Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

The "debate" has already occurred.The results are detailed in major university libraries, in books and journals that fill many floors. Creationists lost.What is being staged at the creation "museum" is not a debate but a floor show designed to make creationism appear to be on equal terms with science.P.T. Barnum would be proud!

When I deal with the past, as an archaeologist, I can learn a great many things, whether creationists say Yea or Nay!The principal thing we can learn about the past is the dating. That lets us put the everything that we find into a chronological perspective. And from a single dated skeleton I can learn a great deal, including age, sex, stature, pathologies, diet, and genealogy. Now that's a real witness whether creationists say Yea or Nay!And we can put the data from a lot of archaeological tests and construct hypotheses. And then we can test those hypotheses. When successful predictions are consistently made, and there is no significant evidence to the contrary, we can elevate that hypothesis to the level of a theory. Whether creationists say Yea or Nay!Creationists deny that our dating is accurate, but they have never been able to demonstrate why or how. The most they have is empty claims based on their a priori beliefs. You're a poster-child for this.I'll leave the rest of the mistakes in your post to others to correct, if anyone wants to bother. (You wouldn't learn anything anyway.)

Your problem with this claim is that the evidence shows that those fossils were deposited over hundreds of millions of years.Pretty LONG flood, eh?

Sorry, no.You would be better to admit to yourself that your beliefs are contradicted by real world evidence.By manipulating and twisting half of the evidence, and denying the rest, you just make the creationist cause look silly.

The oldest one-cell fossils go back somewhere over 3 billion years.Burrows and tracks from invertebrates go back a billion years, and fossils of the invertebrates themselves date to about 600 million years.The end of the flood is generally placed about 4,350 years ago.These numbers don't add up--they are impossibly long for a single flood, but that's what you are claiming. And Noah et al. have to be right back there at the beginning, hundreds of millions or billions of years ago.How can you support any of that with scientific evidence?

We have heard that argument before, but you need to:1) show, using evidence, that all of those layers are of the same age (within a year or so),2) explain how some three billion years worth of fossils are all occurring at the same time, and3) show how all scientific dating methods are wrong. This includes such simple methods as counting tree-rings and varves to radiometric dating, as well other forms of dating, such as thermoluminescence, paleomagnetism, superposition, and estimating the life spans of the fossils in those deposits.You up to the challenge?

Actually scientists have a lot of evidence for those strata, and how and when they were laid down. Those are simple observations supplemented with scientific dating techniques.That you refuse to accept evidence from the real world shows quite a bit about obsessions, and who possesses them.Why do you even bother with science, as you reject the scientific method?

You don't need to know how they died, but when they lived can be determined.And yes, you need to hypothesize. But then you can run a variety of tests, including radiometric dating, stratigraphic dating, and all the rest and you can test those hypotheses. If the predictions derived from those hypotheses are consistently confirmed, than you might be able to elevate that hypothesis to a theory.You seem to think that "hypothesis" means a wild ass guess that scientists make that is surely wrong. But you have no evidence to support that. And in fact, the evidence is all against you.You have absolutely no qualifications to even think the word science, let alone tell us how it works and what it shows. You'd be more honest if you just prefaced each post with "I believe..." and let it go at that.Pretending that science agrees with you is just plain dishonest.

Here's a fun blog, by The Sensuous CurmudgeonICR Reacts to the Bill Nye-Ken Ham DebateICR Reacts to the Bill Nye-Ken Ham Debate | The Sensuous CurmudgeonI think he hits the nail on the head!

One creationist (Woodmorappe) has written about that, but he places some of the fossil hominids in the post-flood and post Babel timeframe.

The relevant evidence clearly shows that Homo sapiens sensu lato is a separate and distinct entity from the other hominids. No overall evolutionary progression is to be found. Adam and Eve, and not the australopiths/habilines, are our actual ancestors. As pointed out by other creationists [e.g., Lubenow], Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis can best be understood as racial variants of modern man—-all descended from Adam and Eve, and most likely arising after the separation of people groups after Babel.

Just one problem.If the change from modern man, i.e., Adam and Eve, to these four species of fossil man took place since the Babel incident, which is usually placed after the global flood and in the range of 4,000 to 5,300 years ago or less. The change from modern man to Homo ergaster would require a rate of evolution on the order of several hundred times as rapid as scientists posit for the change from Homo ergaster to modern man! This is in spite of the fact that most creationists deny evolution occurs on this scale at all; now they have not only proposed such a change themselves, but see it several hundreds of times faster and in reverse!Adapted from:http://blog.darwincentral.org/...-at-creation-science-part-i

You are proposing a rate of evolution that is hundreds to thousands of times faster than any evolutionist ever proposed. Or, even more, as this rate of evolution would have had to occur right after the ark before anyone was around, or folks like the Egyptians and all the rest would have noticed it. So, your superduperevolution would have had to be close to instantaneous.And as I pointed out upthread, some creationists even propose that evolution goes in reverse!How can you folks post these things with a straight face? At some point you have to realize you are just making things up, and that the evidence from the real world says you are wrong. Don't you worry about how silly you are, and how little credibility your cause has when you make things up like that?c.f., St. Augustine

On the contrary, the rate of evolution we see is a substantial argument against the post-flood idea of a superevolution.Do you not see the basic problem here? Creationists argue against evolutionary change over millions of years, then propose the same change in a few hundred years, or maybe a thousand years at most?Don't you see a problem with that?

And no humans with any of those old layers?Trying to put the global flood back several hundred million years and claiming that all fossils and marine deposits come from that single flood reveals the emptiness and the desperation of the creationist claims.Might just as well claim that the earth is only 6,000 years old.Oh, wait. They do that too.Never mind.

Hydraulic sorting is something that creationists made up out of desperation to try to explain hundreds of millions of years of natural deposition with a single event--because they just had to make that evidence go away.For many reasons their explanations simply don't work, but creationists don't let real-world evidence stand in the way of their beliefs.Red Queen: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."Faith, you have the Red Queen beat hands down.

RAZD, you're not playing fair!You're posting data.Now Faith is going to have to make up another tall-tale to explain it all away.Bad RAZD!