Watch Bill Nye and Ken Ham Clash Over Creationism Live

New submitter Max McDaniel writes to point out this live stream of the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham concerning the viability of creationism in a scientific age taking place at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky (of which Ham is the founder). Note: the presentation is scheduled for 7 p.m. Eastern; the live feed is likely to remain less interesting until then.

Comments

This debate...

[ackthpt]

Will be a divine creation.

Re:This debate...

[nitehawk214]

Will be a divine creation.

Or a divine comedy.

Re:This debate...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I see your Bill Nye, and your Ken Ham, and raise you a John Paul The Great:
Faith and Reason, for we must have BOTH, not either

It's not a debate

[mveloso]

It's not a debate, it's an episode of American Gladiators without the pugli sticks.

Re:It's not a debate

[MickyTheIdiot]

we don't have debates in the US these days. Debates imply that the discussion is fact based.

Re:It's not a debate

[Dr. Manhattan]

They usually boil down to who's the better public speaker. A written debate where there's time to think and avoid misstatements and marshal the best evidence and arguments might be useful, but a verbal debate's just a stunt.

Re:It's not a debate

[ElectricTurtle]

Your rhetoric smells of lamp-wicks, Demosthenes.

I would venture to note that the great classical rhetoricians had equal if not more respect for those who mastered the extemporaneous mode.

Re:It's not a debate

[Jason Levine]

If they included the pugli sticks, that might have made it more interesting. Only give Ham foam ones (since his "facts" are so lightweight) and give Nye steel ones (since his facts are pretty iron-clad). Now go "debate"!

Re:It's not a debate

[globaljustin]

It's not a debate, it's...

pep rally. A high school pep rally mixed with a never ending argument.

each side cheers for themselves & at the end everyone debates the other side as to who won the debate.

Re:It's not a debate

[amicusNYCL]

You think in a fight that features Bill Nye trying to wield what is essentially a barbell, that Bill Nye would win that fight? Have you seen him? He's not Bill Nye The Fitness Guy.

Re:It's not a debate

[cusco]

Bill Nye is an experienced public speaker, with the unusual ability to condense difficult and/or complex ideas into bite-size pieces. I've never seen Ham speak, but as Nye has facts, logic and authority on his side I can't help but think this should be entertaining at the least.

Re:It's not a debate

[OakDragon]

I've got no "Insightful" points to give, but you got it.

Re:It's not a debate

[Joce640k]

They usually boil down to who's the better public speaker.

Nope. These days it boils down to who has the best hair.

Fact: 70% of men have hair loss.

Questions: (a) How many US presidents were bald? (b) How many since TV was invented?

(Answers: (a) Five. (b) Only one, and his opponent was bald as well, so...)

Re:It's not a debate

[bobbied]

I've heard Ham speak, he's not inexperienced. He is also in command of his facts and excels in making is point in easy to understand. I suspect that Nye will be at a disadvantage, unless he has studied the creationist positions and arguments well. I can assure you that Ham has studied evolution and is ready to debate the ideas and can articulate his position well. He's written a couple of books on this subject. Nye had better be prepared.

I expect that, as in politics, what observers will take away from this debate will be largely defined by what opinion and world view they bring in. Few will be swayed, although I expect many will be forced to think deeper about what they choose to believe on both sides. Which in my book, is generally a good thing.

Re:It's not a debate

[CanHasDIY]

... a verbal debate's just a stunt.

To a person who sucks at extemporaneous expression, I'd say it probably does appear that way.

However, for people who actually know what they're talking about, and do their research beforehand instead of on the spot, it works out pretty well.

Re:It's not a debate

[rts008]

That emotion exists may be a fact, but that does NOT mean emotions are factual.

They are just emotions, which people experience...sometimes based on facts, sometimes based on misunderstanding, sometimes based on lack of knowledge.

In other words, not much 'facts' can be derived from emotions other than some facts cause varying emotions in different individuals for different reasons.

So, in the context of this discussion, what is your point?.

Re:It's not a debate

[RoccamOccam]

What?! You mean this wasn't real and was only clever editing?!? I guess I can't trust anything on TV anymore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re:It's not a debate

[Dr. Manhattan]

Please explain why "extemporaneous expression" is a mark of being correct. You can do it extemporaneously if you want.

Re:It's not a debate

[operagost]

I'm pretty sure that both participants know that an appeal to emotion is not good logic.

Re:It's not a debate

[richpoore]

Is that an absolute?

Re:It's not a debate

[CanHasDIY]

Please explain why "extemporaneous expression" is a mark of being correct.

Please explain how you expect me to hit goalposts when you keep moving them around.

You said verbal debates were a stunt; I explained that they probably seem that way to people who aren't good at extemporaneous speech. I further explained that experts, i.e. people who already know their shit and don't need "bonus time" to formulate a decent argument, are pretty good at verbal debates.

"Correct" did not enter the conversation.

Re:It's not a debate

[operagost]

You have to be old enough to be losing your hair, and "hair loss" means losing some of your hair, not all of it or even most of it.

Technically, Ford makes it two, but of course he wasn't elected to the presidency. He WAS elected to Congress.

Re:It's not a debate

[Dr. Manhattan]

So the advantage to "extemporaneous expression" is... if you can make a correct case, you can make it extemporaneously?

That doesn't work. Verbal debates are stunts. They allow no time for review, or for detailed examination of points raised. Which is one reason why creationists love them - they invented the Gish Gallop.

Re:It's not a debate

[Joce640k]

Both participants have had practice/coaching.

Both arguments will be worded to sound utterly convincing to their intended audiences.

Nobody will be swayed either way

(it doesn't matter that only one of the arguments will stand up to rigorous logical analysis afterwards)

Re:It's not a debate

[serviscope_minor]

I can assure you that Ham has studied evolution

Well clearly he hasn't studied it very well/understood it, or else he wouldn't be on that side of the debate.

Re:It's not a debate

[HornWumpus]

That's not an argument against TV. That's an argument against women's suffrage.

Re:It's not a debate

[bobbied]

LOL... So you've studied Han's perspective then? No? Waste of your time? You do get your logical fallacy here right?

Re:It's not a debate

[citylivin]

"So you've studied Han's perspective then? No? Waste of your time? You do get your logical fallacy here right?"

Isn't his "perspective" creationism? Wouldn't that require believing in a god or gods?

I don't think hes talking about panspermia. Wouldn't creationism dictate that there is 1) a creator 2) that he has input in human events? and 3) that this creator is "super natural". In that case, what is there to study? It's impossible to prove there is a god short of god herself coming down. And even then, I would most likely believe it to be an intelligent alien race rather than some supernatural being.

Why would anyone give that "argument" any serious merit? I would think you would have to be religious in which case your reason and logic faculties are already damaged and probably could not participate in a debate in the first place. I doubt any non religious people believe in creationism.

Re:It's not a debate

[gtall]

That doesn't really type check. One property of facts deemed necessary is that they are true. You wouldn't claim the concept of an orange to be true would you? Why would you claim a concept like Emotion to be true. You might say someone truly felt a particular emotion. You might claim emotions exist, but emotions here is treated extensionally, like a set. That's akin to saying something like 1 + 1 = 2 in base 10 arithmetic.

The reason I'm being pedantic is that creationists do tend to start with things that hardly anyone can deny simply because they are true, but then start bobbing and weaving attempting an inductive reasoning argument claiming you accepted the basis. I've been down this road with them before, they are devious and not to be trusted.

Re:It's not a debate

[Darinbob]

A good debate doesn't have typical winners and losers based upon deciding who is right or wrong. For debate contests there is often a complex and subjective scoring system, where speaking ability matters a lot (but is not everything). For other types of debates a winner is chosen by how many people in the audience changed their minds.

Re:It's not a debate

[geekoid]

facts? haha. no.

Here is a break down of Hams techniques.

Ham and AIG (pretty much synonymous) present everything in dogmatic absolutes. This over-states their case. It sounds great...at first. But when Proverbs 18:17 comes into play, the case becomes weaker because of it.
Ham and AIG have a history of distorting things like sanatizing/editing quotes from people to make them appear to say something they are not. Their recent Spurgeon sermon was a great and predicted example of this. They removed his mention of millions of years and changed his reference to various stages of prior existence to "stages of creation", and didn't put his actual words in until called on it. And those that read it prior to its correction process probably never knew that they had read something that presented a false picture.
AIG (and others) consistently point to things like Potassium-Argon dating of material from the Mt St Helens volcano dome as "evidence" that radiometric dating doesn't work. But that is dishonest on its face. Potassium-Argon dating is not used for recent things because there isn't enough Potassium-Argon difference to produce a reliable result and tiny amounts of material left in the equipment from prior tests can skew the results. The lab this rock was submitted to clearly stated that their equipment couldn't date rocks younger than 2 million years old. So, knowing that they'd get bad results anyway, they had it dated and then point to the bad results as validation that the science is wrong. It doesn't prove that radiometric dating is wrong. It just proves that you can set up really bad tests. But that is the kind of stuff that happens when you have inexperienced "experts" who are willing to prove their case at any cost and AIG, to this day, still use arguments like this on their web site and in their materials as "evidence".
Ham presents a sanitized version of the history of his position that doesn't reflect reality. He's quick to present where "experts" (more on that later) today differ in their understanding of things to suggest that something isn't established belief, but presents the history of creationism as if his view has always been the predominant one without mentioning all the people that disagreed with it. For example, he's quick to point to George Young, an old British "Scriptural" geologist has holding to a global flood. He's said to be one of "the most geologically competent 19th century Scriptural geologists". The guy wasn't a trained geologist though. He's actually a PASTOR with 5 years of theology training that followed 4 years of "literary and philosophical studies". He wrote mostly about theology, but did write a book on "Scriptural Geology" and published 6 articles on it in magazines. But because he had the "right" opinion about the flood, he's presented as one of "the most geologically competent 19th century Scriptural geologists". What Ham/AIG doesn't tell you is "the rest of the story" that George Young believed that the geology of the day was too young to produce a true theory of the earth and that a LOT more research needed to be done before forming concrete opinions on it.
You often seen Ham on both sides of an issue, depending on his point and audience. On the one hand, he writes "we need your support" books about "compromise" and justifies the need for his organization due to all the kids that leave church and how most schools teach old earth and/or evolution and so forth. That is for the fundraising though. When it comes to "look at how great we are doing", he claims that there is some growing and enthusiastic army of young folks that are standing firm on the Word of God (or rather Ham's interpretation of it) without compromise or shame.
Ham uses very rhetorical and inflammatory language and presents his "ministry" as "reaching folks" with the truth of the Gospel. Yet the ministries of OEC groups are said to be "brainwashing folks" and other inflammatory things. Great Homeschool Conventions even recently banned him from future conferences due to comments h

Re:It's not a debate

[geekoid]

I have studied his 'perspective' and it doesn't hold up, at all. He uses strawman, sanitizes quotes to fit his need, uses double standards, and almost every logical fallacy in the book.

He has nothing. No evidence evolution is wrong, and no evidence of a God, much less evidence some god greated life as is.

This is a man the claims humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

Re:It's not a debate

[tibit]

Nye has facts, logic and authority on his side

I don't know if Nye realizes it himself, but this might be his very undoing. Because, you see, researching facts and logical argumentation requires hard work. Creationists, on the other hand, can and do make up fiction on the spot. There's absolutely no way to debate, in realtime, someone with an infinite supply of made-up "facts". Most "serious debates" I've seen between scientists and creationists basically shows that the former have little handle on what's really going on, and are taken along for a game that's dealt by the creationists. Again: it's very easy to come up with fiction on the spot, good luck disproving or discussing and endless supply of fiction.

Re:It's not a debate

[tibit]

There is no such thing as "creationist positions and arguments". The best public creationist speakers make up "facts" as they go, and their position is what people want to hear, it's so incoherent. That's why they beat anyone else in debates, almost each and every time. There's literally no way to debate them, even if you had your entire life to prepare for a discussion. A debate must be on an even field, and when you debate someone to whom facts and truth doesn't matter at all, you're in for a game that's rigged for you to lose.

Re:It's not a debate

[tibit]

A well trained creationist speaker is an expert at making stuff up and moving goalposts as they go along. That's the impression I get from listening to the supposedly best ones. They rig the game to win from the get go. There's no such thing as researching someone's yet-not-made-up-on-the-spot fiction. You'd need to be able to predict the future, quite literally.

Re:It's not a debate

[cusco]

I've looked at it, and his 'perspective' is pretty much absurd. He seems to believe that only facts that can be tortured sufficiently to fit into his crippled world view are worth considering and anything else is either suspect, invalid, or the product of unsupportable pseudoscience (his definition of which is laughable, especially considering the source). So yeah, a waste of time for most people.

Re:It's not a debate

[bobbied]

You definitely are going to think Nye wins the debate.. Ok..

Re:It's not a debate

[roc97007]

This is where I'm in a quandary. I don't agree with Ham's position, but Nye sometimes comes off as a bit of a condescending asshole, and I confess I'd enjoy seeing him flummoxed. Just too bad it has to be on this issue.

Re:It's not a debate

[irenaeous]

I can assure you that Ham doesn't understand evolutionary biology, nor does he understand how science works. Ham and his ilk are not willing to follow the evidence where it leads, and to change his position as a result. He knows the conclusion he wants to come to, and works backwards from there.

I think you are right, but bobbied is right too. Ham knows his own arguments and how to present them in a way that may sound good and deceive the uninformed. He has lots of experience and practice doing it. Complicated truths are often hard to defend in a short space of time allowed for in a debate, but simplistic attacks that may require involved responses are easy to make. Ken Ham's bat-sh-t crazy ideas won't necessarily preclude him from coming off better looking in the debate.

Re:It's not a debate

[RespekMyAthorati]

Yes, and his "perspective" all comes down to one statement: "The Bible is correct and I understand what it means".
Which is fine, except that has nothing to do with evolution, or indeed science.

Re:It's not a debate

[RespekMyAthorati]

You've repeatedly claimed that there is a "logical problem" with pointing out that Ham's arguments have nothing to do with science, yet you never say what that "logical problem" is.

So, let hear it. I double-dog dare you.

Re:It's not a debate

[RespekMyAthorati]

I've been to similar places in Alberta and Utah.
They have fossils of dinosaurs that can be chemically proven to be 100's of millions of years old, and no humanoid fossils more that 1 million years old.
It has nothing to do with whether you or I were there, you ludicrous twit.

Re:It's not a debate

[RespekMyAthorati]

Nobody wins a "debate" like this, because it isn't a debate.
Pitting blind faith against scientific reason is just a waste of time.

Re:It's not a debate

[Camel Pilot]

This is a man the claims humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

Have you *ever* been to Glenn Rose Texas? Dinosaur valley state park? OK, OK, Not proof, but some see it as evidence.

So, you have evidence that they *didn't* coexist?

How do you know? Where you there? Oh right, you are claiming nobody was, so you where not there.

Having fun yet?

Been exposed as fake a long time ago. Perhaps that this "evidence" appears in only in the Bible belt might just be a clue.

Re:It's not a debate

[dbIII]

Isn't his "perspective" creationism? Wouldn't that require believing in a god or gods?

No it specifically requires believing in a God that came in, did stuff, and then went away.
The Christianity-Lite God is very limited but it least it does what it's told by the merchants charging admission to the temple.

Re:It's not a debate

[bobbied]

Just curious... How do you "chemically prove" something's age?

If you are talking about Carbon 14 dating, there are some fairly wide margin of errors in that method and a host of assumptions that end up being somewhat circular arguments. In addition, it's not really a "chemically" determined dating process, but one based on radioactive decay.

What process are you talking about?

Re:It's not a debate

[DedTV]

I doubt any non religious people believe in creationism.

Plenty of non-religious people believe in creationism. They just don't believe the Bible's explanation of creation. Even a number of religious people believe the Bible's explanation of creation is akin to how a modern engineer might explain how they build a skyscraper to a 4 year old.
Ham's views are like a 40 year old voraciously defending his belief that babies are delivered by a stork because someone he trusted told him that's how reproduction works when he was a kid.

Re:It's not a debate

[shutdown -p now]

I've studied the creationist perspective and their argument in great detail. GP is spot on. It's bullshit, and anyone who devotes any significant time to studying it will inevitably conclude such, unless he's willing to forgo reason.

I can give you an example. Here is a smart guy with a degree in the field who happens to be a creationist. His position is that, purely from a rational scientific perspective, he'd have to prefer evolution - and the only reason why he's a creationist is because he has faith in the Bible as the infallible word of God, and cannot reconcile its message with anything but Young Earth creationism.

Re:It's not a debate

[cusco]

Carbon 14 dating is only good for the last few tens of thousands of years, beyond that the percentage of Carbon 14 is so small that quantum effects on decay take over. Potassium/Argon dating has to be used for older finds. Worth noting is that Ham's group once sent ash from Mount St. Helen's latest eruption to a lab for P/A dating. They were told by the lab that accurate results for samples less than a million years old were impossible (not enough time for decay to happen), but they insisted so the lab performed the test. They have used those inaccurate results as "proof" that P/A dating doesn't work.

Debate?

[fishybell]

You keep using that word. I do no think it means what you think it means.

Seriously though, I'm not sure Mr. Ham is going to actually respond to Bill Nye. If Mr. Nye responds, and Mr. Ham doesn't, it only puts the "science" of creationism in a valid light, as if it were worth debating.

Here's hoping they stay mostly on whether it should or should not be taught in schools, not whether either is true or not. Science isn't so much about "truth" but about the best understanding based on available evidence. That is what should be taught, right from the get go.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

You're expecting something worthwhile from this?

It will be a complete waste of time. Mr. Ham isn't there to change his opinion of anything.

Mr. Nye should know better than to participate, let's hope he learns that today.

Re:Debate?

[i kan reed]

This debate will not convince anyone, even if Ham doesn't successfully pull rhetorical tricks to make it appear to dumbasses that he's being intellectually honest(and he does, Gish Gallop is the word of the day). The only real result is that his failing museum will get enough publicity among culture warriors to pull it out of bankruptcy.

That's it. It's free financial support for a de-educator and nothing else.

Re:Debate?

[Akaihiryuu]

Creationism does not belong in schools AT ALL, except in very specific contexts. In a religion or theology class, sure. In a science class? Hell no.

Re:Debate?

[Hatta]

It will be a complete waste of time. Mr. Ham isn't there to change his opinion of anything.

It's not about convincing Ham. It's about exposing Ham's congregation to actual arguments. If fundie parents sit down and watch this with their kids, the kids might come away with a few new ideas. That's a good thing.

Re:Debate?

[MightyMartian]

Anyone with a web browser can see the falsity (indeed the sheer inanity) of Ham's claims. Debating people like Ham only gives them a platform, and in a peculiar way gives them legitimacy. It would be rather like a historian debating a Holocaust denier. Sure, the historian will probably be able to trounce such a person, but at the expense of giving the denier a platform and the inherent legitimacy that goes along with "I want you to be an interlocutor."

Ham's nonsense was debunked long ago (in many cases long before Ham was even born). At this point I doubt even Ham believes it any more, but it's a way to make some cash.

Re:Debate?

[xevioso]

The idea that the best way to deal with Creationists is to ignore them is a ridiculous one. These people don't go away if you ignore them. On the contrary, you have to engage them. You have to deal with their claptrap whenever and wherever you find it, because these people have political power in this country.

Re:Debate?

[xevioso]

Creationism is alive and well in this country, unfortunately. You have to fight them at every turn. Science is under siege by people like Ham, and ignoring them, alas, will not make them go away.

Re:Debate?

[MightyMartian]

I never said ignore them. I'm just saying debating them is the wrong way to go about it. On the first score, Duane Gish's infamous approach to debating; the Gish Gallop, is used by a lot of Creationists. A large number of claims are thrown out, almost all spurious, but so thoroughly overwhelm the other debater that the Creationist seems to have won. On the other score, it gives them the venue and legitimacy they crave.

Re:Debate?

[mtrachtenberg]

It will be a complete waste of time. Mr. Ham isn't there to change his opinion of anything.

It's not about convincing Ham. It's about exposing Ham's congregation to actual arguments. If fundie parents sit down and watch this with their kids, the kids might come away with a few new ideas. That's a good thing.

In America, at least, it has long seemed that watching a debate is more about choosing one's side and cheerleading on its behalf than about analyzing facts.

Facts can backfire and increase certainty in falsehoods -- http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

It will be a complete waste of time. Mr. Ham isn't there to change his opinion of anything.

It's not about convincing Ham. It's about exposing Ham's congregation to actual arguments. If fundie parents sit down and watch this with their kids, the kids might come away with a few new ideas. That's a good thing.

Let's see: Several months of buildup telling their kids that evolution is 'just a theory that has yet to be proved', telling their kids that there's 'still a debate', telling the kids in advance that Mr. Nye is a liar, etc.

All that vs. one hour of TV with the parents constantly telling the kids that Satan is speaking through Mr. Nye to test their faith.

On balance, not a good deal for the world.

Re:Debate?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

It's about exposing Ham's congregation to actual arguments. If fundie parents sit down and watch this with their kids, the kids might come away with a few new ideas.

So right. There is no easy solution to the problem of excessive religiosity. No matter what you do you will have a very high failure rate. But if you don't try you will have a 100% failure rate.

Re:Debate?

[Hatta]

Anyone with a web browser can see the falsity (indeed the sheer inanity) of Ham's claims

They can, but probably won't. How many of Ham's congregation do you think have read talk origins? Why would they, when Ham has all the answers?

So how do you get them to even listen to opposing arguments? This debate is a good way. Even if these people are coming just to see Ham speak, they have to listen to Nye in order to evaluate Ham's performance. In the process, some of them might realize that evolution isn't as crazy as they've been told.

Yes, it gives Ham a platform. You know what, he already had a platform. There is no downside to this debate. Nobody who isn't already a true believer is going to be swayed by Ham.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

Oh, I don't think it's a waste of time if Nye manages to make Ham look as silly to his followers as he does to the rest of the world.

How many televangelists have been caught in hotel rooms with hookers/cocaine? Did that change anybody's opinion?

How many videos like this do we have to post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

(Scary to think that she was running a state...)

Re:Debate?

[JasoninKS]

Except that your "poking of holes" does nothing to actually prove your point. I have yet to see a Creationist willing to stand up and offer their points in a valid scientific setting. Their entire argument is "Well it's right because the Bible says so", despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's nothing new. Despite evidence showing the sun was the center of our galaxy, the all-knowing Church cried "heresy" because it was against their beliefs.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

True, but setting up farcical debates isn't the way to do it. The Christians have had months to prepare their children for what they're about to see.

We need more surprise attacks which can catch the children away from their brainwashing parents (like Richard Dawkins with his buses)

We need more legal challenges to government abuses (eg. getting Ten Commandments out of courtrooms, state funding of nativity scenes).

We need more people like these guys who connect directly with people: https://www.youtube.com/user/T...

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

There is no downside to this debate.

Apart from all those parents telling their kids "Look, there's still a debate! They've been debating for years and they've never won, not once!"

Re:Debate?

[HornWumpus]

You only have time to destroy one, maybe two. Besides the audience is too dull to understand.

If you spend all your time arguing against strawmen, you have lost.

Re:Debate?

[TheGratefulNet]

agreed. for many fundies, it will be the very first time they're ALLOWED to hear the truth of the matter.

its sugar that goes along with a bitter pill. the sugar, here, is the religion part. it gets the fundies to tune in. once they are there, the science can be explained to them.

most will reject it but a FEW will consider it.

that's a win. giving new information to closed minds is always a win.

the parents will 'explain away' why the religion is correct and science is wrong, but kids will often distrust their parents, so this could work out well for a few of them.

Re:Debate?

[Hatta]

And how is that worse than never exposing these people to any contradictory information at all?

Re:Debate?

[TheGratefulNet]

the last few days, I've heard the phrase 'gish gallop' and now knows what it means. never heard of that before. ...even us science folks are learning things from this 'debate' ;)

Re:Debate?

[TheGratefulNet]

(like Richard Dawkins with his buses)

"the bus came by
and I got on
and that's where it all began"

oh, wait, you mean another bus, don't you?

Re:Debate?

[HornWumpus]

Sun was the center of the galaxy?

Can I ask you to please change sides or shut up.

Re:Debate?

[MightyMartian]

How many Creatonists do you suppose even pay attention to such debates. Believe me, I spent a fifteen years debating Creationists on talk.origins, and I saw maybe one Creationist in all that time start to question their world view. The rest were proof against any evidence, and even after a claim was debunked, the very same person would, a few weeks or months later, trot it out again.

Debating Creationists does no good, and in some ways probably does harm.

Re:Debate?

[TheGratefulNet]

you are forgetting the rebellious nature of most kids.

if their parents say one thing, they may suspect that its not true.

some will blindly just keep on believing their own religion, but SOME may be convinced that the lies of their parents are actually harmful to them and their future.

spreading info to those that never heard it before IS useful, even if it won't sway the majority of the closed minds. some will consider it and that's progress, at least.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

And how is that worse than never exposing these people to any contradictory information at all?

These people go around wearing fact-proof vests. It's the only way they can survive.

I garantee that this 'debate' has been pre-debated to death in their churches for the last six months and their minds are now closed to it.

Anything the nasty Atheist can possibly say today has already been twisted and dismissed in their minds.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

spreading info to those that never heard it before IS useful, even if it won't sway the majority of the closed minds.

...except they will have heard it before.

Sort of.

Their churches will have been twisting and distorting the main Atheist arguments for the last six months during the build-up to this.

Re:Debate?

[tompaulco]

How many televangelists have been caught in hotel rooms with hookers/cocaine? Did that change anybody's opinion?

Not as many as the number of people who say there is no God who have been caught in hotel rooms with hookers/cocaine.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

for many fundies, it will be the very first time they're ALLOWED to hear the truth of the matter.

You don't think the churches have been brainwashing their flocks ready for this? They're the ones who asked for this debate.

Guess what the headline is today on Conservapedia: http://www.conservapedia.com/M... (they even provide the Youtube link for you).

Nope, they know what they're doing.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

I wanted to consider the evidence for Christianity, but there wasn't any.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

Only one of those was claiming moral superiority.

Re:Debate?

[i kan reed]

Do you? I mean we ignored shakers, and they pretty much went away. We ignored flat-earthers and they're not exactly flooding with members.

Re:Debate?

[bunratty]

It's basically the same thing the global warming skeptics do: "the climate always changes," "we have data for only 0.01% of Earth's history," "humans are small and Earth is big so humans can't affect Earth," "the warming stopped 20 years ago," "carbon dioxide is plant food," "it was warmer in the past," "warming is a good thing." All these statements are easy to throw out, but they take time to explain why they don't mean we shouldn't reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the people who have already made up their minds about which way they believe don't listen to the long-winded explanation and just take the snarky remark and repeat it.

Re:Debate?

[CanHasDIY]

There is no downside to this debate.

Apart from all those parents telling their kids...

Question: Why do you care so much what other people teach their kids? If anything, giving them false information as if it were fact puts your kids at an advantage.

Granted, I myself would prefer that parents not teach their children to be morons, but I also recognize that A) it's not my place to tell them how to raise their offspring, and B) that is a daunting task I doubt anyone is capable of taking on.

Re:Debate?

[Hatta]

Any good critical thinker will change his mind when presented with contradictory evidence. But no such evidence exists. It's been 155 years since the Origin of Species was published, and not one observation has been made that contradicts evolution by means of natural selection. Every single observation made, including the discovery of DNA, has reinforced this basic idea.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

Question: Why do you care so much what other people teach their kids?

Very simple: Because those kids grow up to run the country.

People like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Those kids will very definitely go around telling other people what they can/can't do (eg. gay marriage).

Re:Debate?

[TheGratefulNet]

Question: Why do you care so much what other people teach their kids? If anything, giving them false information as if it were fact puts your kids at an advantage.

in the US, at least, many of those in power are STAUNCHLY religious. they make the rules the rest of us have to live by!

does that fully explain our fear in having ignorance pushed out to the populace, widespread?

Re:Debate?

[flipperdo]

I hope they pause every few minutes to show funny commercials. A star studded halftime show would be awesome too...

Re:Debate?

[CanHasDIY]

Question: Why do you care so much what other people teach their kids?

Very simple: Because those kids grow up to run the country.

People like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Consequence of freedom. And, presuming that's a video of G.W. Bush (I don't bother with video links), I doubt you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of Democratic Presidents doing/saying stupid shit - Obama's almost as bad as Gee-Dub when it comes to "open-mouth-insert-foot" moments.

Those kids will very definitely go around telling other people what they can/can't do (eg. gay marriage).

Riiiiight, because kids raised by "progressive" parents definitely don't think they have a right to dictate what kind of cars others can drive, or what weapons they can own, or what they can do with their own property... </sarc>

Re:Debate?

[CanHasDIY]

Question: Why do you care so much what other people teach their kids? If anything, giving them false information as if it were fact puts your kids at an advantage.

in the US, at least, many of those in power are STAUNCHLY religious. they make the rules the rest of us have to live by!

OK, well, that's a good argument against letting certain groups gain a majority of power, but it still doesn't explain why you think you have a right to dictate what lessons other people's children are taught.

does that fully explain our fear in having ignorance pushed out to the populace, widespread?

The fear? Yes. The unreasonable, knee-jerk hypocrisy, less so. I'm all for keeping dumb people out of power, regardless of their religious affiliation, but I'm not about to say that I should be the one to decide what they can and cannot teach their own offspring. Mainly, because I wouldn't want someone else dictating what I can teach my kids.

See what I did there?

Re:Debate?

[Roachie]

Speciation. Where is the speciation?

We lose dozens of species every year, and we have yet to see a new one arise.

How do you like that for contradictory evidence?

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

Consequence of freedom. And, presuming that's a video of G.W. Bush (I don't bother with video links), I doubt you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of Democratic Presidents doing/saying stupid shit - Obama's almost as bad as Gee-Dub when it comes to "open-mouth-insert-foot" moments.

Nope. Sarah Palin talking at a religious university, telling the kids how the founding fathers were Christians and a long list of other stuff that's completely wrong. Even Obama and Gee Dub can't hold a candle to her.

PS: When did this become "Democrats vs. Republicans"? My problem is that an Atheist president is unthinkable in the USA. It simply couldn't happen. Nuh-uh.

Riiiiight, because kids raised by "progressive" parents definitely don't think they have a right to dictate what kind of cars others can drive, or what weapons they can own, or what they can do with their own property...

Where did any of that come into it? This is about religion.

Re:Debate?

[PraiseBob]

The primary problem for evolution is that it too cannot be proven though experiments in the lab nor has it been observed in place. For much of the time evolution attempts to explain, nobody was there to observe and record what actually happened, and there is no way to recreate processes that take millions of years so we can see what happens in a lab.

This is simply not true. You are absolutely incorrect. There have been hundreds if not thousands of rigorous scientific experiments proving evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Humans have cultivated crops for centuries to EVOLVE the crops we have today. Teosinte and Corn are completely different, yet have a common ancestor. Do you think Emmer Wheat looked the same today as it did 20,000 years ago? We've cultivated it to specifically favor traits that provide more food.

Domestication is by definition, evolving a species to favor traits we like. "Domestication (from Latin domesticus) is the process whereby a population of living organisms is changed at the genetic level, through generations of selective breeding, to accentuate traits that ultimately benefit humans." Do you "believe" in domesticated animals? Because there is a lot of evidence that they exist.

Evolution isn't some kind of unknowable magic that takes place over millennia. It is directly observable.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

The fear? Yes. The unreasonable, knee-jerk hypocrisy, less so. I'm all for keeping dumb people out of power, regardless of their religious affiliation, but I'm not about to say that I should be the one to decide what they can and cannot teach their own offspring. Mainly, because I wouldn't want someone else dictating what I can teach my kids.

Right.

But the only way to keep dumb people out of power is to educate the voters. That mostly involves teaching them critical thinking when they're young. The rest will sort itself out.

If you aren't teaching your kids critical thinking then you're part the problem and somebody else needs to step in.

Either that or you have to pass a "voters exam" full of basic science questions before you get to vote on anything important.

Re:Debate?

[operagost]

Ham isn't some country preacher. He's an author and evangelist known around the world. His "congregation" is a lot of people.

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

Is Nye?

Sure, why not? I know I would.

(Assuming Mr. Ham can pull out a new argument with supporting evidence...)

Re:Debate?

[operagost]

It's funny how scared atheists are to debate anyone. it's like they're afraid they might change their minds.

Those of us who believe in science, but also believe in the free exchange of ideas, like to witness these debates. We don't dismiss the opponent. It's intellectually dishonest.

Re:Debate?

[deadweight]

Agree. Why limit it to Christian origin myths? Why not debate the "big turtle in the sky" and the FSM? I am sure His Noodleness has some reps that would love to debate. It gives folk tales equal weight to science.

Re:Debate?

[MightyMartian]

I don't give a damn what parents teach their kids (well, within limits, I wouldn't want parents teaching their kids eating their fellow humans is fine). The issue isn't about that, it is about Creationists attempting to have their long debunked nonsense taught as science in classrooms.

Re:Debate?

[cusco]

The kids that Nye will reach are those who are already doubting. They're doubting their faith, and probably their parents' reason for their faith as well. The seed of doubt is already planted, I'm hoping that Bill Nye can fertilize and water that little seed.

Re:Debate?

[MightyMartian]

What has evolution got to do with atheism? Be specific here.

Re:Debate?

[MightyMartian]

Oh noes, engineers as Creationism! http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/S...

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

There ARE significant problems with evolution as a scientific explanation of the origin of the diversity of life on earth. The primary problem for evolution is that it too cannot be proven though experiments in the lab nor has it been observed in place.

You're probably trolling, but...

NO scientific theory can be proven, we go with the one that best fits the evidence. This is the basis of endless childish word games by creationists.

Evolution is at least as "proven" as gravity since the advent of gene sequencing. I don't see many creationists floating off into space, do you?

Re:Debate?

[deadweight]

Ah...because it takes some dedicated hunters with shotguns sometimes less than a human lifespan to kill something off forever and speciation happens every few thousand/ten thousand/million years? Or were you expecting a trash-eating 3 headed zombie rat-snake-raccoon thing to evolve in your backyard next week?

Re:Debate?

[CanHasDIY]

Consequence of freedom. And, presuming that's a video of G.W. Bush (I don't bother with video links), I doubt you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of Democratic Presidents doing/saying stupid shit - Obama's almost as bad as Gee-Dub when it comes to "open-mouth-insert-foot" moments.

Nope. Sarah Palin talking at a religious university, telling the kids how the founding fathers were Christians and a long list of other stuff that's completely wrong. Even Obama and Gee Dub can't hold a candle to her.

OK, so teach your kids, "that bitch is dumb as hell, and you should probably fact-check anything she tells you," not "She shouldn't be allowed to say stuff I disagree with to people." Because in the case of the latter, you'd be a hypocrite, which in my book means you're not worth listening to, either.

PS: When did this become "Democrats vs. Republicans"? My problem is that an Atheist president is unthinkable in the USA. It simply couldn't happen. Nuh-uh.

Aw, c'mon dude - we both know it's always and R vs D issue, even when it's not. 'Murica, right?

Riiiiight, because kids raised by "progressive" parents definitely don't think they have a right to dictate what kind of cars others can drive, or what weapons they can own, or what they can do with their own property...

Where did any of that come into it? This is about religion.

Making a point - you claim to want to have control over what religious people can teach their kids, because "Those kids will very definitely go around telling other people what they can/can't do (eg. gay marriage)."

I was merely pointing out that the inverse is true as well - the kids of non-religious, "progressive" types will be taught to go around and tell other people what they can/cannot do, albeit about different topics. You're just trading one brand of oppression for another.

My ultimate point being, how other people raise their kids is as much your business, as how you raise your kids is theirs. You don't want religious nutjobs influencing your kids? That's fair, but don't demand, in the next breath, the right to influence theirs.

Re:Debate?

[Roachie]

Are you suggesting that Nye is there to change his position?

Re:Debate?

[femtobyte]

Well, everyone claims moral superiority (I think you just did right there). Only some vociferously base their measure of moral superiority on staying away from hookers and cocaine (in-between bouts of hookers and cocaine).

Re:Debate?

[Roachie]

Thats arguable.

Re:Debate?

[CanHasDIY]

Right.

But the only way to keep dumb people out of power is to educate the voters.

Ignoring, of course, that "dumb" is an entirely subjective, emotional term, and should not be the basis for education or legislation.

If you aren't teaching your kids critical thinking then you're part the problem and somebody else needs to step in.

Supposedly, that's what public schools are for; however, considering the stories I've been hearing coming out of public schools lately, I wouldn't trust them to get it right, either.

But to say, "I believe you're raising your kids wrong, you must let the state take over?" Fuck. That. Bullshit. You wouldn't agree with someone else demanding your kid be taught something against your beliefs, so what makes you think you have the right to do the same to others?

Either that or you have to pass a "voters exam" full of basic science questions before you get to vote on anything important.

Replace "science" with "relevant to the topic being legislated," and you've got my support 100%.

Re:Debate?

[deadweight]

I have never been to the sun. No one else has been there. No person has seen the core of the sun and lived to tell the tale AFAIK. But somehow I tend to think what I learned in astronomy class about fusion and the life cycle of stars is likely correct and have no need of folk tales or ancient creation myths to tell me what the sun is made of. Limiting science to what you personally can see in front of your face is consigning us back to the dark ages. OTOH we could all be a lab experiment done by supernatural beings to win the Divine Being and All Powerful Gods of Creation 3rd grade science fair for all I know and we could never prove it ISN'T true. That is not science however.....

Re:Debate?

[operagost]

(like Richard Dawkins with his abuses)

FTFY.

Re:Debate?

[Roachie]

What did Emmer Wheat turn into?

Re:Debate?

[femtobyte]

Where in the Bible does it say that the Earth is the center of the galaxy?

Implied in the Genesis 1 cosmology, where the heavenly bodies are placed in the sky above an already-formed Earth (complete with vegetation), and supported by numerous descriptions of the sun rising, setting, and even stopping still for a while (as opposed to imagery of the Earth twirling around). Granted, the Church was less upset by the heliocentric concept itself than by Galileo presenting his findings as a dialogue where the character representing "the establishment," who speaks the Pope's words, is named "Simpleton."

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

This is the elephant in the room. Creationists want to "teach the controversy", but only their controversy. There'll be outrage if we advocate teaching Islam in schools alongside Creationism and Evolution.

Re:Debate?

[bobbied]

Only one of those was claiming moral superiority.

I can tell you that *any* person claiming to be a Christian that is asserting moral superiority is lying about being superior, being a Christian or both.

The CRUX of Christian teaching has ALWAYS been that "All have fallen short" and having fallen short we all deserve to die. If you don't start there, you miss the point.

Re:Debate?

[Hatta]

Speciation. Where is the speciation?

It's in the fossil record.

We lose dozens of species every year, and we have yet to see a new one arise.

Which is exactly what you'd predict from the theory of evolution. Natural selection is an iterative process that takes many generations to dramatically shift allele frequency. There's no reason to believe that we could observe it on human time scales.

How do you like that for contradictory evidence?

It's entirely consistent with evolution by natural selection. Not only consistent, but supportive. If speciation occured in just a few generations, which would be observable by human scientists, natural selection could not be the cause.

Re:Debate?

[operagost]

Some of you have a twisted view that somehow a great portion of believers live in some Hollywood dystopia that resembles an unholy mix of "Footloose" and Jonestown.

Re:Debate?

[SolitaryMan]

Christian origin vs FSM -- that is the debate I would watch!

Re:Debate?

[operagost]

There isn't evidence for the existence of anything that predated your birth, either.

Re:Debate?

[tompaulco]

I personally never took the Genesis 1 as being to the letter literal. It may have happened exactly like that, or it may have taken 6 billion years. That's not really the point, and getting hung up on small details doesn't help anybody. I guess the problem is that some people can't handle that a book that is a mere 2,000 pages could contain some passages which are allegorical and some which are literal. I think at some point in history, someone asked "who gets decided what is literal and what is allegory" and at that point, the Church decided it must all be literal, so that nobody could call into question where to draw the line. Me, I think I can tell pretty easily what is a parable and what was an event, but that may differs from others interpretations. And that is fine, they're just wrong. :)

Re:Debate?

[Mysticalfruit]

The bigger issue I have with this whole thing is that Nye is letting Ham frame the debate. They're already talking about making DVD's out of this. What happens if Nye completely obliterates Ham? I don't think this will happen, but if at the end of the whole thing Nye is seen to have taken Ham to task, how do you think they'll edit the DVD? These jokers have shown themselves time and time again to not be interested in the facts. At heart I know that Bill Nye is an educator and believes if even one person in the audience has a eureka moment he's done his job. Unfortunately, I get the sense that the creationists see this as some type of big game hunt.

tl;dr I think the creationists are going to edit the debate to ensure it shows Ham in a great light and show Nye poorly and declare victory.

Re:Debate?

[HornWumpus]

Do you waste your time with the same old 10 dumb arguments that have long sense been addressed?

For example anybody raising the 'entropy' argument against evolution has already heard the correct answer and chosen not to listen. Will repeating it again do anything?

Same is true for: 'no transition fossils', 'carbon dating is broken', 'flood geology' etc etc etc.

Re:Debate?

[femtobyte]

I don't take Genesis 1 overly literally, either. However, if you do push for a certain rigid type of "literal" interpretation, then that's "where the Bible says the Earth is the center of the galaxy," in answer to your question. Note, however, that the definition of "literal" producing this reading was never "decided at some point" by the Church. Neither the "early fathers" (who often promoted allegorical/spiritual readings), nor later Roman Catholic dogma, nor Protestant Reformation-era understandings of "literalism," call for such biblical readings. The "extreme literalism" movement is largely a 19th Century American thing, isolated from larger theological traditions of all branches of Christianity, and developed to consolidate a political power base.

Re:Debate?

[brantondaveperson]

Why do you care so much what other people teach their kids?

Because ignorance hurts us all.

Re:Debate?

[brantondaveperson]

I personally never took the Genesis 1 as being to the letter literal.

Good for you, but they sure did back in Galileo's time.

Re:Debate?

[brantondaveperson]

The same is true of the theory that the earth's landmasses were once coagulated into Pangea. The same is true of theories about how the earth was formed, about the nature of distant galaxies, about the origins of language. In fact, the same is true about nearly every theory of the past. Do you treat those with similar distain?

Re:Debate?

[PraiseBob]

It turned into modern wheat, the varieties we call Spelt, Common, Durum, etc.
Here is a book detailing some of its history: http://www.amazon.com/Evolutio...
Here is some genetic research: http://genome.cshlp.org/conten...

While this may not matter to a lot of people, the human driven evolution of this plant is the root of all civilization, and it would not be possible without evolution.

Wild emmer wheat, Triticum dicoccoides[Triticum turgidum (L) Thell. ssp. dicoccoides(Koern) Thell.] with genome AABB, was discovered in Northern Israel by Aaron Aaronsohn in 1906 (Aaronsohn 1910). It is the tetraploid, predominantly self-pollinated, wild progenitor from which modern tetraploid and hexaploid cultivated wheats were derived (Zohary 1970).

Re:Debate?

[Joce640k]

All I'm saying is that critical thinking, knowing the difference between "opinion" and "evidence-based facts", should be compulsory for everybody. By law. Two weeks per year.

Everything else will sort itself out. Republicans vs. Democrats, Prius vs. Gas Guzzler, whatever.

PS: Do you believe in the personal right to dump toxic crap in rivers, even if they're on your property? How about dumping trash? Should there be laws against that? Doesn't that infringe your "freedom"?

Do you think they should have taken the lead out of gasoline? What are your feelings on catalytic converters? Are they "telling you what sort of car to drive"?

Re:Debate?

[geekoid]

In my experience, it's the quite bystander who you are really talking to. The loud ones should just be a platform yuo use to reach the silent majority.

But it's a hard question becasue it will allow some people to try and claim debates = controversy. even when their side was destroyed...again.

Re:Debate?

[tibit]

I insist on partaking in the controversy of FSM. I think I'll have some noodle appendages for dinner.

Re:Debate?

[geekoid]

Becasue it destroys science, destroys education, and removes critical thinking from the thought process.

And those kids you think your kids have an advantage over? the may become people who set policy.

Creationist thinking and logic is an attack on science and critical thinking. And that leads to a stupid backward populace.

" A) it's not my place to tell them how to raise their offspring"
why not? one of the issues..everywhere is that we are under the impression that no one should teach anyone else how to raise kids.

"B) that is a daunting task I doubt anyone is capable of taking on."
anyone? n. A group of people? yes.

If you are just too lazy to think about it or act on it then just say so.

Re:Debate?

[tibit]

That's why creationists who know what they are doing will make up most of the facts as they go along. Been there, heard it done first hand. Good luck having any argument with that.

Re:Debate?

[geekoid]

"don't think they have a right to dictate what kind of cars others can drive, or what weapons they can own, or what they can do with their own property."
that applies to every group./
Where the line is, is the discussion.

Find 1 republican that think a 5 year old should be allowed to drive a tractor trailer. ON that says it's ok to own nukes, or that allows you to put radioactive material on your front lawn.

Like I said, the debate is where society wants to put the line.

I don't know any progressive that dictate what kind of car people should own. Many believe some type of cars should ahve a different class of license.
Most of my progressive friends own hand guns, but want people to have to go through a background check.
My progressive friends think you can do what ever you want on you property as long as you keep all the impact on your property.

stop letting pundits tell you there are only two sides.

Calm down and think.

Re:Debate?

[geekoid]

"Mainly, because I wouldn't want someone else dictating what I can teach my kids."

Just becasue you wouldn't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't be so.

On whet premise do you think parents are the best teacher for there kids?

Re:Debate?

[geekoid]

Yo do when your opponent has been shot down and completely proven wrong over, and over, and over again. When the opponent is rude and uses logical fallacy and "gish gallop" techniques.

Free exchange of ideas needs evidence to back them.

Atheist have been edited so much, there opponents allowed to ask a dozen questions in as many seconds and then get cut off when they start to answer. So, yes we are cautious. Frankly, I think any science debate like this should have the entire unedited recording released. Scientist and Atheist should make that part of the agreement.
Funny when one wants the entire recording released, the people putting on the show usually balk, refuse, or agree but never deliver.

Of course evolution has nothing to do with atheism, so stop muddying the waters.

Re:Debate?

[Zalbik]

I don't think anyone is saying to ignore them. Just don't engage them.

Deal with the claptrap with education, not rhetoric...which is all this debate is going to be.

Bill Nye would serve the world much better by producing more educational science videos aimed at kids, making them realize that
(a) science is neat!
(b) science works
(c) science actually describes the way the world works.

This would have a much better success rate at moving people away from Ham's style of dogma than this farcical "debate" will....

Re:Debate?

[Zalbik]

Nobody is saying don't try. We are saying don't waste resources on something that will have a very high failure rate.

Bill Nye would serve society much better by producing more educational videos for kids than this garbage.

I'm disappointed.

Re:Debate?

[Velex]

See what I did there?

Yes. You displayed a wonderfully forward-thinking application of the "one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself" version of the golden rule.

The dilemma is that religious fundamentalism and its various manifestations of Puritanism and Biblical literalism tend to work against that verson of the golden rule so we're left with "he who has the gold makes the rules" and "all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent" taking into consideration that money is speech. (The only problem I have with Citizens United is that I believe it's a misapplication of corporate personhood because a corporation is a legal construct and not natural. Therefore, a corporation has none of the examples of natural human rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights as natural rights, only privileges.)

Personally, I would be much more tolerant of religious fundamentalism and Puritanism if the limits of its intrusions into my personal life were a few crappy ice cream joints my money is no good at because I'm trans and some well-meaning witnessers that might walk by and strike up a conversation when I'm mowing the lawn. The US Constitution lays down a powerful framework for attempting to make that so. As is lamented in every NSA/DEA/FBI/Snowden thread, it seems that document doesn't mean as much as it did in that nostalgic yesteryear that never quite existed.

There's always a flux between authoritarianism and libertarianism (small L). The question I suppose is one of how to impede authoritarianism without violating the human rights of individual authoritarians. The problem is that authoritarianism by definition implies top-down enforced conformity, and the only solutions I can think of given the larger sociological picture are different top-down enforced conformities.

Re:Debate?

[Zalbik]

There isn't evidence for the existence of anything that predated your birth, either.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

Re:Debate?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Nobody is saying don't try. We are saying don't waste resources on something that will have a very high failure rate.

Since everything you try will have a very high failure rate you are saying don't try.

Re:Debate?

[quantaman]

But are they looking? A Holocaust denier typically came to that position in spite of the evidence they heard, they've know they're taking the unorthodox position.

But a Creationist was raised as a Creationist surrounded by other creationists and may not have been exposed to evolution, from the their perspective evolution is the weird outlier lacking legitimacy among the people they respect.

I doubt anyone is suddenly going to learn about Creationism or be tricked into thinking Creationism is respectable by this debate, but some Creationists may hear counterarguments they never knew existed.

Re:Debate?

[Roachie]

that would be cool

Re:Debate?

[dbIII]

Ham's nonsense was debunked long ago (in many cases long before Ham was even born

And two out of the three that threw the "flood" theory of fossils out in England all those years ago were Clergymen with a geological hobby. This isn't religion versus science. It's ignorance versus science.

Re:Debate?

[dbIII]

But the only way to keep dumb people out of power is to educate the voters

The other way is to cut off the money supply of the PR agencies etc that are doing the brainwashing. People are not as dumb as they appear. A LOT of money is being spent selling them on dumb ideas, so they are repeating ideas that look valid to them.

Re:Debate?

[CanHasDIY]

"Mainly, because I wouldn't want someone else dictating what I can teach my kids."

Just becasue you wouldn't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't be so.

So just because you don't like the fact they teach Creationism in some schools, doesn't mean they shouldn't, right?

On whet premise do you think parents are the best teacher for there kids?

You answered it yourself, albeit using the incorrect form of "their."

On what premise do you think parents are not the best teachers for their children?

Re:Debate?

[CanHasDIY]

Part of it is a "tyranny of the majority" problem, part of it is the result of rampant corruption allowed by complacent voters.

The question I suppose is one of how to impede authoritarianism without violating the human rights of individual authoritarians.

Eternal vigilance. Liberty is a pain in the ass, but it's worth the effort.

Re:Debate?

[CanHasDIY]

I don't give a damn what parents teach their kids (well, within limits, I wouldn't want parents teaching their kids eating their fellow humans is fine). The issue isn't about that, it is about Creationists attempting to have their long debunked nonsense taught as science in classrooms.

I don't argue with that - religious studies should stay in the religious studies/humanities classroom, where they belong.

My issue is with people who say things to the effect of, "Well, you have no clue how to raise your own children, because your ideology differs from mine, so I should be allowed to force my ideology (which is obviously superior because it's what I believe) down your kids' throats."

Re:Debate?

[RobertLTux]

the funny bit is some folks will have "recorded" the live broadcast so if they butcher what is on the DVD then all of y'all get to have a good Olde Fashioned Crucifixion over the bits that got left out.

Of course we get to do an Olde Fashioned Stoning if y'all try that trick.

Re:Debate?

[DedTV]

It worked. At least in some small way.

Quite a few religious people were riled up because when an audience member asked "What would make you change your mind" Ham's answer was "Nothing" instead of "God". Most Religious people are quite aware of the difference between someone who has faith in God and someone who uses God to create faith in themselves for their own personal gain and that answer made it clear to those who weren't already familiar with him which category he falls into.

Re:Debate?

[DedTV]

How many Creatonists do you suppose even pay attention to such debates. Believe me, I spent a fifteen years debating Creationists on talk.origins, and I saw maybe one Creationist in all that time start to question their world view. The rest were proof against any evidence, and even after a claim was debunked, the very same person would, a few weeks or months later, trot it out again.

Debating Creationists does no good, and in some ways probably does harm.

If you got one creationist to change their world view, it's likely you also prevented many who might have adopted their world view from doing so. That sounds good to me.
Debates aren't likely going to change a zealot's mind. But they might keep a few people from becoming zealots themselves if you have demonstrable facts on your side.

Re:Debate?

[beelsebob]

Two guys argue about the value of x. One says x=2. The other says x=3. The first guy says "I have yet to see an x=3er willing to stand up and offer their points in a setting where x=2."

And yet the x=3ers want to teach about x=3ism in x=2 class.

Re:Debate?

[shutdown -p now]

There's plenty of such evidence. You seem to be confusing evidence with direct observation.

Re:Debate?

[cascadingstylesheet]

It will be a complete waste of time. Mr. Ham isn't there to change his opinion of anything.

As opposed to Mr. Nye, who ... is there to change his opinion of anything?

Promises to be as entertaing and edifying

[korbulon]

as a WWE Free For All.

Re:Promises to be as entertaing and edifying

[bobbied]

Only I don't think anybody in the ring will be faking it..

huh?

[MickyTheIdiot]

I would rather watch paint dry. That would be more informative, too.

You can already make an outline for the transcript.

Nye:
Ham: You're wrong!
Nye:
Ham:

Sorry.. there isn't going to be anything accomplished. You can't have a debate when there is no acknowledgment about facts.

Re:huh?

[MickyTheIdiot]

damn it! bracket kill

Nye: (scientific facts)
Ham: You're wrong (bible verse without context)
Nye: (scientific facts)
Ham: (something about the devil)

Re:huh?

[jockm]

Oh I don't know, it kind of worked the first way...

Re:huh?

[SuricouRaven]

I'm guessing there will be a Gish Gallop somewhere: Ham will throw a ton of arguments at once, each taking only a few sentences to make and many minutes to counter. It's a sneaky debate tactic, but effective.

Re:huh?

[Joce640k]

Yep.

What's the point of a 'debate' where one side is held to rigorous standards of proof (including the proving of negatives!) and the other side is allowed to just make up whatever they want to support their argument?

Re:huh?

[Jason Levine]

Even if Ham leaves out the Bible verses/devil talk and goes straight "Intelligent Design" (aka Creationism Where God Is Hinted At Instead Of Explicitly Mentioned), Ham can toss "talking points" out faster than Bill can refute because it takes less time to say "X is a reason Evolution is false" than it takes to give the proof why that isn't the case.

Ham: {Creationist talking points #1-10}
Nye: {Refutes 1, 2, 3.... runs out of time}
Ham: {Creationist talking points #11-20}
Nye: {Refutes 11, 12, 13, 14.... runs out of time.}

End of the debate. Ham declares himself the winner because Nye "couldn't" counter points #4-10 or #15-20 so "obviously" that means Evolution is wrong.

Re:huh?

[JasoninKS]

Sadly, I see this same thing happen when I judge novice high school debate. "Well they didn't counter arguments X, Y, or Z, just A through W, so therefore I should be declared the winner."

Re:huh?

[tompaulco]

They both have vigorous standards of proof. One uses centurys old established scientific theory and the other uses centuries old established Biblical doctrine. At the end, both sides come out the winner from their perspective, and the loser from the other perspective, which, thankfully, doesn't count according to them.

Re:Huh?

[brantondaveperson]

There were no scientists before the invention of science. Those Greeks were pretty interesting and pretty clever guys, but scientists they were not. Francis Bacon invented science, and he did it in the 1600's.

Re:Huh?

[HornWumpus]

JasoninKS claimed that the earth was the center of the Galaxy. Which is just wrong in every sense.

There is a relativistic argument that any point can be the center of the universe. But 'center of the galaxy' is just laughable.

Also IIRC galaxies weren't discovered until many years after Galileo.

Re:Huh?

[HornWumpus]

Science is both a method and a body of knowledge. Bacon invented the formal method, after which the body of knowledge grew much faster.

Some of the body of knowledge from prior to the method passed testing, some did not. The good old stuff tended to come from ancient mathematicians and engineers philosophizing. The bad stuff from preachers philosophizing.

Re:huh?

[DedTV]

That's pretty much how it went. It really came down to one question though.

Someone from the audience asked "What would it take to change your mind?"
Nye answered "Evidence". Ham answered "Nothing".
After someone posted the video of it online my Pastor (I haven't been inside a church since I was 15, and he's long retired, but he's still a close family friend) posted on his Facebook page that if the guy was sincere in his Christian beliefs his answer could have been nothing other than "God". And since then there's been a lot of discussion of the Book of Job. They seem to have come away giving it to Nye.

bad idea

[onyxruby]

This is a bad idea because it gives an air of credibility where it doesn't belong. What's next, debating 9/11 truthers? I respect Bill Nye and his decision, however i feel he degrades himself doing this.

Re:bad idea

[Antipater]

It gives them a bit of credibility that Nye is doing this in the first place, yes. But creationism already has credibility among many in the American public. Ham has to keep that going through the debate. If he comes off as ranting or raving, then he will lose much of that credibility.

Many creationists (not all, of course) that I've met have been, in most other respects, smart and rational people. They were simply taught from a young age that their worldview was right, and that any evidence to the contrary was unsupported handwaving. To have a man like Nye come in and show them that evolution is actually backed up by science could actually have an effect. It will at least plant the seed of doubt in a few heads.

Call me naive, call me an optimist, whatever. But I don't think the small credibility boost that Ham is getting is too high a price for the possibility of changing a few minds.

Re:bad idea

[mark-t]

If he comes off as ranting or raving, then he will lose much of that credibility.

As if Ham somehow speaks for all the people who might believe in Creationism?

Re:bad idea

[Antipater]

As if Ham somehow speaks for all the people who might believe in Creationism?

Um, yes. For all of his congregation, anyway. That's why you have a publicized debate in the first place.

Re:bad idea

[mark-t]

No, actually, he doesn't. That was my point... and why having a public debate on a subject like this is meaningless.

Re:bad idea

[CanHasDIY]

No, actually, he doesn't. That was my point... and why having a public debate on a subject like this is meaningless.

So take it as "entertainment" and ready the popcorn.

That's my plan.

Re: bad idea

[CanHasDIY]

regardless of truth, what could you possibly gain by subscribing to the 911 conspiracies?

Not being a blind idiot who believes everything a known-to-be-corrupt government tells him?

I don't know much about "truthers," but I do know that some of the "facts" of that event, as the government has presented them, do not pass scientific or logical muster.

Considering that we have government agencies who truly believe their job is to lie to the American people, I'm hard pressed to say that "truthers" are as out-there as some people want me to think.

Re:bad idea

[mark-t]

What do you mean by "modern creationism"? The idea of taking the story of Genesis literally true and belief in a world that is only a few thousand years old is not a remotely modern one.

Re:UTC?

[i kan reed]

Coordinated Universal Time. aka Greenwich mean time. aka what time it is in England, the place calling the shots when time zones were invented.

To get eastern time from UTC, subtract 5.

Re:UTC?

[Joce640k]

Coordinated Universal Time. aka Greenwich mean time. aka what time it is in England, the place calling the shots when time zones were invented.

To get eastern time from UTC, subtract 5.

So to answer his question: It's 00:00, aka midnight.

Sad

[GameMaster]

I love Bill Nye's work, but personally I think he made a mistake in getting involved in this. He's not going to convince the die-hard creationists of anything. The only thing that can be accomplished here is to provide the nutter museum high-profile publicity (which is, almost certainly, the reason Ham was interested in doing this in the first place).

Creationism is, even still, a fringe group of nutters that seem to psychologically thrive off of single-minded obstinance and a belief of personal exceptionalism in their willingness to throw away actual logic and facts. The fact that their beliefs are so fringe is the reason why, almost anywhere else in society outside their individual congregations or this crazy freak show^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMuseum they have to try and water it down by calling it "Intelligent Design" in an attempt to get somewhat more rational people to go along with it.

Re:Sad

[darronb]

... and before bacteria and viruses were understood, it was more likely that demons had infested you or God was angry with you than whatever it was they hadn't thought of or figured out yet.

You don't see the problem with that kind of thought process?

Re:Sad

[jimbolauski]

What evidence is there to indicate that spontaneous generation occurred? There is none. However there is a lot of evidence that spontaneous generation did not occur (left handed amino acids). Just because spontaneous generation correlates with your beliefs does not make it any more valid?

Re:Sad

[nitehawk214]

Intelligent design and creationism are two very different things. ID revolves around there being no natural way to explain the origins of life.There is no natural way to create proteins, DNA, and RNA with life being present. The problem is that the amino acids that are required must be in a solution with 95% left handed amino acids to form. When amino acids are created both left and right are present there is currently no know way to naturally filter them. Further percentages of left handed amino acids higher then 60 have not been observed in nature. With our current knowledge it is more likely that an intelligent creator or a "seed" from a living organism on a different planet started life as opposed to spontaneous generation.

Except that everything you said is wrong. Nice end-run at the Gish Gallop.

Re:Sad

[SleazyRidr]

What evidence is there to indicate that intelligent creation occurred? There is none. However there is a lot of evidence that intelligent creation did not occur (decrease of entropy in a closed system has never been observed). Just because intelligent creation correlates with your beliefs does not make it any more valid. (That wasn't a question.)

Re:Sad

[JackieBrown]

Except that everything you said is wrong. Nice end-run at the Gish Gallop.

I don't think you understand what Gish Gallop means (although it does seem to be the word of the day on slashdot.) He threw out one point.

Re:Sad

[SecurityTheatre]

This is completely fallacious.

First, it assumes one single explanation, when a myriad of them exist. The relative unlikeliness of one answer does not result in the conclusive proof for another, especially when you didn't even discuss why you think it was a binary decision.

Second, several sources have been found with 75%-90% left-handed ratio, indicating that there ARE natural causes for specific handedness of naturally occurring amino acids. The most probable source of this is polarized light, which can be created by reflections off water, as well as space phenomena such as pulsars and has been demonstrated to be configured this way in asteroid material.

Re:Sad

[jimbolauski]

The polarized light method only creates a 60%, 40% disparity, then crystallization can occur to amplify the left handed concentration, the crystallization of only left handed amino acids only occurs in 2 of the 20 amino acids needed for life the other 18 will crystallize with both left and right amino acids. You can't have the optimal conditions for the two amino acids to crystallize and not have those conditions crystallize the other 18.

Re:Sad

[jimbolauski]

How exactly does a decrease of entropy in a closed system never being observed have any correlation to intelligent creation? You are making the false assumption that there is always increasing entropy in closed systems.

Re:Sad

[SleazyRidr]

Well, I do kinda "believe" the laws of thermodynamics.... Do you have any other evidence to present that would implicate the existence of a divine being. I'm just going by Ken Ham's logic that since I haven't seen it personally it doesn't exist.

Re:Sad

[jimbolauski]

You may believe in the laws of thermodynamics, but it doesn't seem like you understand them. There is no evidence that there is a divine creator nor is there any that there is not. There is however evidence that spontaneous generation did not occur on earth, if spontaneous generation did not occur then divine creation or seeding from another planet are the only two explanations for the origins of life.

Re:Sad

[SleazyRidr]

OK then, where is your evidence that spontaneous generation did not occur on Earth? Also, there's the old adage that if you think you understand thermodynamics, you really have no idea.

Richard Dawkins has an opinion on this

[protest_boy]

Why I won't debate creationists:
http://old.richarddawkins.net/...

I couldn't agree more.

Re:Richard Dawkins has an opinion on this

[radarskiy]

Dawkins shouldn't debate because he comes across as a smug asshole and an opponent can use that to their advantage.

Gefundenes Fressen for European newspapers

[vikingpower]

One more reason for them to make jokes about Americans. KY, for cryin' out loud ! Seriously: this confirms so many biases that I can't even begin to count.

Re:Gefundenes Fressen for European newspapers

[TheGratefulNet]

One more reason for them to make jokes about Americans. KY, for cryin' out loud !

hmm, and I thought things were actually, uhm, loosening up in KY.

(sorry...)

Re:Who Cares???

[Joce640k]

...except that religion isn't just a harmless social thing that people do on Sundays.

They're in government, deciding how to run the country (eg. Bush deciding to go to war).
They're trying to remove evolution from the education system.
They get tax breaks.
etc.

Time for some yummy...

[synaptik]

Ham on Nye.

Can a creationist explain me?

[Framboise]

Why if the universe is ~6000 yr old virtually all the astronomical images returned since a century or so show objects at distances requiring more than 6000 yr for light to reach us?

Why would the Creator be so deceptive to create 6000 yr ago in the most exquisite details images of the universe looking precisely 13.8 billions yr old, and this false impression would have been reserved just for us in the recent decades?

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[mark-t]

The answer to that question, from a creationist statndpoint, is the same reason that God allegedly created the first human beings as fully formed adults. Merely minutes old in actuality, but by all outward appearances fully matured, as if they had really grown up from childhood. To a hypothetical visitor from the future who was accustomed only to what they understood as the normal passage of time, even mere weeks after creation, it would invariably appear that things had existed for much longer than they actually had... but that's only because that's all that person knows, because they weren't actually around at the beginning to see it all unfold... not out of any real sense on God's part to deceive anyone, as it were.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[cold fjord]

Why if the universe is ~6000 yr old ... Why would the Creator be so deceptive to create 6000 yr ago ....

You're mistaken. The Bible doesn't teach that the universe is 6,000 year old.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Voyager529]

A few answers here, starting with the foundational ones...

First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe. We have our fundies like everybody else, but the fact of the matter is that even the more rational creationists will disagree about creationism. From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine. Genesis 1:1 is primary doctrine: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". This is agreed upon by basically everyone in the creationist camp - that everything in the known universe was created by God.

Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers. This is an important distinction to make, because, if I may get on my soapbox for a quick moment, Slashdot seems to correlate "creationist" with "6000 years, fossils-meant-to-test-us, God gives 'Murica the right to bear arms" fundies, as opposed to "an individual who believes that there is a Supreme Deity in charge of causing the universe to exist". Simply because Biblical creationists don't have every single answer regarding God's implementation as to how He constructed the universe, and because we don't all 100% agree on the possible ways that God could have done it...doesn't mean that everyone who believes Genesis 1:1 is a completely irrational fundie...okay I'll get back off my soap box and actually get on with answering the question...

Biblical creationism based on Genesis 1 leaves a few avenues of possibility. First, the word "day" is frequently pointed to as being suspect in the first, second, and third "days" of the creation account...because the earth didn't exist until the fourth day. The argument that the term 'day' is not a literal 24 hour period is substantiated by the fact that the original Hebrew language used for the first day doesn't use the term "first day", but "day one", indicating that it was not compared to the other days in those terms. It's entirely possible that the first three days were entirely different units of time. Additional questions raised in this regard is the fact that the Bible repeatedly refers to God as an Entity that is not bound by time, and thus time itself being a creation...yet 'time' is not listed as one of the things that God created, nor gravity, magnetism, or the forces of Newtonian physics, or quantum physics. Since we understand that all of these laws manipulate time given sufficient amounts of these forces, there's plenty of reasons to believe that the notion of a 'day' was not a 24 hour period. Those on the 6-literal-day side of the debate point to the fact that the word 'day', even in the Hebrew, is used solely for the 24-hour time span, and never for an 'age' or any other indiscriminate span of time, so the authors of the Bible could have used the word 'age' if so directed by God, but did not. Whether human error, 'poetic license', or because God builds universes in a week...is amongst the points of secondary doctrine about which Ken Ham and Kent Hovind have gone back and forth about repeatedly.

With regards to the question about the ~6,000 light-year range of light we'd expect to see, the best answers I can personally give is two fold:
1. If we're assuming that 24 hour days are correct, then one could argue that it's no more difficult for God to make photons-in-transit from stars than it would be for Him to create the stars themselves. For bonus points, consider that 'light' was the very first thing created. To answer the question of "why would He do that", all I can say is "I'm trying to figure out the whole lice thing myself..."
2. If we're assuming 6 'ages' of significant time, then one could argue that there would be plenty of time between the formation of the stars and the creation of mankind, so the light-in-transit could easily have a few million year head start to work with.

The "why" is still my personal speculation

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[bobbied]

Thus Ham's stock argument in the form of a question.. "Where you there?"

Seems to be a valid question. Nye can only say "no" which is not an ideal answer.

Long pointless debate now follows....

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Hatta]

First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe.

If you tried believing only in what there is evidence to support there would be a lot less confusion.

From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine.

See, you've got this entirely backwards here. If creation is fact, you should be able to infer the Christian doctrine from observations made in the real world. Forget about what's in the book, and just look at the world. Do your observations lead you to the same conclusion the book does?

Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers.

That's because they're all making it up. If you ask a room of biologists about the actual method by which speciation occured, you'll get one answer. Evolution by natural selection. That's because that's where the evidence actually leads.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[mark-t]

Of course, neither was Ham..

I fully agree that this is a pointless debate.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[femtobyte]

You're mistaken if you think all people reading the Bible agree on what it teaches. Especially, those unconvinced by any amount of rational scholarship on the age of the universe and the descent of humankind are likewise unconvinced by any amount of rational scholarship on Biblical exegesis. When addressing people frozen in to a shallow, reactionary 19th century worldview of both science and theology, one is likely to encounter rigid beliefs on what "the Bible teaches" every bit as shoddily constructed as their scientific views. So, perhaps the Bible doesn't teach you the world is 6,000 years old, but it does teach this to people who believe the world is 6,000 years old.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[JackieBrown]

I really don't know any Creationist that thinks the universe is 6000 years old. If it helps you keep your view of us low, you can rationalize it as we can't do the math required to get to that number.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[bobbied]

Yea, but you do realize that Ham is going to claim he *knows* somebody who was. Which, in his world view, is a better answer than Nye can hope to make. But we've crested the hill and are already speeding down the hill head long into pointlessness...

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[mark-t]

If Ham claims that, then that's a foul... since such a claim being presented as fact presupposes that his view of creation is already true. And even if it were true, it's as irrellevant to the matter at hand as the color of socks he will be wearing at the debate.

The only way that anyone will really prove anything about this to anyone else is if we invent time travel and actually watch it happen ourselves.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[bobbied]

The only way that anyone will really prove anything about this to anyone else is if we invent time travel and actually watch it happen ourselves.

I can agree with *that* statement. But alas, I'm fairly confident that will not happen. Time seems to be explicitly a ONE WAY trip. We might change the rate at which time passes, but it appears we cannot change directions.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Voyager529]

First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe.

If you tried believing only in what there is evidence to support there would be a lot less confusion.

How does one conclusively prove "there was a Creator", any more than one can conclusively prove "All matter existed as pure energy before the energy existed as energy"? Again, internally, creationists debate implementation and methodology, but saying that you can deduce that there was a Creator based upon following what previous iterations until you get to Creation itself...makes very little sense any more than you can take Mass Effect lore and follow its origins all the way back to a hard drive at Bioware. Yes, I am saying that there's faith involved, and I am saying that creationism doesn't, at the face value of the Genesis account, explain the existence of gravity and subatomic forces and antimatter and mathematics. However, I personally have yet to see a solid explanation to the problem of how the 'ingredients' of the Big Bang. Space is expanding, and is expanding from a central point. I can roll with this, but the only examples of those things that I've seen have been things like balloons, where the balloon can expand because it is pushing the air on the outside out of the way. Is there something outside the universe that is being pushed out of the way (what is it?) or not (so then, space is continuing to get 'created'?). From where did all the original energy come from? I've heard of the oscillating universe theory, in which case the heat death of the universe will cause the universe to once again contract into a singularity, but to me that sounds like "turtles all the way down". The 'spontaneous' transition from energy to matter-and-energy - what was its cause? Were there Newtonian/Einsteinian/Quantum physical laws that caused it? Was there 'time' when that happened? These are just a handful of questions that I've yet to find solid answers for in a model of the universe that precludes a Creator, some of which start to stretch the definition of being scientific themselves because they, by definition, are very difficult to observe, measure, or repeat.

From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine.

See, you've got this entirely backwards here. If creation is fact, you should be able to infer the Christian doctrine from observations made in the real world. Forget about what's in the book, and just look at the world. Do your observations lead you to the same conclusion the book does?

Pursuant to the list of assorted questions above, the answer is 'no, because we haven't gotten that far scientifically yet'. Again, it's like saying that if you traced the source code of Mass Effect back far enough, you could come up with the concepts to the scripts, hand-drawn artboards, and casting meetings for the audio recordings. My observations bring me to the point of saying, "yes, God used systems. God works in systems. There are observable correlations between how things work, mathematically quantifiable laws that define how the physical universe interacts with itself, and an order that regulates it all." I've got no problem discussing or debating the implementation; I read one particularly interesting piece that interpreted the first three days of Creation as God performing creation at a subatomic level, which was particularly fascinating. However, every science textbook, journal article, and non-elitist blog post I've read on the topic all lead me back to those questions above (and others) still leave those questions lingering, and thus, the concept of a Creator has not yet been nullified, at least for me.

Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers.

That's because they're all making it up.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[SeattleGameboy]

That is an awful lot of words just to say Bible stories are allegories...

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Your.Master]

Ken Ham is a YEC, as in a 6000-year-old creationist. Thus, that is the relevant interpretation of creationist in this context.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[waperboy]

I pose that christianity throughout time has been all about the personal theist god that interacts with the world. This view is plain to dismiss in the wake of scientific discovery - as well as the origin of man.

I think what you explain (pertaining to "an individual who believes that there is a Supreme Deity in charge of causing the universe to exist") is only a fallback position in the face of modern knowledge, where it is increasingly futile to persist with the traditional religious claims.

Evolution -> bye bye Adam & Eve -> bye bye bible -> bye bye christianity. It is known that man was not created, and from there everything else crumbles.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Sabriel]

However, I personally have yet to see a solid explanation to the problem of how the 'ingredients' of the Big Bang. Space is expanding, and is expanding from a central point. I can roll with this, but the only examples of those things that I've seen have been things like balloons, where the balloon can expand because it is pushing the air on the outside out of the way. [if there's no air on the outside, the balloon expands even faster] Is there something outside the universe that is being pushed out of the way (what is it?) [we're still figuring that out - there are some interesting 'marks' on the universe that may (or not) be evidence of a collision] or not (so then, space is continuing to get 'created'?). [more that space is continuing to get 'stretched' - if it helps, imagine 'space' as the surface of the balloon, not the air inside] From where did all the original energy come from? [possibly a self-reinforcing fluctuation, literally a spontaneous order arising out of chaos, though an omnipotent being could make it happen too] I've heard of the oscillating universe theory, in which case the heat death of the universe will cause the universe to once again contract into a singularity, but to me that sounds like "turtles all the way down". [currently looks like there's not enough gravity for a big crunch, but there's other maybes starting around 10^10^56 years from now] The 'spontaneous' transition from energy to matter-and-energy - what was its cause? [temperature is inversely proportional to volume, so as the universe expanded, the former dropped sufficiently for energy to form stable states - this happened more than once] Were there Newtonian/Einsteinian/Quantum physical laws that caused it? [yes] Was there 'time' when that happened? [yes] These are just a handful of questions that I've yet to find solid answers for in a model of the universe that precludes a Creator, some of which start to stretch the definition of being scientific themselves because they, by definition, are very difficult to observe, measure, or repeat.

Part of the problem is that... hmm... well, it's that we're just barely smart enough to sometimes realise just how stupid we are. So we devote our incredibly tiny lifespans to building on the work of those who came before, figuring out (maybe) how this universe of ours began and formed - and then somebody else comes along and complains when an elderly scientist can't explain, let alone "prove", their life's work in the time it takes to leisurely consume a cup of coffee and a doughnut.

Want to know something? It's incredibly frustrating for the scientist too.

But if the scientist doesn't live long enough to condense the work, some other scientist does, so that others can further the work, and then that gets condensed, and eventually some artist can grasp enough to make a story out of it, one that we can read over that beverage and pastry, and give us merer mortals a glimpse.

I rather like this one, notwithstanding the fictional liberties and an ignorant comment afterward.

I suppose one of my problems with many Creationists isn't the idea of God as an omnipotent being, it's that their idea of God isn't omnipotent enough . They want God to fit in a box, and their blueprints don't include nearly enough infinities.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Your.Master]

May I introduce you to Ken Ham, the subject of this article, who literally argues for the ~6000 year old position.

This isn't really atheism vs. religion here, this is a certain brand of fundamentalist Christianity vs. anything other than that brand of fundamentalist Christianity.

A lot of Christians on this thread are pointing out that this brand of fundamentalist Christianity is actually fairly rare in reality, and I (as an atheist) agree, but the point being debated is exactly this brand of fundamentalist Christianity*.

You do yourself an extreme disservice when you act all martyr-y like this, when the subject is people who you actually disagree with. What keeps a "view of [you] low" is immediately identifying with this guy and acted wounded, rather than joining with the people arguing against this guy, who you don't actually disagree with (at least in this context).

*So many people are getting extremely defensive at these phrases, so I'm trying to spell this out explicitly. Sometimes, when I say "fundamentalist Christianity", somebody else instantly pops up to say that not all Christians are fundamentalist. Well, yeah, but I'm not talking about them, hence the adjective "fundamentalist". If it's not about you, then it's not about you, and there's no need to identify yourself with the people that it is about.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[shutdown -p now]

Well, you can easily educate yourself by googling "young earth creationism".

For that matter, according to the last Gallup poll on the subject, 46% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". Granted, it doesn't ask about the universe, only about humans; but I doubt that the figure would be considerably different if they reworded that question. Nor is 10k years meaningfully different from 6k years in the context of this discussion.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

With regards to the question about the ~6,000 light-year range of light we'd expect to see, the best answers I can personally give is two fold:
1. If we're assuming that 24 hour days are correct, then one could argue that it's no more difficult for God to make photons-in-transit from stars than it would be for Him to create the stars themselves.

I hope you realize that this is the main reason that creationism is not regarded as science. You start from a premise: the earth is only 6000 years old. And if any observation contradicts this premise you resort to the most fantastic and impossible explanations in order to 'salvage' your point of view.
A scientist cannot do that he/she has to find an explanation that matches ALL observations. And assuming somehow whole stars and planets appeared out of nowhere but in a state that suggest actually they were there for billions of years etc. is actually ignoring the observation.
It's not explainging the observation but dismissing it.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Voyager529]

I pose that christianity throughout time has been all about the personal theist god that interacts with the world.

One can, with relative certainty, assume that God believes in Himself :-P
However, I'm of the persuasion that God can, and does, still interact with the physical world. However, that doesn't mean that God didn't set up plenty of shell scripts to run the whole thing as opposed to Him needing to recreate the sun every morning...

This view is plain to dismiss in the wake of scientific discovery - as well as the origin of man.

Perhaps.

I think what you explain (pertaining to "an individual who believes that there is a Supreme Deity in charge of causing the universe to exist") is only a fallback position in the face of modern knowledge, where it is increasingly futile to persist with the traditional religious claims.

We agree on this one, but for presumably different reasons. See, before we had electron microscopes and the Aracebo radio telescope to better understand the cosmos, religion was essentially the only thing we had to describe a whole lot of things. Yes, scientific discoveries do enlighten how things came into existence, but it doesn't require the believe in a Creator to go away. "The Matrix" was a good movie. They had their signature "freeze time and move the camera" shot that was a thing for a while, but was relatively new when the movie came out (15 years ago...I'm legit getting old...). On the DVD release, they showed exactly how they did it - green screen, 40-or-so heavily-timed cameras, and pristine lighting placement. Just because those watching the bonus features of the DVD know how it was done, doesn't mean that the scene is any less impressive, or that we now no longer need the movie producers because we can do it ourselves (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3evWKYX0n00).

Evolution -> bye bye Adam & Eve -> bye bye bible -> bye bye christianity. It is known that man was not created, and from there everything else crumbles.

Abiogenesis would mean that. There's no Biblical issue with microevolution, or even some limited macroevolution. However, I'll fully admit that the concept of a Creator does find itself with a solid parallel to "The Conspiracy Dilemma" - if a conspiracy theorist conclusively proves the conspiracy, he's right. If they are disproven, it just means that the conspiracy goes deeper, as is the nature of held beliefs. Similarly, a Creationist world view takes scientific discoveries as methods of implementation, and how 'the Creator did it', not as evidence as the absence of a creator.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Voyager529]

I hope you realize that this is the main reason that creationism is not regarded as science.

If you read the initial post, I explicitly state that Creationists don't agree on a 6,000 year old earth. Whether it's considered scientific or not isn't in question here.

You start from a premise: the earth is only 6000 years old.

I start from assuming a particular premise, not necessarily that I, personally, agree with said premise.

And if any observation contradicts this premise you resort to the most fantastic and impossible explanations in order to 'salvage' your point of view.

I don't think it's necessarily any impossible that "God created light in transit", any more than it's impossible that God created the stars themselves. I'm simply avoiding limiting God to a specific method that aligns to a particular conclusion. The Biblical account of Adam's creation indicates that he was formed a fully grown man, and was of that physical maturity when he was only two days old. The conclusion that God "must" have created Adam as a newborn would have its own messy implications regarding how he managed to survive without a mother to feed him.

Additionally, there are similar questions involved with things like radioactive dating. Even without creationism in play, when I was in earth science solving word problems like "a 100g sample contains 25g of Uranium-235 and 75g of Lead-207. How old is the sample?" Well, the textbook answer is 'approximiately 1.4 billion years', since it's of the assumption that the sample started as 100g of uranium. If that sample, by sheer happenstance, started out as a 50/50 mix, then the sample is 700 million years younger and the math is only wrong because it's founded on a false assumption. Now I'm not disputing the validity of radioactive dating, but I am saying that asking the question of "a candle 15 centimeters long burns at one centimeter per hour; how long has it been burning" cannot be answered, regardless of how old the earth truly is.

A scientist cannot do that he/she has to find an explanation that matches ALL observations. And assuming somehow whole stars and planets appeared out of nowhere but in a state that suggest actually they were there for billions of years etc. is actually ignoring the observation.
It's not explainging the observation but dismissing it.

It's saying "we don't know". I bought a custom pair of Technics 1200s last year. I have a purchase receipt telling me that they're a year old. They have been retrofitted with cables that are dated from two years ago. They have Dicer controllers installed, whose manufacture initially started in 2010 (but didn't 'catch on' in the DJ scene until a year or two later). The gentleman I purchased them from said that he acquired them a year before selling them to me. Based on that information, one could technically assume that the turntables were likely manufactured in 2011 or 2010. That can't possibly be true, because Technics stopped *making* T12's in 2010! Odds are pretty good that the decks I have were originally manufactured in the mid 1990's or late 1980's; one day I'll be un-lazy enough to try to figure it out based upon the serial number or some of the other minor characteristics that would enable me to better date them. It's entirely possible the the two turntables I have are actually several years apart in age. I don't know. However, a 'scientific observation' of their initial appearance would cause a particular conclusion to be drawn that is both scientific and wrong.
We have only seen things start at the beginning. Human and animal births are an obvious example, but one can very easily point to the various nebulae where we've observed stars and planets in their very early stages of formation. I dare not suggest that, as far as we are concerned, life - organic, stellar, or otherwise - has observable stages through which it passes. However, Betelgeuse didn't 'start' its li

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

That can't possibly be true, because Technics stopped *making* T12's in 2010!

We (both as scientists and as sane human beings) have a similar feeling when you state that the earth and the whole of the universe is only 6000 years old. It just can't be right.

rationality

[Danathar]

You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.

Re:rationality

[rts008]

I'm glad to see +mods for your comment.

That's a very insightful, concise, and informative statement IMHO.

I hope you don't mind some of us 'borrowing' that gem for our own use. :-)

Re:rationality

[Joce640k]

I hope you don't mind some of us 'borrowing' that gem for our own use. :-)

Please find out who originally said it and add the proper attribution when you do... ;-)

Re:rationality

[geekoid]

Why? it's a butchered quote, and incorrect.
the paragraph:

"This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there are no insects in any of the stars."

Is essay is in here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files...

He talks about Charles II and basically claims pascal wager; which has also been shown to be false..more correct: a horrible argument.

" for a man to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there are no insects in any of the stars."
He seems to overlook the fact that I can actually find insect, document them experiment, and it can be confirmed by others.

I actual study religion for a long time; which is why I am atheist.

Re:rationality

[Pseudonym Authority]

As opposed to the crock of total shit that gets dragged out to support the idea of God, like the ontological argument or the tired, disproven "irreducible complexity" nonsense?

Re:rationality

[robot_love]

While this may be true in a glib sense, it can attest that I myself was definitely rationally argued out of my evangelical faith. We should absolutely engage the faithful in rational debate whenever possible.

Re:rationality

[Danathar]

There are variations on that quote (from several sources) and my posting is not verbatim from anybody.

It's a general statement.

Ham is going to drown Nye in FUD

[csnydermvpsoft]

This isn't going to be pretty. Just as the oil industry uses FUD to create false "uncertainties" about climate science, Ken Ham misrepresents evolutionary science to make it appear that there is a debate. There is no way for a logical person like Nye (who is a mechanical engineer by training, BTW) to effectively counteract Ham's bullshit.

The very fact that this debate is happening is already a win for Ham (and not just because of the millions of dollars that AIG is raking in): The amount of media coverage that this "debate" has received creates the impression that there is a debate to be had - when the basic science is very well-understood and unambiguous. Ham's work is FUD at its finest.

Re:Ham is going to drown Nye in FUD

[Kagato]

Sadly I agree. Nye does a lot of guest spot on pseudo news shows. He's very good at writing and a master at presenting scripted material, but he's not a great off the cuff debater. Nye tends to get side tracks and has trouble packaging the argument into a limited time slot when he doesn't have the time to refine a script. Neil deGrasse Tyson is far better at this sort of thing but I he would never do a debate like this.

Re:Are you guys watching this?

[Antipater]

I can't hear them. I think I need Mr. Eastwood to translate for me.

Ice ice baby

[portwojc]

There is an ice storm warning for the area right now. I bet they'll be postponing the debate soon.

Re:Ice ice baby

[bobbied]

Damn Global Warming .. Ahhem... climate change meetings. Why is it *always* snowing or something when they meet?

Oh wait.. You mean they where discussing something else?

Ken Ham will "win" this

[Jason Levine]

Why do I think Ken Ham will "win" this debate? Well, not because I think Ken will prove conclusively that Evolution is wrong and Creationism is right. I don't believe that at all. Evolution has a ton of evidence supporting it and Ken would have to pull out an Everest-sized mountain of hard evidence (*not* coming from "the Bible says...") to even come close to proving Creationism.

The reason Ken will "win" is because when Creationists "debunking" Evolution, they don't require proof. They spew a talking point or three and then declare victory. Those supporting Evolution, however, are careful to lay out all of the facts and supporting evidence. This takes more time than spewing talking points. Ken will rattle off a dozen talking points and Bill will only have time to tackle one or two. Of course, given enough time, he could refute every talking point Ken Ham spews, but I'm sure Ken can toss out the talking points faster than Bill Nye can refute them merely because refuting with evidence takes more time than making a baseless accusation.

So unless Ken speaks in slow-motion and Bill Nye channels an auctioneer, Ken Ham will "win" the debate.

Re:Ken Ham will "win" this

[PPH]

Nye can win if he picks apart Ham's logic and erroneous 'scientific' methods.

Re:Ken Ham will "win" this

[Jason Levine]

Ham, meanwhile, will declare victory because Nye wasn't able to* counter every single one of Ham's points specifically.

* Where "wasn't able to" really means "didn't have time to in the debate format even though he had more than enough facts to tear the arguments to shreds."

Re:Ken Ham will "win" this

[PPH]

counter every single one of Ham's points specifically.

That assumes that Nye lets Ham define the terms of the debate. Nye's opening argument needs to be about using proper scientific technique. Absent that, Ham's points are meaningless.

Re:Nope.

[benjfowler]

Debating an idiot is like wrestling a pig. You get covered in shit and the pig enjoys it.

I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[swschrad]

an engineer should never get into a mud wrestling match with a pig. everybody is going to get dirty, but only the pig enjoys it.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tripleevenfall]

Ken Ham is well spoken and should provide a reasonable point-counterpoint.

I don't think that the idea that we should not wrestle with pigs is the attitude of a responsible scientist. Eventually, all conventional wisdom needs to be challenged. At one time, you'd have been laughed out of a room of distinguished scientists for rejecting geocentricity. An idea has nothing to fear from examination if it is sound.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[ackthpt]

It should be a great moment to have a large bucket of popcorn handy. :)

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Registered Coward v2]

Ken Ham is well spoken and should provide a reasonable point-counterpoint.

I don't think that the idea that we should not wrestle with pigs is the attitude of a responsible scientist. Eventually, all conventional wisdom needs to be challenged. At one time, you'd have been laughed out of a room of distinguished scientists for rejecting geocentricity. An idea has nothing to fear from examination if it is sound.

The problem with your point is you expect both sides to act like responsible scientists and approach the debate with an open mind. However, the creationists are not interested in being proved wrong as much as punching holes in the other side's arguments so they can say they "won" and gain legitimacy for their point of view. They are not interested in the scientific method, as far as they are concerned the Bible says it so it must be true. That is not a debate. Scientists test theories and see if they continue to explain what they observe, creationists have a belief and anything contrary to that is incorrect. Scientists, by nature, are open to new ideas and generally don't speak in absolutes, which put stem at a disadvantage to those who believe in absolutes. Even scientific language, such as theory, is used to argue that the creationists viewpoint is equally valid since sit is a theory as well; although the creationists generally leave out the crackpot in from of their theory.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[garyevesson]

Strange definition of "reasonable".

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you think that if the Creationists are able to poke holes in the other side's arguments then maybe the other side doesn't have a very sound argument. You seem to think the dishonesty resides solely on one side. If you really believe that then you are willfully blind as there are plenty of scientists that fail to adhere to the scientific method in order to legitimze their work. Creationism and science are not incompatible subjects. Creationism cannot prove itself because to believe in it requires faith. That being said you can look around the world and find plenty of evidence to suggest an intelligent creator. Much more evidence than say supports random chance. Science cannot disprove creationism because that would presume that man is correct about everything he knows (something that has repeatedly been proven false over time), that man knows everything (again only a complete and utter fool would think man knows or is capable of knowing everything), and that science has a definitive way to show an origin without God (something else that has been attempted many times and failed).

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[SleazyRidr]

It depends on what you mean by "poke holes". I watched a video last night about transitional fossils. Creationist often like to bring them up as an example of a "hole" in evolution. In reality there are hundreds of transitional fossils, but no matter how hard you look, there will always be some gaps. Short of finding every generation linking a modern human to the bacteria from which we evolved there is no way to convince a creationist. At no point do you need to assume that "man is correct about everything he knows" but you can weigh up two options and either choose the one with hundreds of fossils that seem to fit the theory, or the one with no proof which doesn't fit with what we already know.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[wonkey_monkey]

but no matter how hard you look, there will always be some gaps.

Not only that, but as soon as you find a fossil to close of the gaps, you end up with two more gaps on either side.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[martinux]

While I agree with the general concept that everything should be examined and not taken at face value I would stress that this is not equivalent to "my non-fact based theory deserves as much time and attention as your evidence-based theory."

Ken Ham cannot provide a reasonable point-counterpoint because all he can do is make assertions that sound like science but are in fact not. It doesn't matter how polite and well spoken he is.

As Issac Asimov stated:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

The only value that this 'debate' will have is it will further reinforce exactly how delusional creationism is.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[jellomizer]

Having prominent scientists going debate such things only gives credit to the group who pushes this stuff.
It isn't like he is going to change peoples mind here. As they can always go back to conspiracy reasoning, by calling him a lair, working with the atheists, or liberal agenda...

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[operagost]

Bill Nye has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell.

Ken Ham has a B.A.S. in Environmental Biology from QUT.

If anything, Ham has the superior credentials because this is related to his field of study. Of course, paper is just paper, so that's why we have these debates. I appreciate the play on his last name, but whoever rolls out the ad hominems just because he disagrees with creationism is doing himself a disservice.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[operagost]

However, the creationists are not interested in being proved wrong as much as punching holes in the other side's arguments so they can say they "won" and gain legitimacy for their point of view.

Keep telling yourself that so that you don't ever have to challenge anyone. You clearly are not familiar with Ken Ham, and think he is some inbred redneck or internet troll to be easily dismissed.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[richpoore]

Where it seems to turn into evidence against the theory is when we find multiple examples of a particular animal with gaps on both sides. I believe Darwin even said he expected that over the next hundred years we would find a continuum of fossils. What we find is several of a particular type and then several of another type with a considerable leap in between. For example, I would expect that we would have T-Rex fossils (which we do) and a continuum of fossils evolutionarily precluding and following T-Rex. If we had only found one T-Rex fossil then it would not seem to argue against evolution. The more T-Rex fossils we find without finding any evolutionary ancestors or descendants, however, begins to point to the fact that they may not have existed.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[deadweight]

This is like saying a football team can beat a fencing team. They are NOT THE SAME GAME! A Creationist starts from the premise God Did It! Anything that does not fall in line with this is something God planted for some reason. You can never disprove this. Science has no answer for God Made Oil to look old or anything else because it is a belief in a supernatural actor that is by definition able to do anything at all.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[oh_my_080980980]

And that's why creationism is not a theory. Creation is not a proven set of hypothesis, which is what a theory. Look it up sometime. You must be able to disprove a hypothesis. As such Creationism is not and thus is not a theory.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Registered Coward v2]

However, the creationists are not interested in being proved wrong as much as punching holes in the other side's arguments so they can say they "won" and gain legitimacy for their point of view.

Keep telling yourself that so that you don't ever have to challenge anyone. You clearly are not familiar with Ken Ham, and think he is some inbred redneck or internet troll to be easily dismissed.

Actually, I simply think there is no reason to engage in this particular debate because it is of no value and simply gives credence to creationists that they somehow have a theory that is equally as valid as evolution. Quite frankly, if you want to believe God created the universe then the evolution vs. creation debate ended when the Catholic Church stated there is no conflict between evolution and the concept of God as the creator; since Genesis is not a literal description of the earth's creation.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Registered Coward v2]

Regardless of motives, if side A can present facts that punch holes in side B's argument, shouldn't a scientist sit up and take note? And that's true no matter which side is which.

Sure, scientists listen when someone spots a potential flaw or inconsistency in theory. However, that neither invalidates the theory nor provides any support for alternate theories in the evolution vs creationism argument. Creationist want people to think because they can point out what they consider as flaws in evolutionary theory, such as gaps in the fossil trail, that their theory is thus equally valid. Sorry, science doesn't work that way. If it did, then the theory we were put here by ancient astronauts would be equally valid yet the creationist i've meet recoil at the idea that it is an equally valid theory as biblical based creationism. They have no interest in real scientific debate but merely want to give credence to their world view.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[fatphil]

Or to punctuated equilibria.

I took a photo, there was a bird. I took another photo, there was no bird. Your logic would lead to the conclusion that birds don't move, as we haven't seen it in motion.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[deadweight]

I can "disprove" Noah's Ark with DNA showing that all existing animals did not all come from single breeding pair a few thousand years ago. Makes no impact because "God can do anything" including getting a really slow pig of a boat design from Turkey (where the Ark ended up IIRC) to Australia and back very quicky (roll eyes emoticon goes here)

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[HornWumpus]

There are many examples of continuum of fossils. For example the ancestors of horses and birds.

Creationists want to cherry pick where the 'steps' are relatively large. But as the GP points out, every transition fossil found is just one gap that turned into two.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Anubis IV]

I'm not suggesting that poking a hole in current evolutionary theory somehow proves or validates Creationism, after all, that would suggest a false dilemma: that either current evolutionary theory is exactly correct or Creationism is exactly correct, thus requiring that a hole in one would confirm the veracity of the other. Clearly, that isn't actually the case, since evolutionary theory is undergoing tweaks on a regular basis. I am also not arguing that they're going in without an agenda. They are (though I don't see the relevance).

All I'm arguing is that if you want to discredit them, do so on valid grounds.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[wonkey_monkey]

when we find multiple examples of a particular animal with gaps on both sides.

When it comes to creationist arguments, there are always gaps. Some of them wouldn't believe you existed if you couldn't produce your great-grandmother's birth certificate and dental records.

The more T-Rex fossils we find without finding any evolutionary ancestors or descendants, however, begins to point to the fact that they may not have existed.

Or that were simply more T. Rexes in total than any particular one of their ancestors (descendants don't really come into this one, what with the dinosaurs being wiped out around the time of T. Rex. And it stands to simple reason that the latest ones would be the easiest to find).

Or any of a number of reasons (climatological, even psychological*) why we've dug up more T. Rexes and not many - but not zero - of their ancestors.

As I recall it's not like we've unearthed hundreds of T. Rexes from which to draw much of a conclusion, anyway.

*the possibility that finding one enormous and now cemented-in-popular-culture killing machine from the dawn of time will lead to people digging all over the same area looking for - and finding - more.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Roachie]

See, you are primed to discount any evidence that Ham may present that may refute evolution. Be carful that you dont find yourself in Asimovs 'cult of ignorance' Read the papers at icr.org or answersingenisis.org ? No ?

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[kamapuaa]

Well to be fair it's a creationist vs. one of the high Fivin' White guys. It's not like Stephen Hawking is arguing about whether or not there's turtles all the way down.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

Exactly; it's not like we have the luxury of fossils existing of every single species to have ever existed. Fossils only form under certain conditions; usually animals decompose when they die, and eventually there's nothing left. Rarely, something different happens, and we're left with a fossil: for instance, an asteroid strikes, or a volcano erupts, or the animal gets stuck in some tar pits. These occurrences are abnormal, so there's no telling how many species we're missing out on because none of their members happened to get caught in a fossil-forming event.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

Creationists don't believe in Catholicism, and will probably tell you the Pope is the Antichrist or somesuch.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[brantondaveperson]

And not only *that*, but all forms are transitional forms.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Registered Coward v2]

I'm not suggesting that poking a hole in current evolutionary theory somehow proves or validates Creationism, after all, that would suggest a false dilemma: that either current evolutionary theory is exactly correct or Creationism is exactly correct, thus requiring that a hole in one would confirm the veracity of the other. Clearly, that isn't actually the case, since evolutionary theory is undergoing tweaks on a regular basis. I am also not arguing that they're going in without an agenda. They are (though I don't see the relevance).

All I'm arguing is that if you want to discredit them, do so on valid grounds.

There is no need to discredit since they aren't a valid scientific theory. There is no prove or disprove since sit is based on a belief; one that is quite compatible with evolution. Unfortunately, many creationists seem to need to disprove evolution under the false assumption that proves them right.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

If it did, then the theory we were put here by ancient astronauts would be equally valid yet the creationist i've meet recoil at the idea that it is an equally valid theory as biblical based creationism.

The "ancient astronaut" theory (probably not a scientific theory) is that ancient humans (wherever they came from) were visited by alien "astronauts" in some way, perhaps teaching them things, or perhaps just observing them, and that these visitations explain things found in various ancient texts, such as happenings in the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible, or the description of what sounds like nuclear war in some ancient Indian texts. It's highly unlikely, and really just conjecture, but it's a lot more believable that a 6500-year-old Earth and the idea that God planted fossils to test our faith, things that Creationists would have you believe.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Hatta]

Creationists, in my experience, would be happy to be corrected on actual, observable, testable science

In my experience, creationists believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Try correcting them about what the fossil record actually shows, you won't get anywhere.

an atheist believes there is no God, so any option that leads to a God conclusion must be false

Not true at all. I've never met an atheist with an active belief in the absence of gods. Not even Richard Dawkins goes so far. What atheists do is withhold belief until there is evidence, and no evidence exists for the existence of any god or gods.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[almitydave]

There's a problem with the "why haven't we found more fossils" question, and you touch on it. Wiki says we have about 30 T. Rex specimens. If we assume they lived 28 years on average (research indicates that's near the top of the range), and there were only about 1000 alive at once (probably a low estimate), and they existed for about a million years, that comes out to about 35,000,000 total T. Rexes. Which means we've only found one in a million.

If their ancestors are any harder to find (see parent for examples why), we may NEVER find many of them, even if they numbered a hundred million. The fossil record is by nature incomplete.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

At best, it'll convince more magicians that they're right, making the whole world more stupid.

No. Don't confuse "the American public" with "the general public worldwide". Only dumbass Americans believe this Creationist shit these days (I think it's also popular in Turkey).

Don't worry; while America is obviously going the way of ancient Rome in a hurry, the rest of the world will continue on with science.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[gtall]

While I agree with your sentiment, I do not think it is possible to have a logical argument with creationists. There does seem to be a trend among the religious conservatives or mere conservatives to simply deny that any evidence contradicting their predetermined solution is factual. Most people in general find it hard to walk back their beliefs, so it isn't a property entirely enjoyed by conservatives, it is just more noticeable with that crowd.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Anubis IV]

While I think everyone here understands that there will naturally be gaps in the record, I think that's tangential to the point he was trying to make. From what I can gather, he's saying that if evolution was the uniform process we believe it to be, then, all other things being equal, the distribution of fossils based on species should be roughly uniform as well. Put differently, while there will be gaps, we should expect to find a few of a lot of species, rather than a lot of a few. Instead, however, we're finding a lot of a few species, which would, at least on its face, seem to suggest either a non-uniform evolutionary process (i.e. punctuated equilibria), or else something other than evolution altogether (e.g. Creationism).

Going back to what you're talking about with abnormal circumstances leading to fossilization, I think most of us would agree with that idea. That said, we have cases of fossils from a particular species being found all around the globe that don't seem to correlate to a global abnormality (i.e. they were due to local circumstances, such as a volcanic eruption). The natural question would then be, if most of these circumstances are localized, why is it that they are generally only capturing evidence for the same small handful of species? That is, why do they get a lot of a few instead of a few of a lot?

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[gtall]

I think a better argument is to merely accept what the creationists believe and then follow that to the logical conclusions.

A creationist must believe that G-d buried a lot of fossilized bones since science tells us that. And G-d created all the bridging fossils, so we got fooled by G-d. For those non-young Earth creationists, G-d has allowed the rest of the Universe and our solar system in particular to take periodic pot shots at us. What's He trying to do us, wipe us out? That's just the solar system, what about massive volcanoes that are also up to the job. This is some weird G-d, sets us up for success and then via the random luck of the draw, we get to go splat.

Oh, but Jesus says he'll come back to save us. Well, He also said the generation he was talking to would not pass away before He returned. We're still waiting. So did Jesus lie? Could He have been mistaken?

And as for how ethical G-d is, if a good Buddhist grows up never being exposed or even hearing of Christianity, is s/he damned to limbo or worse? How does that get squared with a loving G-d? Ah, but G-d has a plan...which merely involves people being in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting whacked through no fault of their own, like the little 3 year old in Italy who was nailed in mob hit on his family, he was just there so they decided to do him too.

This...this is one funny G-d.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[fatphil]

Burgess Shale? Lots of species there.

The fossil record informs us that there were times in the past that had as many different species as we have now. The tree of life does not only broaden over time, it gets hacked back mercilessly in extinction events too.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Anubis IV]

There is no need to discredit

Let me restate my concluding point in light of that statement: use valid reasoning, whatever your purpose may be.

Whether you're seeking to discredit them or not, you were providing invalid reasoning. Few things annoy me more than people I agree with giving the other side valid ammunition to make an invalid point. :P

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Defenestrar]

Not every Biblical scholar agrees in a global interpretation of the flood. Here's a pretty decent site put up by a Christian geologist if you'd like to see. He also has a section taking apart young earth speculations from a scientific basis.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[geekoid]

You can't discredit nothing.
They have no provable data. All they have is a lack of understanding of evolution and attacks on evolution theory.
Mostly stupid attacks. Many, if not all, don't even understand that the theory makes prediction that have been born out.

SO, how do you discredit blatant attacks created in ignorance?

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

Going back to what you're talking about with abnormal circumstances leading to fossilization, I think most of us would agree with that idea.

Most of us might, but Creationists would probably try to use the lack of fossils as a way to "disprove" evolution.

As for non-uniform evolutionary processes, that seems to be well-supported by the fossil record. The idea is that lifeforms evolve and adapt to survive best in their environment; once they've adapted, they don't need to change much, so they don't until things change. For an example, look at sharks and horseshoe crabs. Those things haven't changed much in millions of years; we have fossils of their ancestors and they're little or no different from the creatures living today. So it seems reasonable to assume that those creatures simply don't need to evolve; any non-harmful mutations in them aren't likely to help them survive any better than the ones we have now. This wasn't the case for other creatures, so they continued to evolve while the sharks and horseshoe crabs stayed the same.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Kazoo the Clown]

Perhaps that's because you have a naive notion of "color". Star "color" is a complex spectrum with features that correspond to the different elements that make up the stars composition. There are peaks that correspond to hydrogen, helium, etc., in various amounts, all the elements that make up the stars composition. Red shift for example is not just a matter of a single color moving to the red, but the entire spectrum element signature of the star is shifted, which can be readily differentiated from a star that is another "color" rather than the same color but moving causing a shift.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Anubis IV]

Why don't you tell me? Seems like what you've described could be easily summed up by a few of those.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Zalbik]

Personally, I think he is easily dismissed as he apparently believes the universe is 6500 years old, Noah's flood actually occurred and that dinosaurs co-existed with humans.

For these to be true, so much of our scientific knowledge would have to be so wrong that it would be an absolute "miracle" that any of our technology worked at all.

I don't believe scientists should waste time debating people who use a different standard of truth. I especially think it's a bad idea to grant any amount of scientific legitimacy to people like Ham by engaging in this sort of activity.

If whoever organized this wants a debate, have Ham debate a rabbi, priest, imam, monk or any other sort of religious leader. Mixing a religious debate with science makes as much sense as having him debate a plumber.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Anubis IV]

Guess I should clarify what I was getting at, since I kinda did a lousy job of it in re-reading my post. I was (in my head, though not on paper) constraining my comment to species from a particular lineage. The Burgess Shale is a case of having lots of species from lots of lineages, so it doesn't address that notion. Constraining yourself to considering one lineage at a time, why do we see examples of a lot of a few from that lineage, rather than a few of a lot, even in cases where that species may be spread out over a wide-ranging area, such that they would not all be subject to the same (abnormal) fossilization conditions?

There are plenty of possible explanations, but it is something interesting to consider.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Zalbik]

After the debate is over, anyone being intellectually honest should be willing to recognize which points were credible or compelling for both sides, and which were not

And there's the problem. Many people aren't either intellectually honest enough, or intellectually capable enough to judge accurately as to which points are credible or compelling. They'll just base it on either (a) points that reinforce their preconceived notions, or (b) points which sound good, or which the opponent has a difficult time immediately responding to.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tibit]

You have no idea how creationist debates go. They literally offer no ideas at all, nothing sane that could be debated. Almost every sentence they utter is either nonsensical, or contains a bunch of made-up stuff that you have simply no way of preparing to counter. They literally make up facts on the spot, and there's simply no argument to that. Nobody enjoys a "discussion" where one party is constantly delaying things by looking them up in various sources.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[geekoid]

"Creationists, in my experience, would be happy to be corrected on actual, observable, testable science"
no they don't. I have been dealing with those people for 30 years. I have explained where what they think is evolution is flawed.
They don't car. You find a transitional fossil, they claim you theory is wrong becasue now you have 2 gaps. they don't understand that evolution makes predictions, they flat out refuse to look at the evidence critially.

Add to that there side is 'A magic guy did it' and they have no evidence at all to support it except some book of collected letters.

"...and an atheist believes there is no God, so any option that leads to a God conclusion must be false;"
As an atheist, let me say this: "Wrong", and stop bring that flase assumption and ignorance of atheism. It's irrelevant to the discussion.

The fact is, evidence support modern evolution. warehouses full of it. It's been tested, made many correct predictions,.
Critical thinking and the Science Method shows it to be true.
It's like saying gravity isn't real becasue scientist still have questions about it.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tibit]

He is a credentialed troll, I give you that. Why is he a troll? Because he knows full well where he is wrong, and he does it only for his own satisfaction.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tibit]

LOLWUT? Catholics are creationists by definition. Sure, not all creationists are catholics.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Zalbik]

I've never met an atheist with an active belief in the absence of gods.

Chrisopher Hitchens
Me

There's two for you.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[geekoid]

yes, actual. I have read icr and answergenesis. They are crap. They show a clear lack of understanding of critical thinking, the scienetific method, and cherry pick data. Most of which doesn't show what they think it does.

How about you learn some critical thinking skills?

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Anubis IV]

Certainly. And that is a concern with these debates in general and the impact they'll have on the public at large. Even so, I'll go back to what I said: "what they choose to believe doesn't mean that you or anyone else has been freed from your responsibility to be intellectually honest in objectively assessing the points they made."

Put differently, while what you've said is almost certainly true, we shouldn't allow ourselves to use it as an excuse to abandon reason.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tibit]

You must be completely unaware of how creationist "arguments" work. You're debating a bunch of stuff that is either irrelevant to the discussion, or just plainly made up. Since they have unlimited supply of made-up "facts", there's no way to have any real-time debate. There's literally no way to prepare to debate them and have any chance to offer even a semblance of finishing with an upper hand. It's a well-understood tactic, and they take full advantage of it. You'd need to have dozens of researchers on realtime chat, working furiously at fact-checking and debunking everything the other side says, in order to prevail in a "debate" with a creationist.

It is, quite literally, like wrestling pigs in the mud, except that the pigs are the only ones who enjoy it, but everyone gets dirty. It's an absolutely splendid analogy, on many levels.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tibit]

A scientific theory must simply offer you predictive power. If anyone says that creationism is a scientific theory, then it's a simple matter to check it. Let them make predictions, and let us all test them. It's as simple as it gets. The debate doesn't make any sense when the creationists insist that they can debate while pretending that scientific theory means something else. Music theory is closer to being a scientific theory than creationism ever was, or will be. Once you understand music theory you can figure out how to make music, at the very least.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[complete loony]

However, the creationists are not interested in being proved wrong as much as punching holes in the other side's arguments so they can say they "won" and gain legitimacy for their point of view. They are not interested in the scientific method, as far as they are concerned the Bible says it so it must be true.

If you're talking about Ken Ham, I agree with you. Just be careful not to paint everyone with that stereotype.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[kent_eh]

Don't you think that if the Creationists are able to poke holes in the other side's arguments then maybe the other side doesn't have a very sound argument.
Knowlege and verifiable facts can still be shot down by someone with superior rhetorical skills.
That doesn't affect the truth of the facts, but it can determine who "wins" the game.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[disambiguated]

If you assume that the fossils we find are equally likely to have come from any time in the past, you would expect a continuum of fossils. The tiny percentage of fossils that have survived are not equally distributed though. So you get little slices of times/places where fossils survived, and the rest are gone forever.

Poke all the holes you want/can in evolutionary theory -- it won't improve the alternative theories at all.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[kent_eh]

A creationist must believe that G-d buried a lot of fossilized bones since science tells us that.
Actually, some creationists (Including Ham) claim that the fossils were created when Noah's flood killed off most of the world's creatures. And that the Grand Canyon was also created as those same floodwaters receeded.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[martinux]

Ok, ok. You got me!

I am in fact part of the massive global worldwide conspiracy of scientists and old earth religious believers who have agreed to manipulate data to destroy the truth. You sir put forward such a magnificent case that I could no longer maintain the paper-thin cover that millions of us have constructed.

It is a sad sad day.

BRB. Calling the Vatican, most protestant denominations, muslims and all other persons whos ancestors have helped us keep the lie alive through the centuries. The cat is well and truely out of the bag.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Registered Coward v2]

However, the creationists are not interested in being proved wrong as much as punching holes in the other side's arguments so they can say they "won" and gain legitimacy for their point of view. They are not interested in the scientific method, as far as they are concerned the Bible says it so it must be true.

If you're talking about Ken Ham, I agree with you. Just be careful not to paint everyone with that stereotype.

Certainly. Having strong religious beliefs do not automatically me nay you are ant-evolution or anti-science. As one put it, one is about why (religion) and the other how (science) and both can coexist nicely.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

Are you an idiot? Official Catholic doctrine is that evolution is correct. It's the American fundamentalists and evangelicals (all protestant) who believe in Creationism. Go get an education.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[RespekMyAthorati]

Ken Ham has a B.A.S. in Environmental Biology from QUT.

Too bad he didn't learn anything.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[RespekMyAthorati]

You clearly are not familiar with Ken Ham, and think he is some inbred redneck or internet troll to be easily dismissed.

Well put. That's exactly what he is.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[RespekMyAthorati]

Catholics are creationists by definition.

Yes, but they aren't ignorant redneck "young earth" creationists, as Ham is.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[RespekMyAthorati]

If a Creationist ever brought up a point that contained a shred of reason (and no, "I don't believe it" isn't reason) then it would be worthwhile to examine it.
If they ever have, I would like to know about it.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[RespekMyAthorati]

.and an atheist believes there is no God

Wrong.
"Atheist" means "without theology" and refers to a person who correctly points out that there is no evidence for the existence of a God.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[turtledawn]

one easy answer is that species prefer different habitats. For example using contemporary species, yaks are probably never or only rarely going to fossilize - their environment is too dry and there are lots of scavengers. There may well be tons of water buffalo fossils however, just because they get washed away and buried in flood sediment on a regular basis. Similarly rare species will automatically form fewer fossils just because you're starting with a lower number of corpses. And a third possibility is that animals which have strong social bonds are more likely to form mass bone beds, because they won't leave their social group members to save themselves from a threat. As you mentioned, there's more possibilities but I wanted to spell a handful of them out.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[paul.hatchman]

And we don't just see this effect in stars. But also in galaxies, quasars, basically every distant object we can observe.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[dbIII]

Since many here have equivalent or better qualifications why are we making any sort of deal about them? They are not authorities so their arguments need to rely on merit.
However as someone who worked at QUT (ironically in Mechanical Engineering), I have to reluctantly point out that the science faculty does not have much of a reputation apart from a few long established areas and the Environmental Biology course is very new. The place was a technical college that was turned into a minor university via some amalgamations. To say that an Environmental Biology degree from the place is a joke would be cruel and inaccurate, but reality does come close since it would be the third ranking course of that type in the city of Brisbane (pop. 2.2 Million). Unless the guy has picked up a reputation after graduation I don't think we can take him seriously.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[dbIII]

I think this stuff has gone well beyond the bounds of religious beliefs and is really about control - specifically about getting more money at the turnstile of the merchant in the temple franchise. Religion is not supposed to rely on trickery and slick salesmanship.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[utkonos]

I enjoy the god-in-the-gaps argument. If this holds true, the more discoveries made, the smaller the gaps and therefore the smaller the god gets.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Bandraginus]

In 2007, the then leader of the catholic church stated that there was no conflict between evolution and catholicism. The catholic church officially toes the theistic evolution line. I'm not sure where you get this "Catholics are creationists by definition" line from.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tibit]

Creationism at the basic level is simply the belief that there is a creator. The protestant excesses are just icing on the cake, but not necessary.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tibit]

Creationism: belief in a creator that created our universe etc. The creationism popular in the U.S. is just, um, a sociologically expected conclusion of an underlying problem.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Alsee]

Catholics are creationists by definition.

You've got your definition wrong. "Creationism" is not merely the idea that God created the universe. Creationism is specifically defied in opposition to evolution. Creationist is specifically the position that God directly crafted the variety of species in substantially the same form we see them today, and virtually always in accordance with some specific religion genesis account as in the Koran / Bible / Vedic text or whatever.

The official position of the Catholic Church is that Evolution is compatible with Catholicism, and in fact the Catholic Church hosts many scientific conferences that explicitly affirm the validity of Evolution, and which explicitly reject Creationism and Intelligent Design.

The Catholic Church's position is that God created the universe and all of the scientific mechanisms and processes within the universe, and that this equally includes the laws of physics, chemistry, and the evolution of life on earth.

The official Catholic position is Evolutionist, subcategory Theistic Evolutionist. The position that God created the universe, and that Evolution is just another one of God's chosen mechanisms for running His universe.

-

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Alsee]

When people think "fossils" they generally think dinosaurs or other large animals. (Note that when I say "large animals" I am including the smallest mouse.) It is extraordinarily rare for a large animal to leave a fossil record, and the fossil record of large animals is extremely random and extremely spotty.

Large animal fossils are extremely glamorous, but often overlooked the largest proportion of fossils we have. The small animal fossils. Animals roughly the size of a grain of sand, such as Forams (phylum foraminifera). Forams are tiny animals that live in the ocean.... trillions of them. Every day vast numbers of forams die and settle down to the deep dark cold sea floor, in the slowly accumulating sediment. Forams have often elaborate mineral "skeletons" called tests. Every day vast numbers of these tests become ideal fossils in the undisturbed see floor sediment. Sediment that very slowly builds up in virtually perfect layers.

Back in the 1970's oil companies developed technology for deep sea oil exploration and started bringing up long exploratory drill cores from the deep seabed. Each drill core was filled with tens of thousands tests. An effectively limitless supply of ideal perfectly layered fossils.

We have a continuous and complete fossil record spanning tens of millions of years for a large chunk of phylum foraminifera. Not merely a continuous and complete record of each transitional species, but a continuous and complete record of all the transitional forms along each species-to-species transition. A continuous and complete record tracing diverse foram species back to a common ancestor.

(Note: The group "forams" is roughly equivalent to the group "mammals". There are herbivores and carnivores and even forams that grow internal algae farms. So when I say "diverse species of forams" traced back to a common ancestor, it's roughly comparable to tracing cows and lions back to a common ancestor.)

But animals the size of a grain of sand aren't glamorous. The fossils look like tiny specks unless you look at them through a low-power microscope. Almost no one has ever heard of "forams". Forams are a type of plankton, and while many people have heard of plankton almost no one knows or cares about it.

So the elephant in the room is that we *do* have a continuous and complete fossil record for a significant chunk of the tree of life. The best possible record a scientist would wish for documenting the fact of evolution in extraordinary detail. And virtually no one has heard of it because it's an incredibly obscure and otherwise unremarkable branch of almost microscopic animals.

The glorious fossil record 19 November 1998:
The fossil record may not be complete for all groups at all times and in all places. But, argues Dr Paul Pearson, when we have reason to believe that it is, the dates that can be assigned to fossils are invaluable for unravelling the paths of evolution.

PAUL PEARSON
In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin lamented that the imperfection of the fossil record detracts from the glory of geology. Fossilization is such a rare and capricious event, our collections are so poor, and sedimentary formations are so full of gaps, that Darwin could not point to a single example where fossils in successive geological strata showed evolution from one species to another.

Unknown to Darwin, uninterrupted sedimentation does occur in the open ocean, especially on aseismic ridges and plateaux. These areas experience a continuous rain of particles to the sea bed, and are among the most geologically quiescent places on Earth. A steady build-up of sediment is the result.

Now, after thirty years of systematic ocean drilling, many of these sites can be studied. Piston coring generally allows hundreds of meters of sediment to be fully recovered, spanning millions of years of deposition. Where gaps occur, they can easily be identified.

A co

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[gtall]

It can take a relatively short time to fossilize a bone. However, we have geological tests that can tell us the true age. And we have many different kinds of tests, they generally agree. However, fossils are embedded in rock that we know takes 10s of thousands if not millions of years to form. So, the fossils didn't get there except by either (a) dying inconveniently longer than 6 thousand years, or (b) this G-d Guy is pulling another fast one. A creationist must conclude he's a sneaky god.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Registered Coward v2]

There is no need to discredit

Let me restate my concluding point in light of that statement: use valid reasoning, whatever your purpose may be.

Whether you're seeking to discredit them or not, you were providing invalid reasoning. Few things annoy me more than people I agree with giving the other side valid ammunition to make an invalid point. :P

So here is my reasoning:

Evolution is a theory that uses the scientific method to test it. Creationism as a belief that can neither be proved or disproved.

If you want to debate X vs Y you need a common reference to use for comparison so you can reach some conclusion on which side has better made their argument. If it is the scientific method, then both sides must be able to use it to test their theory.

Since that is not possible in this case because each side bases their conclusions on a different frame of reference, a debate accomplishes nothing in terms of which theory (in scientific terms - which I use here since Creationists argue their theory is equally valid as evolution since both are "theories" and neither can be conclusively proven correct) is a better model of observed phenomena and more predictive. Therefore, why debate?

Since one side's POV is predicated on a belief that can be neither proven nor disproven, there isn't a question of validity of the belief because, well, they believe it is true. Since you cannot prove it isn't true, there is nothing to discredit since it is simply what they believe. When any points can be explained away by "It's God's will" or "God did that to test us and our faith" there really isn't room for a reasoned discussion. Again, why debate?

Finally, the existence of a creator in no way means evolution cannot be the mechanism which resulted in life as we know it today. If you did debate, you could end it at the start by saying"Sure, God could have created man; he simply used evolution to do so. After all, who are we to question how God does what God does; we must just seek to understand how God does it. Now, let's discuss why God created the earth more than 6000 years ago and dinosaurs didn't coexist with "modern" mankind."

In the end, faith and science can, and do, coexist quite nicely. So, to answer "why debate?," ask "Who gains from it?" Creationists want to make their position appear to be worthy of the same consideration as the scientific theory of evolution. Not just to believe in one and not the other, but to give their POV equal time in scientific debate. Debating recognizable figures form science helps accomplish that and I think it is wrong for scientists to do so. That's my belief

So, to close, I am genuinely curious what you find invalid in my reasoning.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Registered Coward v2]

Certainly. And that is a concern with these debates in general and the impact they'll have on the public at large. Even so, I'll go back to what I said: "what they choose to believe doesn't mean that you or anyone else has been freed from your responsibility to be intellectually honest in objectively assessing the points they made."

Considering the points they usually raise have already been discussed and proven not to be valid. At some point, you can simply say "Bring up some new evidence and we'll talk; but if all you are going to do is rehash what has been said, and shown why it is not a valid criticism of evolutionary theory, before then there is no reason to have the discussion."

Put differently, while what you've said is almost certainly true, we shouldn't allow ourselves to use it as an excuse to abandon reason.

Sure. Bring up some new evidence evolution is wrong or that provides verifiable evidence for your theory and I'll listen. However, "anything this complicated couldn't have happened by chance" is not a valid point.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tbannist]

The more T-Rex fossils we find without finding any evolutionary ancestors or descendants, however, begins to point to the fact that they may not have existed.

The lack of descendants of Tyrannosaurus Rex is likely because the line went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, and it seems like there are about ten other Tyrannosaur species found in the fossil record so far, then there's the Coelurosaurs that the Tyrannosaurs most likely evolved from, and the Theropods before that.

So given that they probably had no descendants because they were wiped out by an external event, and we have found fossils of some of their ancestors, what does that mean for evolution?

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Man Eating Duck]

I'm still fascinated that the entire big bang theory is based on the color of the stars.

With apologies to Charles Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Anubis IV]

Oh, I was simply referring to the attack on motives earlier. At the time, your argument sounded like something along the lines of, "because they aren't coming into this with the right motives, there's no point in listening to what they have to say." That may be a misstatement of what you intended, but that's how it came across.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[SleazyRidr]

Only if you believe that humans already know everything to know about geology. Who knows what the floodwaters of Noah's time could do.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Registered Coward v2]

Oh, I was simply referring to the attack on motives earlier. At the time, your argument sounded like something along the lines of, "because they aren't coming into this with the right motives, there's no point in listening to what they have to say." That may be a misstatement of what you intended, but that's how it came across.

No worries. I can see where it can be interpreted that way; one of the challenges with writing a quick reply to a comment.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[SleazyRidr]

I have heard this creationist rubbish for years and I am still waiting for just one (1) piece of evidence to be produced. There is more evidence to show Earth was formed in the accretion disk of the sun and life as we know it developed through the process of evolution than that the Earth was terraformed and populated. The idea of theism is nice but you really should stick to the truth. - we don't know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[thistle172]

And yet, in the final analysis, Ken Ham had absolutely NOTHING to marshal in support of his baseless viewpoint except semantic chicanery and a gross lack of understanding as to what constitutes actual science. It was, as these events always are, BORING BEYOND BELIEF!

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Bandraginus]

Yeah, fair enough. I guess I was thrown because the term has been used lately to identify the intelligent design / young earth creationist crowd.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[shutdown -p now]

It's raising its hand in many Muslim-majority countries (it tends to go hand in hand with Salafism). It's also gradually becoming more popular in Russia, even though the official position of the Russian Orthodox Church on evolution is basically "no comment".

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[AlanS2002]

A Bachelor of Applied Science from the Queensland University of Technology a superior credential that a Bachelor of Science from Cornell. Are you smoking crack?

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[fatphil]

I'm not sure one even needs a fossil record of so-called speciation when ring species not only show that speciation does occur, but also show that the concept of species and speciation isn't one that you should get particularly hung up upon, as it's a very fuzzy-edged concept.

I remember when "here's incontravertable proof that organisms evolve traits/organs/capabilities specific to their environment" became no longer an example of "evolution" to the creationidiots; they retreated, regrouped, and then demanded "now show me one *species* turning into another *species*" as proof. Quite why we didn't reply "sure - but only after you show me this thing you call 'god', I don't know".

There's even less reason to get hung up about in-between-steps between species when the bizarre unbelievable traits of midpoints in the fossil record have been spotted on creatures alive today. E.g. a fish that prefers being on dry land to being in water. Everything that was "unbelievable" about the past probably exists somewhere today.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

Sounds like we Americans are in good company!

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[shutdown -p now]

Oh, for sure, and the neighbors are actively getting acquainted with each other. I don't know if you've noticed, but there has been a trend in right-wing American blogs lately where people praise Putin for e.g. anti-gay laws. There's also a similar trend among some of the Russian conservatives where they still heap insults on US in general, but praise some of the more extreme politicians on the right.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

I've totally missed the pro-Putin anti-gay stuff, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Holy crap I need to get out of this country. Pretty soon we're going to have another Victorian era, only worse. At least in Victorian times people knew how to act polite usually.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[shutdown -p now]

Read and weep (or laugh, if you're cynical enough to appreciate the irony).

Holy crap I need to get out of this country. Pretty soon we're going to have another Victorian era, only worse. At least in Victorian times people knew how to act polite usually.

It'll split long before that happens - which is what you tirelessly advocate here, anyway :) - so why not just move to the part of the country that'll be sane post split? New England or PNW or something.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[Grishnakh]

I'm pretty close to New England now, and this place seems to love authoritarianism. It's not very liberal at all (they think they're liberal because they tend to vote Democrat, but loving unions does not make you a liberal), the level of corruption is insane, and they have military soldiers with M-16s performing police duties.

I do advocate a break-up, but I think realistically if it does happen, it's going to take a long time, and things will have to get a LOT worse. America still has a lot of imperial power and inertia. Look how long it took the Roman empire to collapse; America's a lot more cohesive than that was (or other empires were); it's actually one single very large country (with some tiny territories, and a lot of military bases scattered about), rather than a small country with a huge amount of possessions where people had totally different languages and cultures.

Instead of spending the rest of my adult working years living through the decline, it seems like it'd be better to move to greener pastures.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[shutdown -p now]

New England is also rather diverse. I was thinking more about the lines of Vermont or New Hampshire, rather than, say, Massachusetts. (Western) Washington and Oregon are also fairly social libertarian and with no love lost for in-your-face displays of state authority, and I don't see that changing.

While it may indeed take a long time, all this crap isn't really affecting the states listed above much. It's more of a guilt by association than anything that you'll run into in the course of your daily life. OTOH, if it will be actively pushed from the federal level down onto the unwilling states, it would only accelerate the fragmentation.

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[msmonroe]

It's hard to win an argument when the proof is that it says it in this book. Seems like a pointless debate.

Re:It could be educational.

[Antipater]

What do I do - oh worshipers of the intelligence of Slashdot? He IS smarter than me and he holds those beliefs.

He's your father, and he will likely die before you do. You let him hold his beliefs, and you just keep him from imparting them on your children.

Let's hope it ends better than the last one

[jpvlsmv]

I hope this does[n't] end up like the last debate between science and creationism:

http://www.websitesonadime.com...

--Joe

Not worthless

[mugnyte]

Nye isn't stupid, he's thought about the implications of this debate. He's already talked about the promotion of the debate as a leveling effect of the two approaches, when really they are nowhere similar. (Creation Mythology and Scientific Inquiry).

However, I think if Nye plays his cards right, he'll not fall into the trap of a tit-for-tat banter of each little Creationist pseudo-doubt. Instead, he'll address the general sociology of the subject: The Christian religion is just one of dozens of creation myths, popular in certain places of the world at this time in history. It simply cannot admit it is wrong, although it has been proven wrong many times and simply abandoned those historical issues (Copernicus onward, for just a few examples). Additionally, there are still the hangups in Christianity with gender (both women and gays) as lesser actors on the stage. Combined with the peculiar Politically-rightward stance in the US, defining their positions on the environment, poverty and interventionism - Christianity cannot explain many parts of the modern world well, let alone creation.

Nye could also simply state that there are too many religions to include them all in an Origins class, and all of them arrive with only scriptural evidence that it's best left to a comparative-studies class on mythologies. Which is exactly where they are today.

Also, if everyone started empirical scientific exploration over again (really, we do this all the time in teaching) - the same models would be arrived at - simply because the models fit the observations. They aren't dictated from any secret cabal, exactly opposite the Christian method. Nye can do this, as well as any of us. The evolutionary discrepancies Ham will blubber on about are not worth the time, but this entire use of one religion to define all things in the universe can easily be made to look silly.

Re:Not worthless

[TheGratefulNet]

I like the phrase 'accident of birth'.

why do you follow religion A? accident of birth: you were born in a country where most people follow A. and so, you are taught and are 'sure' that A is true.

if you were born in country B, you'd be 'sure' that B's religion is true and factual.

this is the most powerful argument I've ever heard for why one religion is no better (or accurate) than another. yes, you are 'sure' about yours just like they are 'sure' about theirs. what makes yours uniquely true and theirs wrong?

it may take years for that to sink in, but eventually, a thinking person has to understand the global implications of localized religions and how they can't all be right (and actually, they are all dead-wrong!)

Re:Not worthless

[netsavior]

Both sides will remain unchanged by the debate; but somewhere in Ken Ham's intended audience there is a child just hungry enough to latch on to a morsel of truth and doubt. This will be the child's foundation for escape from that crippling dogmatic world.

This is those children's first and maybe only opportunity for scientific education.

I hope every new earth denialist logs in and lets their children watch as Ken Ham "wins."

no matter what happens, this is a victory for rationality

Re:Not worthless

[mugnyte]

Posted AC, of course.
The same thing happens to a creationist here as in any intellectual discussion - they are asked to provide a non-scriptural model that fits the evidence. I am curious why Christians even care how species differentiate over time. By all means, if your thesis can stand any critique, it should be proposed.

Re:Not worthless

[mugnyte]

Learning is a journey - and if a Christian child is exposed to this debate, they may be guided to thinking one way, but over time the topic of "there's debate" will continue. Let them research over their lives to find the truth. Curiosity can only help. If the truth doesn't win, that itself is a good way to see that it needs a clearer presentation, or may not be so true.

Re:Not worthless

[netsavior]

I think it is also reasonable to mention that by population most "Christians" belong to sects that admit the scientific fact that evolution is reality. Catholicism is a large group, the largest Christian group, and they have accepted evolution as fact, that isn't a recent thing. There are many many groups that worship the Abrahamic god without willful ignorance on this subject.

This isn't Christians vs Science... this is "the craziest of the Christians" vs Science

Re:Not worthless

[ITEM-3]

why do you follow religion A? accident of birth: you were born in a country where most people follow A. and so, you are taught and are 'sure' that A is true.

if you were born in country B, you'd be 'sure' that B's religion is true and factual.

I wish I had mod points to use here. I had this same realization many years ago, and soon after I abandoned my religion of birth (Christiantiy) and decided to pursue science. Unfortunately this argument doesn't work well on most religious people since they can come up with a handful of names that converted to their religion, which they use to argue that a truly enlightened person will find his way to the "correct" religion. Of course, they never mention anyone who converts in the other direction...

Re:Not worthless

[Anti-Social Network]

Dead on. I think of it as the "common sense" bias, where a category of "things that people know" include the local religious beliefs which give it an "unfair" advantage vs. all the other world religions, and thus the burden is squarely on the incumbent religion to prove itself from first principles to ensure this has not happened "to me" (this is the biggest argument I have designed for discussing religion with fundies; unfortunately the only time I got to do this, it was a guy who had converted to Islam after being atheist most of his life, so I didn't get to use this particular argument).

The thought to engage with is: how do you tend to those poor bastards that were unlucky to be "born into" the wrong religion? Well, naturally you've got to insist everybody carefully examine the evidence on both sides - and this is where it wraps back to an imperative on the fundie in question. You then put two conveniently-selected ideologies on trial with each other, and for bonus points, the null hypothesis (atheism).

You may never get them to properly examine their own beliefs in context or critically examine their own evidence, but this is the closest you're going to get, and a good opportunity to plant the seeds of truth they wouldn't ordinarily come across in their self-selected comfort zone.

Convince someone to not love their mother.

[Anonymous Coward]

All of Nye's arguments will be discounted as the words of the Devil and the kids won't be allowed to watch it.

I'm a product of fundie parents.

What changed me? I don't know exactly. I was waking up one day when I was 9 and thinking, "If Santa Claus and Zeus are fake, why is God real?"

Long talks with my priest - (HE was THE nicest MAN I have ever known - NOT in the Biblical sense!!!!)

Faith is what it boils down to, I have none.

Do this - try to convince someone that they don't love their Mother.

Good luck with that.

Re:Went over my head.

[bobbied]

Well, it seems true so I'm going to claim it is because it feels right.

Re:Went over my head.

[Speare]

Emotion is a fact.

I take from this short statement the same sentiment that Bruce Schneier was speaking about, when he stopped whining about how everything "security theater" was completely irrelevant, and started exploring the real and tangible impact and importance of the feeling of safety IN ADDITION TO actual safety controls. You cannot just dismiss grandma's warm and fuzzy acceptance of strict authoritarian searches, you have to actually include it in the calculus, the whole of which can inform the security methodology.

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

Religion is the same: you can't just dismiss religion, it's a palpable phenomenon for a large number of stakeholders. Often, you can coexist with their philosophy while still doing real science. Galileo wasn't locked up in house arrest for his science, he was locked up for being an ass to the church. The church actually had little problem with the already-common views on the shape of the solar system, and would have "come around" on the matter much faster without his goading.

Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[robinsoz2]

I am a creationist myself (in the minority here on Slashdot) and frequently listen to Christian radio. I often find myself cringing when Ken Ham's little segments come on. He usually uses circular reasoning to prove his point - the following is an exact paraphrase of something I heard him say recently: "The Bible states that the world is less than 6000 years old and therefore evolution is wrong. Because evolution is wrong because the Bible says it is wrong, we have proved the evolutionists to be an unreliable source and therefore we can not trust the evolutionists criticism of the Bible." I personally know a number of scientists who believe in creation/intelligent design (plus one atheist leaning agnostic with doubts about the probability of life arising by chance) who would represent the creation side of the argument better than Ken Ham.

Re:Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[Bardez]

Ken Ham is a hack. I'd much rather see Bill Nye debate someone like William Lane Craig. That, at least, would be an interesting debate.

Re:Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[TheSync]

My question for creationists is how can evolution not be possible?

First, there are different alleles out there in any population and it is reasonable to assume that some of them may lead to differential reproductive results, which would change the overall population of existing alleles.

In addition, we know that there are mutations going on all the time as well. For example, a study of 78 Icelandic families whose genealogies were well known sequenced the genomes of 219 distinct individuals (Kong, A., et al. (2012) Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father's age to disease risk. Nature 488:471-475. [doi: 10.1038/nature11396]) and found there are about 77 mutations per generation.

So isn't it likely that over billions of generations that there will be significant genetic change based on the interaction between the environment and the reproductive success of individuals?

At the same time, I totally think that biogenesis itself is not understood at all by science - there are just wild guesses right now. I give creationists cover if they want to say that no one really knows how biogenesis happened, but once we get to cells and DNA, the rest is pretty easy to work out.

Re:Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[StormReaver]

I personally know a number of scientists who believe in creation/intelligent design

No, you don't. I'm not going to speculate on their actual profession, but it isn't "scientist".

Re:Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[Sun]

Care to share what you do believe in, then? Particularly, why you believe the evolutionary model is wrong?

Also, I'm interested to hear whether you think your ideas are scientific, and what that term means to you.

Thanks,
Shachar

Re:Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[Sun]

I am very interested in hearing what you believe in. In particular, why do you think the evolutionary model is wrong?

Also, I'd like to know whether you consider your belief of how the species got to be the way they are to be scientific.

Thanks,
Shachar

Re:Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[tibit]

Creationism is an answer to a question that fundamentally doesn't make any sense. There's plenty of such questions, like, for example, "what's the meaning of life". It's really easy to ask a nonsensical question, and people do it all the time, deluding themselves that the answer might matter. Answers to nonsensical questions, other than those explaining the nonsense itself, are pointless.

If you truly believe that god is omnipresent and omniscient, then it doesn't make any sense to ask if god created the universe. It's like asking if cars are made out of cars - it's absurd. No matter what the answer is, the omnipresence and omniscience remains unchanged. Omnipresence and omniscience makes the "who did it" question entirely moot. Whatever the "true" answer to the question about "why are we here" and "who made us" is, it is an entirely irrelevant matter. It has absolutely no importance whatsoever. You can't make any decisions by it, there is zero tangibility to it, it's just a silly distraction.

Re:Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[Alsee]

an exact paraphrase

Do you mean that literally?
And by "literally", I literally mean figuratively :)

-

Re:Ken Ham does not speak for all creationists

[jdavidb]

Just wanted to chime in to say you may be a minority, but you are not alone. These days I'm less interested in a debate on origins and more interested in whether or not people should be creating a compulsory one-size-fits-all educational system, so I don't chime up as much on such topics as I used to. But - still here, still believe in the Bible, still doing engineering/sciency stuff somehow despite my backwardness, and I still see no reason for people to try to force each other to change. I don't know a whole lot about Ken Ham, although there's a chance we might swing through that area this year and take a look.

debate

[Ulises_Jofre]

Some fossilized questions for a transitional and healhty debate, for instance: is there evolution if there is no time? How will evolutionary biology meet new physical paradigms about time, space and so on? Will new conceptual changes deny evolution? Or on the contrary, will it become a more extraordinary process, full of astonishing implications? If so, will past human beings and the rest of living beings become something different as science progresses? After all, is life something fix-finite-defined? That is, can one understand it by means of using a flesh brain and its limited words, axioms and dogmas? Does the whole of life fit inside a bone box? Indeed, will science add indefinitely without understanding completely, is there an infinite pool of knowledge and ignorance waiting for us? Otherwise, will religions use the word God forever and ever, as if it were a death thing, a repetitive thing that is part of human discussions? And, in order to speak about God, are they using his limited brain or do they use unknown instruments? Along these lines, there is a different book, a preview in http://goo.gl/rfVqw6 Just another suggestion in order to freethink for a while

Re:debate

[bigwheel]

This.

There is an interesting and informative debate to be had. But like any debate, it is a waste of time for those who remain closed-minded (on either side of any issue) and only looking for a win.

Consider that the Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago, whereas Man has only been on the scene for about 200,000 years. There is probably a large pool of knowledge that is not available to Man. Based on elapsed time and size of the universe compared to Earth, you'd have to be pretty arrogant to think that Man has anything more than a speck of knowledge. And that is even with the assumption that time is linear. If you allow for screwing with the concept of time, then it gets even worse. What happened before the Big Bang?

Maybe the earth is just a petri dish or set of dishes, where "the creator(s)" used an eye dropper full of pond scum, to see what evolves. Maybe the creator is planning to keep the parts that have certain characteristics, and then flush the rest down the toilet. The truth is that we don't know. It could be possible that the creationists and evolutionists are both right -- or both wrong.

Hopefully, Nye and Ham will have a polite debate that attempts to search for truth, rather than merely trying to win a meaningless "gotcha contest".

Re:Went over my head.

[tripleevenfall]

It's a fact that I'm experiencing this emotion.

Re:UTC?

[Ichijo]

To get eastern time from UTC, subtract 5.

Except when you subtract 4 during DST, or when you're talking about Australian eastern time when you add 10, or 11 during DST. The issue of when DST starts and ends adds even more variables to the question.

That's all a little complicated, so let's just say the debate will start at 19:00 UTC-05:00. Slashdot editors, take note.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it.

[PPH]

The moment a machine is poofed from thin air that solves our food, water and space travel needs

Aliens landed on my lawn and presented me with such a machine. I took it apart.

Not that easy.

[nobuddy]

mediator: each side has 5 minutes.

Opponent: here are 50 unrelated yet complex to explain concepts that I claim are wrong.

You: 5 minute explaination completely destroying item #1. Out of time, so Creationism has "proven" you cannot answer 49 problems with evolution.

Opponent: round 2; here are 50 more, fuckface. good luck.

And?

[nobuddy]

As opposed to "scientists are afraid to debate us! look, no debates accepted in years!"

weeks?

[nobuddy]

Man, where did you find the ones that waited weeks? I'd see them close their argument with the very same claim that had just been destroyed.

Re:weeks?

[Joce640k]

I'd see them close their argument with the very same claim that had just been destroyed.

Video proof for those who doubt this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/user/T...

I hope Nye alters his presence in this debate away

[JezmundBerserker]

My hope is that Nye sides steps the idea of debating Creationism v. Evolution and starts a dialog with Ham about the difference between religion and science. That one of these belongs in a philosophy class and the other belongs in a science class. As other people have noted above there is no way Nye (the guy who is logically and rationally right in my eyes) can win a debate with this guy to the point where anyone who supports Ham will change their mind about Creationism; however maybe he can deflect the conversation to be actually useful. I think the reality is what Danathar posted above said. That.. "You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into." Which I'm sure is all of Ham's section..

No you didn't

[nobuddy]

You cannot be a fundie AND have considered the evidence. the two are mutually exclusive, fundamentalist religion requires the rejection of reality. You may have seen that evidence was available, but chose to reject it unexamined.

Re:No you didn't

[Joce640k]

One of the first things you find out when you debate fundies is that they haven't even read The Bible.

How depressing is that?

Re:Who Cares???

[SleazyRidr]

Yes, that is indeed exactly the point being made. Anyone with any religious belief whatsoever is part of a global conspiracy to take over the world. I'm glad your reading comprehension is good enough to pick up on that.

Re:Went over my head.

[runeghost]

" Galileo wasn't locked up in house arrest for his science, he was locked up for being an ass to the church."

Would you care to cite your source on this? Every text I've read that discusses the reasons for his imprisonment cites his research and statements supporting the heliocentric model, or his refusal to recant those statements. How exactly was he an "ass" to the church?

Obviously, by doing science. :-)

Nope

[nobuddy]

No holes have been poked in either of those. Both stand strong and uncontested in science.
people with an agenda for power and money convince the uneducated such as yourself that there are holes, in exchange you give them money and power.

Actually, yes

[nobuddy]

His website and all the others are in a very incestuous relationship. Anything he says is a parroting of what they have shared with each other. I guarantee every claim you see him make will already be found on every creationist website you can find.

They have nothing new, and refuse to discard what is old and already debunked.

Re:Actually, yes

[mark-t]

When was creationism debunked?

Re:Actually, yes

[david_thornley]

When was Creationism bunked in the first place? Wouldn't it have to be bunked in order to be debunked?

The only way it can be debunked is to refute evidence in its favor. Since there is no evidence that I've ever found*, AFAICT it can't be debunked.

*Note that I do not believe in the literal truth of every passage of every English translation of the Bible, and am prepared to ask uncomfortable questions of those who do.

Oh, you are one of them...

[nobuddy]

Run along. No point in trying to explain physics to you any more than explaining biology to creationists.

I wish we could

[nobuddy]

if YECs would just do their thing and leave the rest of us out of it, no one would care. But they won't. they have been trying for 50 years to take over the school system to spread their gospel.

fact is, you have two different rulebooks here

[swschrad]

which is why it's going to be a mud-wrestle.

on the one hand, you have observable science, discovered facts, and theories that have been verified by science for possibly hundreds of years.

on the other hand, the yardstick is the Bible as God's own inspired word with many scribes.

and they do not coincide. put it down to divine mystery if you prefer, or stubborn obstinacy if you prefer, but at some point there will be a wide divergence that Science answers with theory, and Religion answers with a smile and faith.

I'm not taking my beartrap into that minefield and testing it after it's set. just saying, no minds will be changed...

Bullshit

[nobuddy]

Complete and utter bullshit.
creationism and ID are the same thing. Once creationism was trounced in court, the same people in the same buildings making the same arguments appeared under a new name. Only an idiot would fall for such a transparent ploy.

In his defense

[nobuddy]

He is a smug asshole. he's just very good at what he does.

Re:In his defense

[Anonymous Coward]

He is a smug asshole. he's just very good at what he does.

Unfortunately the thing "he does" is to mislead the public into thinking that practicing science means "being a grumpy bigot who goes out of his way to be unpleasant to people who disagree with you". So far as I can tell he hasn't conducted a proper experiment in 30 years or more (none of his publications since then, even in journals, appear to be scientific experiments rather than opinion pieces grumbling about the influence of religion), and yet he portrays himself as a great scientist; his own pet theory (memes) is an unfalsifiable piece of informal non-science; in the manner in which he speaks, he portrays it as if scientists (as a group) agree with his views on religion when the actual data on that (Eklund et al's studies) is that scientists are religiously very diverse. And he's not averse to making "No True Scotsman" arguments that surely good scientists ought to be atheist and how incredulous he is that he's met one or two that aren't. For those of us working in science, whose publications are about trying to advance the state of our fields rather than railing against people we don't like, and who try to encourage children to take up scientific careers, he's about the worst thing that could have happened.

I prefer better comics

[nobuddy]

Calvin and Hobbes or Dilbert are better comedy sources.

Ask for proof

[nobuddy]

Please point us at the Bible passage that says the Earth is 6000 years old.

hint: you are in for a rude shock. The bible never makes this claim anywhere. It is an entirely man-made claim.
http://www.oldearth.org/questi...

Re:Ask for proof

[Anonymous Coward]

It goes back to Bishop Ussher's chronology, which was based on all the "begats" in the Bible going back to Adam.

As Dick said on 3rd Rock from the Sun while reading the Bible: "These people begat their brains out!"

Re:Ask for proof

[goose-incarnated]

Please point us at the Bible passage that says the Earth is 6000 years old.

hint: you are in for a rude shock. The bible never makes this claim anywhere. It is an entirely man-made claim.

That's because it's an entirely man-made book.

Mr Madison,

[nobuddy]

what you've just said... is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

One side is an opinon

[nobuddy]

the other is proven fact. You cannot change facts, so that only leaves the creationists as possible converts.

Re:Who Cares???

[CanHasDIY]

Yes, that is indeed exactly the point being made. Anyone with any religious belief whatsoever is part of a global conspiracy to take over the world. I'm glad your reading comprehension is good enough to pick up on that.

Hey - if you don't want people to think you're generalizing, don't fucking generalize.

Otherwise you just come off as a holier-than-thou asshole, and most rational people will, at that point, start ignoring you.

Re:Went over my head.

[Sique]

Actually, Galileo Galilei had the explicit permission from the Pope to explore and to research a heliocentric view of the sky, provided he didn't call his own results the absolute truth and any other view false. Also, Galileo Galileis works were never listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, thus the Catholic church never viewed his worldview as heretical. On the other hand, they had to be published with a comment regarding their validity, basicly a disclaimer that this book contains the view of the author, which is not necessarily the accepted doctrine of the Catholic church.

In the 17th century, the Catholic church was very interested in new astronomic research and results, because this was the Age of Discovery, and astronomy was important for the explorers to navigate and to cartograph the world. Everything that improved upon the results of the Ptolemaic view of the solar system was welcome. Recalculating of the Equinoxe lead to the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 in all Catholic states. The results of Copernicus, of Kepler and Tycho Brahe were considered pretty interesting, provided they allowed for a better way to calculate the stellar and planetary positions. When Ole Rømer in 1676 was able to show and calculate, that light has an finite speed using the Galilean Moons, he didn't get any ban from the Catholic church - this was three decades after Galilei's conviction.

Re:Went over my head.

[swv3752]

In "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" he put the ideas of Pope Urban into the dialogue of Simplicio and thereby insulted the Pope.

Five minutes on Wikipedia would have answered your question.

intelligent design question

[deadweight]

Say a "designer" visited a long time ago and let some simple single celled organisms loose. Say he came back and tweaked some hominid DNA to give homo sapiens a little push in the right direction. Why does this have to be the Christian God? Why can't it be the Vulcan Genetic Institute or the Klingon Speciation Company or what-the-hell-else? The literal claims of the Bible are SO far off what we observe they seem to be the LEAST likely way to be Intelligent Designing.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it.

[tompaulco]

That's not the way creationism has worked historically, but that's okay, even when it has worked that way, the beneficiaries stopped believing after only a short time period, so who could blame you for not believing when you have never seen it happen.

Re:Who Cares???

[Kismet]

Well, what are you going to replace it with? Advocates of what some call "scientism" think that science can replace value systems, like religion, when it comes to making decisions about how one should act. In the aftermath of 20th-century megalomania, Eric Hoffer called out the True Believer who, although godless, was nevertheless anything but irreligious.

Will there ever be evidence that anything at all is "good" or meaningful? There are self-styled rational people who want to help others live lives that are free of "delusion" and contribute to the "well-being" of humanity, as if those things were somehow valuable. Yet, when pressed on what exactly well-being consists of, or whether people ought to have it or not, or the point of humanity in the first place, I get the sort of make-believe these people are trying to save me from.

There is no meaning in the universe that isn't utterly make-believe. Our existence is an absurdity; nothing can be proved beyond its physical nature, and there is even a certain tenuousness about that. Perhaps the most dangerous and deluded people of all are the ones who think they are free from delusion because they haven't got religion.

Re:Who Cares???

[SleazyRidr]

Who generalized? Where in any of the posts preceding yours is a generalisation?

head in sand syndrome?

[hurfy]

Lots of new species are discovered.

Here is Time's top ten for 2013. I assume there where more than 10 to choose from last year. PLus prior years. For how ever long you are considering. Must make hundreds of 'new' species. Now convince us ALL of these have ALWAYS been here and noone noticed. Surely some of these new species may actually be NEW.

http://science.time.com/2013/1...

None of those count because you didn't see them arise, right? Just have faith :P

If I was a student of Danny Faulkner...

[hermitdev]

...I'd want my money back. If you listen to his "testimony", he testifies that studying astronomy has "nothing" that contradicts a "recent" earth creation (roughly 6000 years). Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't most astronomy contradict "recent" earth creation? Even with an expanding universe, most observations are at over 10 billion years for the existence of the universe (roughly 4.5B for the Earth, itself). So, does "god" have gas, brake & clutch pedals? He floored it for the first 6 days, slammed on the brakes, swerved, while hitting the clutch?

(not having watched the entire video yet) I hope Bill Nye asks (Ham) point blank: Why do you insist on a creator that dictates natural laws, rather than just accepting a supernatural being created the universe. (assuming said supernatural being did, in fact, create the universe, what created the supernatural being? what does he/she/it exist? Turtles all the way down...).

"Evidence confirming an INTELLIGENCE produced life". It would seem to me that blinding accepting without independently observable proof that anyone accepting his (Ham) evidence would be inherently lacking intelligence. Intelligence requires critical thinking that judges the available evidence. And no, superstition is not evidence. It needs to be independently observable.

This fallacy again?

[dbIII]

At one time, you'd have been laughed out of a room of distinguished scientists for rejecting geocentricity.

At the time you speak of you wouldn't have even been laughed out of a room of distinguished clergymen - the Cardinals vote on Galileo was close to a tie. Of course that was also long before anyone was called a scientist.

I suppose it's appropriate to bring up something from so long ago though because we're writing about a bunch that want to rewind back three or more centuries to before it was widely accepted what fossils were.

To me this is tricksters versus logic and the truly amusing thing is that the tricksters would be considered heretics back in the time they want to drag us back into. Those closed minded groups only exist because everyone else was open minded - they are a bunch of radicals that pretend to be conservative to excuse being stubborn. They give Christianity a bad name.

Re:Went over my head.

[dbIII]

He made fun of the Pope.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... :
"a ponderous Aristotelian named Simplicio, who employed stock arguments in support of geocentricity, and was depicted in the book as being an intellectually inept fool."
"Pope Urban's demand for his own arguments to be included in the book resulted in Galileo putting them in the mouth of Simplicio".

Link to the video

[codepigeon]

I could not find this in a search. Here is a link to the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The Value

[fyngyrz]

Actually, I simply think there is no reason to engage in this particular debate because it is of no value

But it is of value. Look back a few decades; remember how repressed and "in the closet" atheism was? Most kids were inculcated with religion by default because that's all that really made it into the public square.

Now, through the auspices of high profile objectors like these, and the rising tide of audibility on the networks, tons of kids know that theism is a subject of great controversy, not one that is settled, as the religionists would very much like them to believe.

The huge holes in theistic reasoning are now on the table, and subject to dissection by some of the finest minds out there. Baseless-assumptions-as-axioms are revealed for what they are; the cries of "but you don't know how X happened" are revealed as minefields constructed by the god of the gaps ideas; the idea that it is ok to have questions with no obvious answer is beginning to percolate about the population without inspiring fear. No longer do all citizens feel that they have to profess a theistic viewpoint in order to be socially adequate. Even the false middle ground of agnosticism is eroding, and all of this is not just good, it's great.

No, a debate like this probably won't move a single member of its local audience to the opposite view; but it serves to strengthen the atheist standing and presence in the community and that makes it very valuable indeed. Here, on Reddit, etc., this debate is very much an important topic right now, in the sense that lots and lots of attention is focused that way. All good, my friend, all good.

Nye is being used by Ham

[EdwardSTL]

Ham's organization is cash strapped. Attendance to his fake museum fall off year after year and his Ark project is stalled due to a serious lack of funding. The debate was nothing more than a tool for Ham to gin up his crazies into giving him money. Unfortunately Nye fell right into it. Nye should have taken this piece of advise from Ham's most valued scientific text. "Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, ” Matthew 7:6 Unfortunately Nye's attempt to spread the truth may have done more damage than good by pumping more money into Ham's abomination.

It's a dirty job and somebody has to do it ...

[quax]

... but I'd rather stick a needle in my eye than listen to that debate.

Anyhow, I am not done yet with reviewing the medieval debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Re:Who Cares???

[tibit]

Science isn't there to replace value systems, but you don't need to believe in any higher being just to be a good person and not a prick.

Re:Who Cares???

[CanHasDIY]

Who generalized? Where in any of the posts preceding yours is a generalisation?

...religion isn't just a harmless social thing... They're in government... They're trying to... They get...

If that's not a generalization, I've somehow ended up in an alternate dimension where words have different definitions.

Re:Went over my head.

[Alsee]

I don't where you heard that story, but it's loaded with factual errors. It's an utter apologetics whitewash of a number of extremely embarrassing facts.

February 19, 1616 An Inquisition commissioned theologians to prepare a formal report on the heliocentric view of the universe.

February 24 1616 the unanimous report concluded that a stationary Sun and moving earth is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture ".

February 25 1616 The Pope declares an an order for Galileo to "abandon this doctrine, not to teach it to others, not to defend it, and not to treat of it", and threatens stronger action if Galileo did not comply.

February 26 1616 Galileo receives the order: "to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it... to abandon completely... the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing".

March 5 1616 The Pope ordered a complete ban on any book advocating the moving Earth model on the basis that it was "altogether contrary to Holy Scripture". This ban was not limited to Galileo's work, but also included Kepler's work, Copernicus's work, and any such work in general.

Next we jump ahead to 1632, two Popes later. Galileo has a good relationship with the new Pope. Galileo wants to write a new book, and the Pope demands that his geocentric arguments be included. So apparently the Pope knew of and consented to a new book. The Pope's garbage geocentric arguments naturally get demolished in the book, and the character who presented them came off looking foolish. The new Pope takes it personally, and orders the new book banned.

Galileo is then brought to trial "for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world", in violation of the 1616 order.

Galileo is threatened with torture and interrogated.

June 22 1633 The Inquisition finds Galileo guilty of Heresy for teaching that the Earth moves after a moving Earth had been explicitly declared contrary to Holy Scripture. Galileo was sentenced to prison, which was reduced to house arrest. Furthermore the Inquisition bans the publication of anything ever published by Galileo, whether it deals with the solar system or not.

January 8 1642 Galileo dies, after a 9 year life-sentence arrest.

1835 Galileo's work is finally removed from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, after more than 200 years of being on the Church's prohibited list.

1992 Pope John Paul II finally issues a public vindication of Galileo and acknowledgement of the Church's fuckup:
"Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture. "

Note that "theologians of the time" refers to the official position of the Church and at least two Popes who attacked Galileo. And "they maintained the centrality of the Earth" refers to their insistence that the Earth is the center of the universe and does not move because Bible says the Earth does not move, and the Bible is the infallible word of God.

And I don't think this would really be complete without pointing out exactly why the Church declared that the Bible stated the Sun orbits a non-moving Earth. That includes, but not necessarily limited to:

Psalm 104:5 (English Standard Version)
He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.

1

Re:Who Cares???

[Kismet]

You don't need to believe in a higher being, it is true; but you must believe in something.

Undecidable (type 1)

[FreedomFirstThenPeac]

Just as in mathematics there are things that are undecidable. The real question is not whether evolution exists, it is whether god exists and if so, did it create the universe yesterday, last Thursday, 6,000 years ago, 13.7B years ago, -Aleph0 years ago, in parallel or in series, as a quantum (over the Rational), or continuous (over the Reals) space.

Myself, I think the universe exists as a serial expression of all possible states in a countable universe (-Aleph0 to Aleph0 in every direction, x,y,z,t, others) and we travel through it as an information set on top of that universe, with the possibility that we can exercise free will over that countable universe using randomness generated over the Reals, not over the Rationals. That makes our decisions unpredictable in every sense, even if our choices are countably infinite. But that is actionable (it gives me a foundation for making decisions) but not testable (yet). It may never be testable.

Re:And he's met neither of you.

[Zalbik]

No, I actively believe there are no gods. The same as I actively believe there is no Santa Claus (spoiler alert), no Bigfoot, and no highest prime number.

I actively believe that there are no entities in the universe with supernatural powers. This pretty much eliminates any reasonable definition of "gods".

Evolution is misunderstood

[iMactheKnife]

I'm writing an S.F. novel, "The Sage of Saggitarius" ,that features an enhanced woman, Zila, searching for the "secret of life" with the aid and funding of a very unhuman sentient over a thousand years old.

I've done years or research on evolution. The modern basis is molecular biology, not fossils, and the key constructs are the conserved genes that are 100 million years old. Evolution turns out not to be "survival of the fittest" because no one can define fitness with all the implication of the relationships among the environment, competitors, predators and their feedback loops. These are impenetrable webs of non-linear equations. Fitness landscapes probably exist, but most of the hill climbing leads to dead ends. And what happens when a particular species, such as humans, is no longer dependent on a particular fitness niche?

The work of Jeffrey England may be the great breakthrough. He sees evolution as part and parcel of of entropy. It cannot be observed by examining instances. It's an emergent phenomenon, like entropy itself. Life serves the Tree of Life. Evolution serves entropy.

These are not easy things to explain, and perhaps harder to understand.

First Impressions - Not Much of a Debate

[Carcass666]

I got through the first 2/3 of this, and gave up after Ham kept repeating the same themes:

• That we cannot observe the past, and that science should be divided into "operational" and "historical" science. Ham did not explicitly state he does not accept that we can observe the speed of light, but in doing so he would have discredited his point about not being able to observe the past (i.e. every time you look up in the night sky).
• Ham seemed to infer that if you are not directly observing an event as its happening, the best you can do is to find an authoritative reference (i.e. the Bible). He explicitly rejected the idea that continuity of natural law could be used to infer history (i.e. rings of trees or ice strata can be used to determine age).
• Nye a few times offered points that are testable (i.e. find a fossil swimming through rock strata, that sort of thing), whereas Ham admittedly started with the Bible as absolute truth, and then inferred history from there.
• I did learn about the creationist concept of "kinds" - which basically said that all current species were bred (not evolved) from 1,000 base "kinds". Nye pointed out the math of the millions of species that would have appeared after the flood, which was ignored by Ham (at least as far as I got in the video). The concept of "kinds" as an origin for current species sounds like a big cop-out. It basically exists to validate the Noah story.

On the other hand, I'm not sure Nye was that great of a counterpoint. He focused far too much on the flood, I suppose because if creationists start from the Bible as absolute truth, and infer creation from that, disproving any part of the Bible would disprove creation. I don't think it's effective. The idea of "creation" is not predicated upon the flood actually happening and an ark; attacking the flood only rebuts the Bible as an authoritative source, there are plenty of other myths and legends of spontaneous creation. I am guessing that Nye's very valid point that splitting science into "observable" and "historical" is bogus was lost upon the attendees that were creationist-friendly. So was the point that non-testable beliefs are not science.

For me, this was a discouraging insight into the mindset of a religion I had walked away from. These people feel free to hijack terms, ignore evidence that leads to conclusions they don't agree with, and do so only so they can try and feel superior over their secular countrymen and co-opt education. If you don't believe science supports a truth that you don't believe in, fine. Science does not answer all questions. But don't wrap scholarly terminology around bogus arguments and call it science. I will return the favor and not call my lack of belief in the divine a religion.

I am very disappointed

[TsuruchiBrian]

I am very disappointed because I am an atheist and a science enthusiast, and I feel like Ken Ham actually won this debate. I don't think he is right about Christianity or the bible. I think he argued his point in a way that was better than Bill Nye. I think the points Ken Ham brought up were flawed, but I thought they at least attempted to answer the right questions. I felt Bill Nye's answers seemed to indicate that he didn't even really understand what Ken Ham was saying.

As an example, Ken Ham was forced to repeat over and over that he did not think that the assumption that natural laws were constant was correct. Bill Nye kept pooring on more examples of how science, which inherently makes this assumption (e.g. that radioactive decay rate has remained the same) shows that Ken Ham is wrong, but it doesn't. This debate should have taken a philosophical turn towards the question of whether it's reasonable to assume natural laws are constant. If Bill had said "I just don't accept that this could be possible", I would be ok with it, but it seemed like Bill Nye was unaware that this was where the debate was going.

I just don't think Bill Nye is a good debater, nor do I think he has the expertise to really make his points confidently. I saw Bill Nye debate Richard Lindzen in a short TV segment, and Bill Nye just seemed like a climate change believer/cheerleader rather than someone who actually knew anything about climate change.

There is nothing more frustrating than watching someone argue a position you hold badly.

All over the internet I see people proclaiming that Bill Nye won the debate, but that's only because he was on the side that they agree with (and presumably still agree with). He did not really present any arguments that, if I were a young earth creationist, I would find even remotely convincing or even thought provoking. He seemed just to regurgitate the same statements about how science is great without actually meeting Ken Ham's claims head on. He seemed to not even understand Ken Ham's attacks on a philosophical level.

If you want to see an example of how I think these debates should have been conducted (from the secular point of view), I would refer you to debates between Dan Dennett and various theologians. Dan is a really great thinker and the people he debates (while wrong), are people who would probably destroy Bill Nye in a debate.

I will say that at the end, I was satisfied with Bill Nye's answer to the question about Evolution and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. He correctly brought up the fact that earth is not a closed system. And I was happy that he ended by stressing the point that what makes "normal (i.e. secular) science" different from Ken Ham's brand of creationism in terms of "historical science", is that normal science makes predictions that turn out to be true. Ken Ham's citations of predictions made by creationism are only back formations. He can't come up with any examples of predictions that were not known to be true when they were made. It's easy to say that the Bible predicted everything we see today. The way to test a prediction is to make a new one that isn't known to be true yet.

I think Ken Ham is an interesting debater, and I'd love to see him debate someone a little more clever than Bill Nye

Re:I am very disappointed

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

I am very disappointed because I am an atheist and a science enthusiast,[...] This debate should have taken a philosophical turn towards the question of whether it's reasonable to assume natural laws are constant.

Well the idea that natural laws ar constant is the very basis of science. So if you go into debate about that it becomes (as you state correctly) a philosophical debate. It would appear to the viewer then that believing in the existence of natuaral law is a question of opinion. That it simply is a point of view. And that is exactly what creationists are stating. They say: hey why don't we get the chance to represent our point of view in the classroom? Our ideas are just as valid and scientifically sound.
So then the debate is lost. The only thing you can do as a scientist is to point to all those things are all consistent with natural law and totally inconsistent with the idea that natural law change over time. And then you force your opponent to say things like: "Ok, yes there are more than 6000 year rings in that tree but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's more 6000 years old!".
The people that cannot draw their own conclusion from that they are already convinced creationists and will never be converted anyway. The rest may have something to think about.

Don't get me wrong: I was also a bit frustrated at first but the more I reflect on it the more I think he did an excellent job of not falling in any pitfalls were you end up with a Yes/No discussion (which is a win for creationism as explained above) and at the same time forcing Ham to show his true face: a bible studier that will accept only "evidence" that supports his cause and nothing else.

Re:I am very disappointed

[TsuruchiBrian]

It would appear to the viewer then that believing in the existence of natuaral law is a question of opinion. That it simply is a point of view. And that is exactly what creationists are stating. They say: hey why don't we get the chance to represent our point of view in the classroom? Our ideas are just as valid and scientifically sound.

In this respect I thought it was good that Bill Nye brought up the difference that creationism really makes no useful predictions in the way that normal science does. I would have maybe attacked his assertions that creationism *has* made predictions that have come true, on the basis that these examples were made after the fact to try to fit the bible.

I would have also attacked the assertion that creationism and science are compatible because of all the examples of creationism and scientists. Just because you find an examples of creationist scientists doesn't mean that these two concepts are compatible. I agree with what you said:

Well the idea that natural laws ar constant is the very basis of science

And I might have "fallen into the trap" that Ken Ham would probably want me to in saying that Materialism, Naturalism, and constancy of natural laws is the religion of science. It is the axioms (i.e. the things we believe without evidence), analogous to how christians might believe the Bible, or muslims the Quran, as a starting axiom. In this qualitative respect I think religion and science are similar. Where I think they differ is the sheer quantity of utility. Science produces seemingly infinitely more useful predictions and discoveries compared with traditional religion. Does this mean it is "truth"? That is a philosophical question.

So if you go into debate about that it becomes (as you state correctly) a philosophical debate

I think this is the natural place for this debate to go. You are not going to convince a creationist based on a materialist argument, and you are not going to convince an atheist based on a theological argument. Let's go to the place where these ideas can actually be pitted against each other in a meaningful way. Philosophy is important for this very reason. We can do science or do religion, but I think philosophy provides clarity into why we should or shouldn't or want to do these things. I think my point of view is right, but I want to see it tested. Maybe it's wrong. Even if my point of view is essentially right, these sorts of debates can expose weaknesses and help to refine my point of view.

The only thing you can do as a scientist is to point to all those things are all consistent with natural law and totally inconsistent with the idea that natural law change over time. And then you force your opponent to say things like: "Ok, yes there are more than 6000 year rings in that tree but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's more 6000 years old!".

All it takes is for a different creationists to say "We redid the biblical calculations and it turns out the Bible predicts the world is 10,000 years old, so the tree rings make sense.". For me it is not enough to just attack these things based on evidence, because they will always just fit the evidence to their book and say that their book predicted everything correctly. We need to attack this way of thinking. We need to expose this old trick for what it is. And we need to go into philosophy to do it.

The people that cannot draw their own conclusion from that they are already convinced creationists and will never be converted anyway. The rest may have something to think about.

Lots of people can see through the bullshit and figure it out. Lots of people can't. I think that by clarifying and strengthening the argument, more people will be able to see that religion is bullshit. I think eventually this will happen on it's own, but I think the faster we reach this tipping point, the better off we w

Re:I am very disappointed

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

I am not worried about secularists being converted back to religion.

I think you underestimate what is at stake here. Isn't the background of this debate that creationism is getting serious foothold in science classes in certain partst of the US? This is why Bill referred to the 'viewers' and 'voters'. His message was clear: do you really want this kind of crap to be thought as science in science classes? This is about a generation that will have trouble distinguishing between science and just an opinion that is not based on any facts. And we see this confusion already around us (the global warming debate??)

So I don't see the point in playing it safe.

Well he didn't. He played it very well both tactically as strategically. When you start from the mindset "we have much better agruments as the others" you will communicate this attitude to your audience. Your opponent will use this to point out "look he clings to his oppinion and is deaf for anything else and then he accuses me of exactly that same thing!". In a debate tactics and strategy are very important. You have to understand: a lot of people judge the outcome purely based on the impression they got. Bill gave the impression of having a lot of facts and figures and spoke with a lot of authority. Ham spoke also with a lot of authority when he was citing the Bible, but not when talking about science.

What Bill did was simply pointing out: there is simply too much proof to ignore and your theory is not a theory at all. Its a story without any reasoning behind it.

And as you remarked in your original post: it worked very well. He made a much better impression than Ham.

Re:I am very disappointed

[TsuruchiBrian]

I think you underestimate what is at stake here. Isn't the background of this debate that creationism is getting serious foothold in science classes in certain partst of the US?

It seemed like this might be happening a few years ago. But since then it has been defeated in courts every time it comes up. Even in the most conservative states, creationists are having a very hard time getting it into science classrooms, due to people on the other side putting up a very good fight.

You have to understand: a lot of people judge the outcome purely based on the impression they got. Bill gave the impression of having a lot of facts and figures and spoke with a lot of authority.

As an atheist I got the impression that Bill had lots of facts and figures and not much understanding of what the debate was really about. I thought Ken knew what the debate was about, but he was just on the wrong side. If I were a creationist I think I would feel pretty bolstered by this.

What Bill did was simply pointing out: there is simply too much proof to ignore and your theory is not a theory at all. Its a story without any reasoning behind it.

I thought Ken actually did a really good job for his side on this topic. Ken wasn't saying that his position was right, he was saying that Bill's position was no more valid than his. Bill kept relying on radioactive isotope dating as proof of the age of the earth, and Ken said over and over again, that he does not consider the assumption that radioactive isotopes have always decayed at the same rate to be valid, upon which this evidence depends. Rather than giving a reason to believe in the constancy of natural laws, Bill just seemed like he didn't know why we should believe this, and just repeated himself, ignoring Ken's argument. To me this makes him look weak. It makes it look like science has no reasoning behind it (even though it does).

He made a much better impression than Ham.

I think he made a better impression on people who were already on his side. I think Ken probably made a better impression on people who might have been on the fence. He made a better impression on me, and I'm an atheist.

I think Bill knows which side of the argument is correct (i.e. science). I don't think he necessarily as a clear idea of why it's correct, and I think that's why he's a bad debater. He knows a lot of things, but I don't think he is a good critical thinker. As I said, if you want to see someone debate religious people you should see Dan Dennett do it. He doesn't just engage in a shouting match and try to be the loudest. He actually asks very poignant questions of people on the other side that they have trouble answering. He is very good at articulating points that plant seeds of doubt that are very hard to dismiss. He is even good at debating other atheists. This is the kind of person we need to be advocating our position.

First define the topics.

[buildupthekingdom]

First define the topics. It is the THEORY of Evolution and the THEORY of Creationism. To declare eother as fact is not science. Science fact is observable, demostratable, repeatable. So since neither can do all 3, they are theories. I see the element of discussion is Faith. Do you believe in random progress, or intelligent design.

Re:First define the topics.

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

First define the topics. It is the THEORY of Evolution and the THEORY of Creationism. To declare eother as fact is not science. Science fact is observable, demostratable, repeatable. So since neither can do all 3, they are theories. I see the element of discussion is Faith. Do you believe in random progress, or intelligent design.

It's probably hopeless but I'll try anyway. Evolution is not a theory. It is a fact. If you look at the fossils and you place them in time you see how they ... evolved (there is no better word for it) from a very simple species to ever more diverse and complex.

Then there is the theory of evolution that tries to explain this observations. If you don't believe the theory you still need (as a scientist) to explain this evolution with a new evolution theory. But the evolution is there and remains there.

And you can say: yes but it was God (or an intelligent designer) that created all this variaty. The problem is: we know the mechanism for all this evolution: genetics.

Through genetic analysis we can find traces of previous species from which we (or any other annimal) has evolved. So now you intelligent designer is reduced to generating a few changes in the genetic material in the course of millions of years. Not an efficent designer and he certainly didn't do much better than introducing random changes.

Re:Went over my head.

[Sique]

You are talking about the process against Foscarini, which was about his book "Lettera sopra l'Opinione de'Pittagorici, e del Copernico della Mobilità della Terra, e Stabilità del Sole, e del Nuove Pittagorica Systema del Mondo", which indeed was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1616. In this process, Galileo Galilei was merely a bystander, and exactly here he got the letter from Robert Bellarmin, the inquisitor in the process, to continue his studies - provided he declared his works a mere hypothesis, as I wrote before.

Banned in this process was Foscarini's book, a book of Johannes Kepler and some other works about the Copernician stellar system, but not "De revolutionibus" by Copernicus itself, which got suspended instead. That means that within the reach of the Roman Inquisition, it could only be published with a comment that explained that this was just a mathematical model. No book by Galileo Galilei was affected. But his old supporter, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, became the new pope Urbanus VIII in 1623. Thus, while his work Saggiatore was anonymously accused of Atomism, a report by Padre Giovanni Guevaras exonerated Galileo Galilei.

Also, the original accusation in the process of 1633 were Atomism again and herecy with regard to the Last Supper, but papal iudicaries changed it into teaching Coperincanism and disobedience, quite a difference. What we have here is not a confrontation of the Catholic Church vs. Galileo Galilei, but a church-internal feud between different theological groups about the interpretation of the Holy Bible and its relation to recent astronomical discoveries, where Galileo Galilei was more or less a prominent figure, who one side wanted to exemplarily convicted and the other side wanted him protected.

I agree that none of this is scientific behaviour, but given the situation of Michael Mann, who one side of the climate debate wants to convicted of fraud and the other side wants him protected, we aren't any better.

Both have some decent points...

[carpus]

As a scientist and parent, the most profound takeaway that is most likely to ruffle the most feathers:
    * We can only know what we have observed and kept track of
        (and even that is subject to our interpretations and limitations on observation)

We have between 50 and a few hundred years of documented scientific observation, depending on the area of focus. We have belief that the world environment has never changed, and many assumptions about things we have not tested and verified (or cannot). As a scientist, I don't care whether you believe in creation or some other explanation. But let's not ruin science by misclassifying theories as law. We cannot expect the next generation to think critically if we refuse to teach them attention to detail and proper coefficients of faith in sources of information. At the end of the debate, we all place faith in something.

Computer science has suffered from something we find largely in the general scientific world: avoiding the discussion by calling the opponent "stupid" in whatever terms and language chosen.

St. Augustine got it right... over 1500 years ago:

[flyhigher]

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

“If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

– St. Augustine of Hippo, 5th Century AD (considered by some Protestants to be one of the theological fathers of the Reformation)

- See more at: http://truecreation.info/