or "hyperevolution"? Do you propose, then, that the superevolution (or whatever you want to call it) was so fast as to be actually saltational?

Er ... the speed. The speed would be "super" and not "ordinary".Especially if you hold that the evolution was actually saltational. Do you?

Because of the non-weird expectations promoted by observation, Faith. Evolution observably doesn't go that fast.