Two antagonists squared off Tuesday night in a debate between creation versus evolution. It is a debate that will likely not be settled until doomsday, whenever that is. Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis, which teaches a literal 6000 year creation, said that nobody would ever change his mind. Bill Nye, "Bill the Science Guy," a long-time scientist and TV personality, was just as adamant. "Show me the evidence," he said at one point. Obviously, in his book, Mr. Ham's logic did not come even close to convincing him.
Ham said that it was a matter of science being hijacked by what he called "secularists" and drew a distinction between historical and observational science. By failing to draw that distinction, Ham accused certain people with a "secularist agenda" of forcing a belief system on kids in schools that denies a Biblical worldview. "They say that man just evolved from animals, while the Bible promises man eternal life," said Ham. He asserted that since we weren't there, we were not in a position to say, for instance, that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. But Ham said that since the Bible was written by eyewitnesses, we could rely on it. But Nye refused to accept a distinction between historical and observational science. "It's like [TV show] Crime Scene Investigation, where they put the scenes together and piece together who committed the crime," he said. Nye challenged what he called Ham's "remarkable" views of the worldwide flood. "Try taking a sapling and having it grow underwater for a year," he said. He said that if the flood had really happened, there would have been animals near the top of the flood plain in the Grand Canyon frantically trying to swim to safety. But in fact, he says the observational evidence shows that they lived a natural lifespan. Nye said that it was not a matter of attacking religion. "There are billions of religious people on this planet and most of them do not accept a 6000-year creation," said Nye.
Ham said that it was totally possible to be either an atheist or a creationist and still be a successful scientist. At the start of the debate, each side had a 30-minute presentation. In Ham's presentation, he played film clips of various scientists who had invented things who were literal creationists. Ham said that secular scientists committed acts of faith all the time when they assumed that certain scientific laws would hold. Nye countered that was because they were based on what has already been discovered; for instance, the laws of gravity.
Ham questioned how Nye could come up with a hypothesis that could exclude God when he didn't observe the past like we do the present. "None of us saw how the Grand Canyon formed," said Ham, a point he made over and over again throughout the debate. "You weren't there." Ham said that he and Nye looked at the same bodies of evidence and came to different conclusions. "It's really about your worldview," said Ham. "For me, God is the ultimate authority." Ham said that the problem in schools is that kids were not being taught to think critically about science. He said that observations simply confirm one's starting point.
Ham said that all naturalist Charles Darwin proved was that there was evolution within the species, not evolution from one species to another. Instead, Ham said that according to the Bible, God created each animal "after its kind," a statement in Genesis that he says is born out through science. For instance, over time, dogs can evolve into other species of dogs, but not into some other kind of animal. "Dogs will always give birth to dogs and cats will always give birth to cats," he said. Since nobody, according to Ham, ever observed an animal evolving into another kind of animal, that meant that to say that evolution is true is just an act of faith. "But people are always accusing us of trying to teach religion in schools," he said.
Whereas Darwin believed that there were lower and higher races of man, Ham said that has been demonstrably disproved by the Human Genome Project, which proved categorically that there is only one human race. Yet Ham said that the science of today is based on Darwin's ideas. On the other hand, Ham said that the Bible really promoted equality through the teaching that we are all descended from Adam and Eve. "This confirms creation and not evolution," said Ham. "Secularists do not like to admit the belief aspect of their worldview."
In the final analysis, Ham said that it was a battle of authority -- man or God. If man's ethic prevailed, Ham said that the next question could be, "Why not get rid of old people?" He said that whether one believed in Biblical creationism or evolution through random processes affected the way one lived their lives.
For his 30-minute presentation, Nye referred to the geology of Kentucky, where the debate was being held. "There is layer on layer of limestone in Kentucky," he said. In many of those layers, there were coral animals, Nye noted. He said that they had lived their natural lives, something which he said would not have been possible had there been a catastrophic flood. Nye said that the problem with the recent catastrophic flood model was that there was not enough time for those layers to accumulate.
Another piece of evidence Nye presented was the layers of ice that were found when scientists tapped into the Greenland ice. They counted 680,000 layers of ice; since each layer of ice takes one year to form, that ice shelf had been there for well before the flood. He said that for Ham's thesis to be true, there would have had to have been 170 cycles of winter and summer per year, something that is not happening.
Trees, said Nye, are another piece of evidence against a catastrophic flood. Every tree has one ring for every year that it ages. Nye said that there were some bristlecone pines in California that were 6,800 years old and there was a tree in Sweden that is around 9,500 years old, something that would not have been possible had there been a catastrophic flood.
Nye said that one thing that geologists study is the rate at which soil settles. Based on the rate at which soil is deposited, Nye said that the Grand Canyon could not possibly have been formed in the 4,000 year period after the flood; furthermore, if there had been a flood, there would have been Grand Canyons all over the place and not just in Arizona.
Another problem with the creation flood account, according to Nye, is the fact that there are animals in Australia. "How did they get from the Middle East to Australia after the flood?" asked Nye, saying that had that been the case, there would have been remains found along the way of Kangaroos. "There would have had to have been a land bridge to Australia," he said.
Another problem with the flood account, according to Nye, was the logistics of building an arc big enough to house even 7,000 "kinds" of animals. Since there are around 16 million species of animals today, Nye said that in order for Ham's model to work, there would have had to have been 11 new species of "kinds" every day. But in fact, Nye noted that we are losing species every year. "Noah would have had to have gotten 7,000 pairs of animals onboard the ark and found a way to feed them for a year," said Nye, citing what he said was the impossibility of Noah's task. And then, said Nye, there was the matter of building a ship that would not leak in the middle of a storm of that nature, something even modern shipbuilders have a hard time doing. By contrast, Nye gave the example of the Washington DC zoo, which has 400 species of animals housed in 163 acres.
By contrast with Ham's model, Nye said that science was about being able to make predictions and test those predictions. Contrary to Ham's assertion that there were no transitional forms, Nye said that there were some being found all the time; for instance, the tiktaalik, a fish-lizard transitional form found right where scientists predicted it would be found. He explained that science was about making predictions all the time; for instance, being able to predict that a spacecraft would be able to launch into space or what would be needed to care for an elephant. "Ham can't make predictions and demonstrate results based on those predictions," said Nye.
Nye digressed into a history of the Big Bang Theory, which he said was based on observation. Edwin Hubble, an astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, noticed that the stars were moving apart from each other. Another scientist, Fred Hoyle, suggested that the reason for Hubble's observed phenomena was that there had been a Big Bang Theory and hypothesized where it had originated. Sure enough, said Nye, subsequent radio observations found the point exactly where Hoyle said it was going to be. From there, Nye noted that they were able to determine the earth's age to be 13.7 billion years.
The age of the earth, said Nye, was derived from studying volcanoes. After a volcano erupts, molten lava freezes and locks rubidium and strontium into place. Based on these rocks, Nye said that scientists can tell that the earth is four billion years old. And on top of that, Nye said that there were billions of stars that were more than 6,000 light years away; scientists measure angles of the earth at different times of the year to determine the distance of stars.
Ham said that there was one problem with Nye's logic -- he was not there. But when you add up the time after Christ died and the timeline of Biblical history, you come up with 6,000 years. Others have come up with different results; for instance, the controversial preacher Harold Camping, who predicted the end of the world in 1994 and later in 2011, believed based on the Bible that the earth was around 17,000 years old. Ham said that there were hundreds of methods that have been used over the years to date items and all of them yielded different results. For instance, he said that different methods used on a new lava dome around Mount Saint Helens in Washington yielded results of anywhere between 0.35 million years old to 2.8 millions years old.
The problem with accepting an earth that is millions or billions of years old, said Ham was the fact of sin and death. In Ham's view of creation, death came into the world following Adam and Eve's sin when God killed an animal to clothe them. On the other hand, an old earth view of creation, said Ham, would have meant that death and suffering were on the planet well before Adam and Eve fell. By contrast with the hundreds of dating methods used, Ham said that the Bible could be regarded as infallible history because "they were there."
But Nye said that relying on the Bible in modern English as a history guide was like playing a game of telephone in first grade, when the original message and the final message might be two different things. He said that the Bible had changed constantly from its original form. Contrary to Ham's assertions, Nye said that science could observe the past; since a light year is the distance light travels in a year, scientists observe an object 6,000 light years away as it was 6,000 years ago. "Are we supposed to take your word over what we can observe in our own backyards," Nye asked Ham.
Ham said that they had been working on a model of Noah's ark and that they could have fit around 1,000 different kinds of animals. "That only makes it worse," said Nye. "Then, they create 30-40 new species per day." Ham said that one problem with the speed of light was the "horizon problem." In a nutshell, scientists found that radiation levels at opposite points 13 billion light years away were exactly the same. Scientists have been able to explain the horizon problem with the inflation theory, which scientists say caused the Big Bang through gravitational repulsion. This repulsion makes the universe expand at an accelerating pace, something that is still happening today.
Nye said that for Ham's theory of historical science to be true, something would have had to drastically change in the laws of physics. He challenged Ham to show how natural law had changed in the last 4,000 years. By contrast, Nye said that the Pyramids had been built before the time that the flood had supposedly occurred; he said that there were human civilizations with traditions that stretched far before the time that the flood had occurred.
In all likelihood, this is one of these debates that will not be settled anytime soon regardless of whether you think evolution is logical or illogical. For a simple debate, this one created a major Twitter frenzy, with the hashtag "Ken Ham" trending. There were people who felt strongly on both sides and the debate was live streamed on several different websites.
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