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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.
Will be a divine creation.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's not a debate, it's an episode of American Gladiators without the pugli sticks.
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.
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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.
damn it! bracket kill
Nye: (scientific facts)
Ham: You're wrong (bible verse without context)
Nye: (scientific facts)
Ham: (something about the devil)
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.
No sig today...
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.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Why I won't debate creationists:
http://old.richarddawkins.net/...
I couldn't agree more.
Oh I don't know, it kind of worked the first way...
What do you know I wrote a novel
...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.
No sig today...
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.
Ham on Nye.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
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.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I hope this does[n't] end up like the last debate between science and creationism:
http://www.websitesonadime.com...
--Joe
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Well, it seems true so I'm going to claim it is because it feels right.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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.
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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.
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.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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".
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.
He is a smug asshole. he's just very good at what he does.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I could not find this in a search. Here is a link to the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
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.
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.
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
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.