Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

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.

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Again, yes, creationists are in the same
position with respect to the prehistoric past EXCEPT that we DO have a written witness that constrains our theorizing, and again it's all a war of interpretations and plausibilities.

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Except that the empirical evidence is very solidly against the YEC position, would be more accurate. And calling a collection of myths a "written witness" is stretching the truth somewhat. I find it somewhat telling that you prefer to attempt scientific argumetn(and fail miserably because critical thinking is beyond your capabilities) rather than arguing for your theological views which are really the core of your arguments. It strongly suggests to me that you know that your dogmas are indefensible, even by your low standards.And as you have been demonstrating, even if it were merely a "war of interpretations and plausibilities" you would lose, and badly,

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1) It's crucially important that this insane accusation stop that says creationists are opposed to Science as such. That's the BIG lie that's promoted here and that Bill Nye perpetuated. There is no problem whatever for creationists in appreciating and engaging in the normal sciences that are testable.

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Since it is quite obvious that you ARE opposed to the conclusions of science, and because the science that leads us to conclude an old earth and evolution IS testable it is an obvious fact that creationists are anti-science.If I said that I wasn,t against Christianity, but I opposed Creationism because it was an idolatrous and anti-Christian cult how would you react?

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2) Since it's all a war of interpretations all the Old Earth has on its side really is establishment belief, consensus, because its interpretations are ridiculous, a shared aggressively affirmed group insanity.

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Even if it were that simple, viable interpretations still beat bullshit rationalisations that rely on not looking closely at the evidence hands down, and that's all you see able to offer.

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3) The Flood has the actual evidence of the strata and the enormous abundance of fossils on its side. Right now the OE sciences are blind to this obvious fact. Too bad.

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Neither of which are evidence for the Flood - as should be obvious to any honest person in a position to judge. And just because you dismiss the evidence you cannot account for - such as angular unconformities, the order of the fossil record, the numerous dating methods which prove you wrong - does not mean that that evidence does not exist or should be ignored.

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We find the gold, copper, and oil. What do Creationists find?

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Glen Morton found that his Creationist teachers had lied to him. Does that count ? :-)

1) Is a historical and interpretive science still a science?2) if a method has been tested, how can it be said to be untestable?

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Of course, although when dealing with the absurd claims that come out of it and are imposed on the rest of us as Fact I often doubt it. But it isn't science in the sense that sciences that can be tested in the present are science.

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Well, you need to make a case for there being a major difference there. But OK, the "historical and interpretive" thing is a bit of a red herring.

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What are you talking about? What method has been tested and what does that have to do with what I'm talking about?

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Does it matter ? If something has been done then that proves that it can be done, doesn't it ? How could anyone say otherwise ?

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No, this is a crucial and central issue in this debate and it needs to be recognized.

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It has no bearing on the question of whether geology is science.

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The accusations of creationists that we oppose Science are false

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Then why do you keep proving that they are true ?

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t'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.

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OK, creationists are only against science that contradicts their false religion.

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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.

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WIthout evaluating the evidence and the arguments you have no idea how strong the conclusion is. Not that it is relevant. What you need to do is to show that the BEST evidence for the conclusions of science that you disagree with is inadequate.So far, you've not done anything that even comes close.

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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.

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But we have a very strong case, and you haven't even got a viable explanation of how the unconformity could exist. Simply extrapolating from the observed tilt of the strata is better than anything you've offered. And, of course, mountain building is occurring in places today, it's not an unobservable process.

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You also cannot prove that humans and apes are genetically related, and treating THAT as fact is fraudulent science.

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The genetic evidence that we have seems pretty conclusive. It's not absolute proof, but no science can offer that.

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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.

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You don't even understand the argument or the conclusion here.

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When you have an hypothesis call it a hypothesis. Stop trying to pretend you know things you can't know.

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I don't. I don't believe that I can say the same about you.

I didn't misrepresent a single thing.

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The worldwide billions of fossils are terrific evidence for a worldwide catastrophe that buried them all at one time

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Why should we conclude that fossils were all created by a single event ?

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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.

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Since I didn't use the phrase "have to" or claim that you were offering a proof thus defence relies on misrepresentation. In fact without good reason to think that at least the vast majority of fossils were produced by a single event your claim is false.

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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.

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It is not sensible to agree with false or indefensible assertions. Since you can't defend these claims it is time that you stopped demanding that people agree with you.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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They should in any case, simply on the face of it, if only because the alternative scenarios are ridiculous,

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On the face of it, the idea that fossils accumulate slowly over time, with localised disasters playing an important role, is less ridiculous than the idea of a world-wide flood. After all we know that localised disasters happen. Mike the Wiz may have got a lot of things wrong, but on that he was close enough to right.

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plus the fact that billions of dead things got buried which protected them from predators (which were dying en masse too) and even managed to get fossilized, which does require special conditions the Flood would have produced in abundance, which otherwise can only occur rarely.

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Of course it isn't true that fossilisation requires protection from scavengers, so we don't need everything to be instantly buried.

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You can of course come up with all your objections, but the general fact remains that he observable situation DOES support the Flood extremely well.

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If that were true you would have no need to make unwarranted assumptions, false assertions and hand wave away features of the fossil record that contradict your ideas.

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You can't know where they SHOULD have occurred. This is one of those things that can't be proved, exactly the sort of speculation, imagination. hypothesis that cannot be tested, so you are left with it in that form as merely an hypothesis.

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Our understanding of nature - which you accept as valid knowledge - gives us an excellent basis for trying to understand what the Flood would produce.

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We know the land animals ended up at the top, for whatever reason.

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That's hardly an accurate representation of the facts. We don't find land animals in the earliest strata, but they aren't restricted to the most recent (or anything like it!) and marine fossils continue up through the strata, with, to the best of my knowledge, no end.

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As for the creatures differing from their living counterparts that simply implies changes by microevolution since the Flood, which is exactly what should be expected.

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Where "microevolution" means ultra-fast macroevolution, and I don't know of any reason to EXPECT that at all.

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Why the stranger ones are deeper is a puzzle, I agree, but again there's no way to KNOW why that is so, it just is. And again they are bizarre because they are so different from life forms today, but again their living counterparts would simply have microevolved from any of those types that happened to have been preserved either on the ark or otherwise. The animals on the ark most likely didn't look a whole lot like those we are familiar with today.

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It's not just a question of why the stranger ones are deeper, it's also about why so many of the familiar ones are absent. And I think that it,s quite telling that you have to appeal to evolution to explain that.Of course, if we take the more reasonable point of view that the fossils accumulated over a long period of time, and that they represent samples of the life forms living at particular times, the problem goes away. Which is why geologists got that far before Darwin entered the fray.

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Paradigm clash I'd say. You guys think in terms of transitional forms, I don't because I don't share the evolutionist model. Your model expects gradations, mine doesn't. Mine expects variations, not gradations.

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We're talking about evolution that YOU BELIEVE IN. It's not like there's any big difference between "variations" and "gradations".

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The bones in the archaeological digs could have all sorts of different forms from those either on the ark or in the fossil record just depending on how the groups dispersed after the Flood. Larger, smaller, heavier, lighter, taller, shorter, any variation is possible depending on what mix of alleles was involved.

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That only applies to the initial population. The question is how we got from your hypothetical initial population to the species-you-won't-admit-are-are-species today. How is that going to happen without any identifiable intermediates between your just-off-the-ark population and the multiple species descended from them ?

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The alleles for human skin color for instance should produce the whole range of skin colors. You've got six reproducing individuals on the ark, each with four genes.

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Only if you start adding to the Biblical account. If you stick with the Bible then we'd expect Noah's sons to get their alleles from Noah and his wife - so we'd expect only 4 different alleles between them, not 6.

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I don't have the patience right now to try to calculate all this out and it wouldn't be something you'd find in the archaeological graves anyway. But this may illustrate the principle I have in mind. From the basic genetic variability you could get both very dark skinned and very light skinned individuals as well as everything in between, and depending on how they form groups and disperse from one another you will start getting whole populations with different skin color from the other populations. Not gradations, just different groups with different characteristics.

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The problem here is that you've chosen just one characteristic governed by a single gene. And for a variation which is known to be found within a single species at that. Try accounting for multiple differences between your hypothetical cat-that-came-off-the-ark and all the modern cat species-that-you-won't-call-species. And then try that for other "kinds" too (especially the "unclean" ones).

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No they shouldn't. As the animals dispersed from the ark and their population grew, you'd start getting different mixes of alleles in the groups that split off. Basic evolution: change in gene/allele frequency brought about by reproductive isolation of a daughter population.

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So there shouldn't be any intermediates between the original just-off-the-ark pairs and modern populations ? How could that be ? Are you suggesting that each modern species-that-you-call-a-variety is descended from a single pair which were already had all the traits you'd expect from the modern species ? Or are you suggesting that all the change occurred in a single generation ?Really, I think we're back to you not understanding your own argument. Which is why you make an assertion and then unknowingly argue against it.

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You theoretically could get a population of wiry fast dogs in one place and another population of large lazy dogs in another, and yet another population of good hunting dogs and another of small dogs as pets.

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But shouldn't there have been intermediates between all three populations and the original just-off-the-ark pairs they're descended from ? If not, how could it happen without any intermediates ?

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Then you aren't looking at the places I'm describing where it DOES go that fast

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Can you show us any of these places, and provide observations of the rate of evolution from them ?Or are you just assuming that there is evidence to support your claims ? Wouldn't that be an extremely bad example of passing off a hypothesis as a fact ?

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There was an example somebody posted here some time ago about the -- spontaneous unintentional -- development of four completely different herds in a very short period of time from a larger domestic herd, and I don't even remember what animal it was, cattle, sheep, horses, what, don't remember and don't know what search terms to use to find it.

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Even if your memory is correct, there is still a distinction between varieties of that sort and species, even if you insist that it is only a matter of degree. I don't think it could help you much, at. Least not without a much better measure and a proper comparison with the species-you-call-varieties.

So your only objection is a hypothesis without any significant supporting evidence ?That's not much of a case.

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If you mean species as the product of "speciation," that occurs when interbreeding with the former population has been lost in a daughter population, right? But there is no other difference from other varieties, and that loss can be the result of genetic depletion so it's rather a distinction without a difference or however that goes.

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Actually I mean species as they are observed, without any judgement on how they came to exist. As for the rest that's just your hypothesis that you're passing off as fact. Or at least that's the most generous assessment.