Matt Stopera went to the Nye/Ham debate, and gave the creationist attendees a chance to speak their minds: he let them write a question on a sign for Bill Nye and then took pictures of them. These are perfectly ordinary, cheerful people who have no problem expressing their views.

The results will make you just want to stop the world and get off.

Might as well — we’ll see if this embedded video actually works when the countdown is complete, and then we’ll comment as it goes.

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Before the debate starts, I looked around a bit for opening statements, to get an idea of how the debate will go. Bill Nye has given away his strategy: he’s focusing on the actual debate question, Is creation a viable model of origins?, and plans to talk about how creationism is useless for leading us to new ideas and testing models experimentally. That’s good. That’s a solid foundation he can ‘win’ on. Ken Ham, on the other hand, is talking about how there is observational science (true science), and historical science, which is not only a totally bogus distinction using criteria invented by creationists, but doesn’t even answer the debate question. Expect much talking past each other. Nye will talk about science appropriately. Ham will be blowing dogwhistles for his audience of true believers.

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Called it. In Ham’s opening statement, he trots out this nonsense about historical and observational science; claims that atheists have hijacked the word “science”. He also brings out a video of an engineer who is a creationist, therefore creationists can be scientists. Too bad he couldn’t find a real biologist.

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Nye’s opening statement: he’s got five minutes. Why is he going on and on about bow ties?

Oh, good: he’s going straight for Ham’s premise, talking about how CSI makes no distinction between historical and observational science. It’s all about studying events in the past using evidence in the now — great example!

Talking about billions of believers who do not accept Ken Ham’s view — also a good idea to carve Ham away from his self-mounted pedestal as the representative of gods.

Bow ties were worrisome, but he’s off to a good start.

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Now we get 30 minutes of Ham. Right off: video of Raymond Damadian, one of the contributors to the development of the MRI, who declares himself a biblical creationist who believes in a 600 year old earth. Then we get a video of Danny Faulkner, an astronomer who works for AiG, who claims that nothing in “observational science” contradicts the bible. He mentions again the engineer from the opening, Stuart Burgess, who works on satellites, and we get another video from him.

So far, there’s nothing but evidence by assertion and authority. These guys have no relevance to the question, and one is an in-house crank paid by AiG.

Christ. More historical vs. observational science. Is this all he’s got, testimonials and invented distinctions in science? Nye effectively shot those down with his CSI example.

You weren’t there. This is all he’s got, isn’t it? So he’s just going to repeat it over and over.

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Now Ham is claiming that he and Bill Nye use the same evidence, and just have different interpretations. NO! Ham selectively ignores almost all of the evidence. He’s simply lying here.

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Oh, god. Now he’s claiming he has evidence confirming the bible stories: evidence that intelligence produced life, that creatures reproduce after their kind, that there was a global flood…wait a minute. No, he doesn’t have evidence for that.

He’s getting specific. The biblical “kind” is equivalent to the Linnaean taxonomic category of family. He’s also claiming that there are limits — dogs will always be dogs. He cites a recent paper on dog evolution, showing a diagram of a tree generated from the genomic data, and then claims the collection of squiggles creationists draw of trees of descent (with a discontinuity at the Flood) are the same! No, this is so sleazy. The dog tree is based on real data. Any arbitrary tree would not work. The AiG tree is evidence free, and has a flood bottleneck not seen in the scientific tree.

And then, as is typical, he claims the creationist picture is confirmed by observational science. Liar.

Another testimonial: Andrew Fabich, a microbiologist. Who teaches at Liberty University. He’s there to claim that Lenski’s experiment doesn’t show evolutionary change, it’s just a switch that gets turned on and off, the information was already there.

Now it’s time to slander: He cites the racism of Civic Biology, a terrible book that promoted eugenics in the Scopes era. So? These conclusions have been rejected by most modern scientists.

Jesus. Bible quotes. Prophecy. Fuck.

MORE OF THIS HISTORICAL/OBSERVATIONAL NONSENSE. Jebus. This isn’t a legitimate distinction as used by Ham.

Ham is incoherent. Now it’s all about abortion and euthanasia and the gospels and salvation. These points are not relevant to the question. Why are they using a debate format if Ham is free to simply ignore the topic under discussion?

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Nye, finally. He begins with fossils, having found specimens right there in Kentucky — millions of layers of ancient life. Ice cores: 680,000 layers that demonstrate an interval of 680,000 years. This is a nice example of the data that Ham ignores. Would require 170 winter/summer cycles per year to fit into 4000 years. Trees that are older than 4000 years. Layers in the Grand Canyon — wouldn’t there have been churning and bubbling if they were laid down in one great flood?

Shows a slide of hominid fossils. Where do we fit? Isn’t it obvious there are more than just one species there?

He’s really hammering on the evidence Ham neglects — it’s good, Ham isn’t going to be able to answer it all. It’s an evidence-based Gish gallop!

Nye is making more good points about the absurdity of a big wooden boat holding 7000 kinds for a year.

Tiktaalik: an example of a prediction from evolutionary theory. Creationists have nothing similar.

Nye is giving examples of the predictive power of real science: the Big Bang, cosmic background radiation, etc. Rubidium and strontium and radioactive decay: radiometric dating is important and causally explainable.

Now he’s refuting that astronomer from Liberty University: there are billions of stars more than 6000 light years away. He’s focusing on the evidence for the age of the earth, which makes Ham’s claims ridiculous.

No jebus in his closing argument, just a plea to respect the importance of science for their children.

Now we get 5 minute rebuttals.

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How does Ham deal with the age of the earth? You can’t observe the age of the earth. YES YOU CAN. Then he adds up the genealogies in the book of Genesis. What? Whoop-te-doo.

Christ. His example of the flaws of radiometric dating is a sample that was dated at 45 million years by potassium-argon, but when it was sent…for…radiocarbon dating (I’m getting stupider just hearing this)…they got a different date! Well, yeah. Carbon-14 decays much more rapidly and you can’t date specimens beyond about 50,000 years.

Amazing argument: the bible says god created everything and it was good, and tumors and death are found in fossils, therefore they must be less than 4000 years old.

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Nye flubs it. He suggests that those 45,000 year old trees actually were that old, and it was just older rock above them. He’s not familiar with bogus creationist arguments. He’s not doing as well at this responsive, interactive stuff as he did in his prepared remarks, because he’s not used to dealing with these routine and often refuted creationist claims.

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Ham replies to Nye’s explanation of the 45K year old trees by saying they were encased in basalt. That’s true. That’s what’s annoying: Nye should know you can’t use carbon-14 to date 45 million year old samples.

We didn’t see those tree rings forming or those ice layers being laid down. Nope. But we know how they get laid down. Your interpretation requires absurdities like 170 winters per year.

Noah’s Ark wouldn’t twist and be unstable because it had three layers of wood. Right. Show me that in your bible, Ham.

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Nye repeats the figure of 680,000 ice layers. States that the most fundamental difference between them is that scientific assumptions are based on evidence, not invented out of whole cloth. WHy should we accept Ham’s assertion that natural laws changed 4000 years ago — his model requires that everything, stars in the sky, species, the surface of the earth, underwent a radical change in how they worked 4000 years ago. Why should we believe him?

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Oh, no. Q&A from presubmitted questions from the audience, for 45 minutes. I’m dyin’ here.

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First question is about cosmology. Ham has no problem. Jesus.

Nye talks about natural laws that explain the movement of the stars and planets. Point, Nye. Asks if Ham can come up with a prediction.

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Question 2: where did the atoms of the big bang come from? Nye: We don’t know, let’s try to find out. Talks about Perlmutter’s measurements of distances and motions.

Ham’s answer: we do know. It’s in the Bible. The audience laughs. Bible, bible, bible, bible.

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Q3: What evidence besides the Bible does Ken Ham have? Ham: the majority don’t decide the truth. The appendix is important. If the Bible is right, then we have predictions based on that. He is incapable of answering the question. He’s a babbling idiot.

Nye kind of goes off on a tangent, too, pointing out that scientists embrace disagreement, just show us the evidence.

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Q4: How does consciousness arise from matter? Nye: I don’t know. I would say I don’t know either, but nevertheless, it does. We have an approach to figure it out. Nye also talks about how we can experience the joy of discovery and are looking for it.

Ham: it’s in the Bible. Idjit. See Q3.

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Q5: Ham, what would change your mind? I’m a Christian. God has shown me clearly through his word, and the person of Jesus Christ… None of that answers the question. Also says Nothing anyone can say will convince me the word of god is not true. So I guess he did answer it: Nothing.

Nye: We would just need one piece of evidence. Then he lists a long litany of things that if evidence were brought, he would change his mind, fundamentally. Asks Ham again to make a useful prediction.

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Q6: Nye, what other evidence besides radiometric dating do you have for the age of the earth? Radiometric dating is pretty convincing, but also deposition rates. Many steps in evolution of speices. Like asking, “if things were any other way, they would be different.” So it’s silly to exclude dating methods.

Ham says something about dating meteorites to get the age of the earth, as if that somehow invalidates it. Dating methods are full of contradictions, and most of them contradict billions of years.

Q7: can you reconcile rates of continental drift today with how fast they had to have gone thousands of years ago? They believe in catastrophic plate tectonics.

Nye points out that a century ago it would have been easier to answer…before continental drift was discovered. It’s a conclusion about the past based on evidence now.

Q8: Favorite color? Nye: green. Ham: blue.

Q9: How do you balance evolution with the second law of thermodynamics. Nye points out that we have a huge source of energy called the sun.

Ham: energy and matter cannot produce life, no matter what energy you have. It requires god. He babbles on, apparently the second law didn’t operate before the Fall.

Q10: Ham, how would you respond to evidence that the earth was more than 10,000 years old? He says you can’t do that. There is nothing in observational astronomy that contradicts a young universe.

Nye points out that yes, we can demonstrate the age of the earth. We’re supposed to just take Ham’s word for the age? Are you sure that life cannot arise from non-life? What can you predict? What can you provide us that tells us something about the future?

Q11: Can science and religion be reconciled? You just know Nye is going to avoid this one, and he does, pointing out that there are billions of people who use science without believing in a young earth. Ham is an unusual exception.

He sees no incompatibility between religion and science.

Ham says science needs god. Christianity and science go hand in hand.

Q12: Do you believe every word in the bible should be taken literally? His answer: what does literally mean? He thinks of it as “naturally” — some of it is poetry, it should be taken as poetry. He makes much vague noise on this one.

Nye points out that Ham takes what he likes as literal, what he doesn’t like as poetry.

Q13: Have you ever believed that evolution was accomplished through a higher power? Nye says you cannot prove or disprove a higher power, but intelligent design has a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of nature.

Ham claims no new function has ever been demonstrated in evolution.

Q14: Name any organization (other than church or park) that is using creationism to produce a product. Ham’s answer: everything relies on god, and old time scientists were all creationists.

Nye repeats the request for predictive examples from creationism.

Q15: Since there’s all this evidence that humans are getting smarter by evolution, how do you explain how ancient people weren’t dumber? Nye just rejects that: we’re not getting smarter, there’s no evidence for it. Being smarter isn’t a necessary consequence of evolution.

Ham’s rebuttal is blind cave fish. He seems to think that’s not evolution. I want to point out that the blind cave fish did have a new function: expansion of tactile sense in the jaw.

Final question: What is the one thing on which you base your belief?

Ham is predictable: the bible. Only the bible talks about the origin of the earth and animals and on and on. It’s a very specific book. (No it isn’t: it does all that in a cursory few pages.)

Nye: the information and the process we call science.

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I can’t believe I sat through 2 hours and 45 minutes of that.

Nye was better than I feared, but man, he missed some key points. Every single thing Ham said was obvious, predictable, and said by him a thousand times before; he was inflexible and unable to say a single thing that would change his mind. Someone more experienced with this crap than Nye would have had rebuttals right at his fingertips.

But Nye was enthusiastic and passionate, which was great. He might have reached a few people out there, and in a few places, I think he was effective at communicating the quantity of evidence that refutes Ken Ham. All Ham had was his habit of falling back on the Bible, which is more than enough for some people.

David MacMillan wrote an op-ed on tonight’s Nye/Ham debate. It turns out he’s exceptionally well qualified to write about creationism.

This debate is more than academic for me. I grew up steeped in creationism. I was homeschooled with creationist curriculum, my family took us to creationist conferences, and I was deeply proud that I knew the real story about evolution and the age of the Earth. I was taught there was absolutely no way the universe could be explained without creationism. Evolution was a fairytale based on faith; creation was good science. I was taught that Christianity wasn’t consistent without creationism… that all “Bible-believing Christians” rejected evolution and long ages in favor of a six-day creation and a global flood.

My proudest teenage achievement was mowing lawns to earn $1,000 so I could help build the Creation Museum. My donation earned me lifetime free admission, a polo shirt and my name engraved in the lobby. I wrote back and forth with many prominent creationists and hotly debated origins with anyone who dared argue in favor of evolution. On two occasions I even wrote featured articles for the Answers In Genesis website — a high honor for a teen.

And then, gosh darn it, he did what every Jebus-lovin’ parent dreads: he went to college. He got a degree in physics. He started reading the scientific literature and comparing it to what the creationists claimed. Before you knew it, he was…lost to Satan!

Because so much of what I’d been taught was flatly false, I had to re-learn practically everything about biology, geology and the history of science. I’m amazed by the amount of evidence I systematically ignored or explained away, just because it didn’t match creation science.

Creationism isn’t just one belief; it’s a system of beliefs and theories that all support each other. We believed that unless we could maintain confidence in special creation, a young planet, a global flood, and the Tower of Babel, we’d be left without any basis for maintaining our faith.

So he learned some science, and now he isn’t a creationist anymore? Ken Ham may have just allowed a serpent to slither into the midst of his flock. MacMillan is much more optimistic about the outcome of the debate than I am.

In a debate like this one, demonstrating even the most elementary facts about evolution and the age of the universe would be a great success.

And that is a very good point. Creationists are very thorough about closing the doors and living in incestuous ignorance, trying to limit access to real scientific information — perhaps the virtue of debates, despite my intense dislike of the format and the implicit bias, is that they are one of the few avenues in which scientists are allowed to speak to the fanatically faithful.

I’m going to have to think on this. Zack Kopplin is also giving the debate his stamp of approval.

Larry Moran has been given a quiz to test our comprehension of Intelligent Design creationism. Unfortunately, it was composed by someone who doesn’t understand ID creationism but merely wants everyone to regurgitate their propaganda, so it’s a major mess, and you can also tell that the person writing it was smugly thinking they were laying some real traps to catch us out in our ignorance.

Larry has posted his answers. I’ve put mine below the fold (I sorta subtly disagree with him on #2). If you want to take a stab at it untainted by our answers, here’s the original quiz, untainted by logic or evidence, so you can view them in their pure naked ignorance.

Also, another thing: the person who composed the quiz clearly expected simple yes/no answers, yet wrote questions that demand explanation. Yet again, the idiocy of the IDiots is exposed. I’ve actually troubled to explain my answers.

[Read more…]

On the eve of the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, it’s nice of the Secular Coalition of Australia to apologize for sending Ken Ham to us. But, to be honest, I cannot accept the apology. Ken Ham’s ideas were forged in the crucible of raging American fundagelicalism — he has explicitly credited The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications by Whitcomb and Morris as his inspiration for the idiocy he promotes, and it really is the bog-standard Young Earth Creationism formulated in the 1960s by frustrated American creationists who were trying to appropriate scientific respectability for their religious cause. So we are ultimately responsible for poisoning the entire planet with this nonsense (you aren’t alone, either; Turkish creationism is really just regurgitated bilge from The Genesis Flood, too).

I do think the Australian suggestions for what Bill Nye ought to do to Ken Ham to be possibly acceptable, however — if only someone could translate them into English.

So on Tuesday, when you’re roasting the Ham and his patently ridiculous ideas on the rotisserie of logic, tell him you’ve got a message from Australia. Tell him from us that we used his state-issued Akubra hat to cover a hole in the national chookhouse shed, that he is no longer entitled to use his formal Australian name (Kenno) and that he is now forbidden any Tim Tams – ever again. Also, that whenever his name comes up at Christmas, while we sit around drinking white wine in the sun, there will be a formal awkward silence of twenty to forty seconds, until someone brightly offers everyone pudding. And if you could manage to kick him in the shins and tell him and his ilk to leave our kids alone, Bill – we’d owe you one.