Last night, Bill Nye debated Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis. It didn’t go so well for Nye.
Why? Because Ham has certainty on his side, and certainty isn’t something scientists do. Scientists don’t accept explanations without proof, and they’re smart enough to admit when they don’t know something. Creationists, on the other hand, claim to have all the answers. At the end of the day, the latter approach appeals more to a crowd.
Creationists generally issue a few stock arguments against various theories, most of which are easily debunked by even the layman. Notice the insistence that the second law of thermodynamics (entropy, in short) invalidates the concept of evolution. What they’re missing is that Carnot’s law applies in a closed system, not an open one.
Someone needs to tell the guy in picture #21 that the Big Bang was not the result of an exploding star. The lady in picture #5 asks how we can have sunsets without God. That would be due to the fact that the earth is round. It rotates on an axis, and the part on which she’s standing sometimes rotates away from the sun. We’ve sent out spacecraft which have more than adequately demonstrated this.
There are plenty of Christians who believe the earth is more than 4,000 years old, and there are many who have no problem with evolution. So, why do so many still choose dogma over demonstration? If one’s faith is so fragile that it can’t withstand new pardigms, that’s a personal matter. The same things creationists want stripped from our textbooks are the very foundations of medicine, technology, and commerce.
Abolish those things, and we turn back 300 years of progress.
2 thoughts on “Acceptance vs. Investigation”
I watched the whole thing, and I think Ken Ham could have benefited greatly from the public speaking class I was required to take in my first year of college. He was terrible. He just rambled on most of the time, bouncing from topic to topic, orbiting the issues without confronting them very strongly. The only things he exhibited any preparation or certainty with were his repeated assertions, “The Bible is the word of God, and He knows everything,” and “It’s ‘historical science’ which means that I don’t have to follow the same rules.”
On the other hand, Bill Nye took us step-by-step through all the ways that creationism is wrong, and stayed focused on the question, “Is Ken Ham’s explanation viable?” He wasn’t just right, he was also clear and easy to follow, in utter contrast to Ham.
That’s my point, though. To a thinking person, Bill Nye more than held his own. The problem is, a crowd is not a thinking person. It’s a group, and the best way to reach groups is to appeal to their emotions.
Ham doesn’t need to be right. He doesn’t even need to be more than a marginal speaker. He just needs to project a sense of certainty and to hit the right buttons. On that front, he won.