Bill Nye's Creationism Debate Not a Total Disaster, Scientists Say

[Buster's Uncle]

Bill Nye's Creationism Debate Not a Total Disaster, Scientists Say
LiveScience.com
By Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer  1 hour ago



Bill Nye and Ken Ham onstage at the Creation Museum in Kentucky on Feb. 4, 2014. The two men debated whether Biblical creationism is a viable way to understand origins.



The debate between science popularizer Bill Nye and creationist Ken Ham last night (Feb. 4) was controversial before it even began. Scientists from across disciplines argued that debating young-Earth creationism legitimizes the idea, which holds that the Bible's Book of Genesis is a literal description of the creation of the world 6,000 years ago.

Scientists and science educators also worried that Nye would be backed into a corner by a barrage of nonsensical misrepresentations of scientific evidence, impossible to refute without teaching the audience Science 101. The morning after, watchers seemed to agree that such a slaughter had not come to pass, though they still questioned the point of the creationism debate and the detailed approach taken, which included a scripted introduction and presentation by each speaker followed by a more traditional debate.

"Success, as much as there could be in this situation, came when the scripted part was over and Nye put his heart, soul and guts into his direct reactions to Ham's," said Holly Dunsworth, an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island. "Before that, it just looked like two men throwing as much stuff at the audience as they could."


Debating science

Ham, founder of Kentucky's Creation Museum, rejects large swaths of scientific knowledge, because of his belief that Genesis should be interpreted literally. He also, as he made clear during the 2.5-hour-long debate at the Museum, rejects much of the scientific process. Ham divides science into "observation science," the discoveries that work in the present and make modern technology possible, and "historical science," which encompasses any attempt to look into the past. Ham is alone in making this distinction, which scientific researchers find baffling.

"What happened a minute ago is due to the same laws that cause what will happen a minute from now," Dunsworth told Live Science. "Everyone takes this for granted, even creationists, otherwise they'd be afraid to step outside the house every morning, wondering whether the ground would give way or whether they'd fall up into outer space."

Nye combated Ham's argument with a barrage of evidence of a planet far older than 6,000 years (in fact, Earth is about 4.5 billion years old), including ice cores that hold a record of hundreds of thousands of summer-winter cycles, fossils dating back millions of years, tree rings showing at least 9,000 years of history and cosmic microwave background radiation that holds evidence of the Big Bang, but failed to get much of an explanation for why Ham disregards this evidence.

"[Ham's] explanation was 'Well, nobody was there to observe this,'" said climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. "In other words, if humans weren't there to observe it, it didn't happen. That's not science."



People who disbelieve evolution often take offense to the idea than "man came from a monkey." The reality of the evolutionary tree is a bit more complex.


Strange citations

Ham also spent time citing mainstream scientific studies he said backed up his worldview. In one example, he cited research that came out in January 2014 about dog domestication, arguing that the study's finding that modern dogs evolved from a single population of wolves backs up his idea that God created "kinds" of animals that diverged into today's species within a few thousand years. Ham believes that "kinds" cannot diverge into other "kinds." For example, a branch of dinosaurs could never have evolved into today's birds.

"The interpretation he presented is difficult to understand from our perspective," John Novembre, the lead author of that study, told Live Science. Dogs clearly diverged from wolves recently, as shown by their DNA similarity, Novembre said; the existence of evolution makes exploring the relationship possible.

"As genome-scale sequences have finally become available to us, it's been amazing to see how a single theoretical framework can predict so many patterns seen in these massive datasets," Novembre said. (So evolutionary theory predicted what is now seen in genomes.)

However, these kinds of in-the-weeds examples likely only confused the audience, researchers said.

"I think that it was somewhat unfortunate that both speakers went into very many details, in a wide range of disciplines, instead of concentrating on a few basic points that fully capture the differences between the two views," said Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., and author of "Brilliant Blunders" (Simon & Schuster, May 14, 2013).


Success for science?

One of the key features of a scientific theory is that it is falsifiable, Livio told Live Science. That means the theory makes predictions that are testable in new experiments.

"As long as the results of those new experiments or observations agree with the predictions, the theories hold," Livio said. "Once the results are found to deviate from the predictions, the theory has to either be rejected or to be modified."

Creationism has no such predictable power, as findings must conform to the creationist's interpretation of God's word.

As a result, the debaters were "playing a game without consistent rules," Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute who watched the debate, wrote in an email to Live Science. Because Ham doesn't accept the basic premise of science, Shostak said, he shrugged off all of Nye's examples of scientific evidence for an old Earth and evolution.

Whether the debate was worthwhile is an open question. Some scientists, like Mann (who is friends with Nye), said their feelings were mixed but hoped a few "fence straddlers" were won over to a better understanding of evolution. Others felt the debate was a waste of time.

"This was not productive or beneficial to science education — it was a spectacle, pure and simple," said Matthew Bonnan, a paleontologist at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey who blogs at The Evolving Paleontologist.

"There is a fear among many Americans that if they accept science, and evolution in particular, they have to abandon their faith," Bonnan said. "But science and faith are different things, which are not diametrically opposed to each other."

Debate may not change many minds, Shostak said, but Nye was right to hold the line — and to appeal to the need for an educated populace.

"I would merely say that the facts can speak for themselves, and with an elegance and brilliance that no resort to misguided faith can match," Shostak said. "We can try to learn quantum mechanics in the lab, or we can try to figure it out from biblical texts.  But even wet-behind-the-ears students can appreciate that a cellphone became possible only when we took the former approach."

Josh Rosenau, a public information project director at the National Center for Science Education, helped Nye prepare for the debate and felt he came away as the winner.

"In the end, I'm just glad that it went so well," Rosenau told Live Science. "Hopefully we won't have another of these debates for a good long time."


http://news.yahoo.com/bill-nye-39-creationism-debate-not-total-disaster-182953646.html

[Geo]

"Hopefully we won't have another of these debates for a good long time."

Amen to that!

[Buster's Uncle]

Agreed.

[gwillybj]

"There is a fear among many Americans that if they accept science, and evolution in particular, they have to abandon their faith," Bonnan said. "But science and faith are different things, which are not diametrically opposed to each other."

 

Nye:    :win:

Ham: 

[Buster's Uncle]

Christians Against Creationism
The Daily Beast
By Brad Kramer  7 hours ago





 
I am an evangelical Christian. I believe God created the world, that all mankind needs a savior, that hell is real, that Jesus really rose from the dead, and that he’s coming back someday. I believe the Bible is all the word of God, and that it is truth from cover to cover. And I am tired of Ken Ham and others like him, defining what it means to believe the things I do.

Ham, of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis, was one side of a highly-publicized debate Tuesday night with Bill Nye (The Science Guy) over whether “creation is a viable model for human origins. Ham is a “young-earth creationist”—i.e, he believes that God created the universe 6,000 years ago in six literal days, thus rendering evolution a hoax. Nye argued for what he called “mainstream science,” mocking Ham’s view as unscientific and dangerous to American progress, particularly if it shows up in public school classrooms.

Ironically, Ken Ham is kind of a childhood hero of mine. I was raised in a conservative home where his books let my active imagination intermingle with my budding faith. A universe spoken into existence in six literal days? Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark? Secret evidence all around us? I hungrily devoured this wild conspiratorial narrative, eager to be a young Jedi in the rebellion against the evolutionary Empire. When I encountered non-Christians in my adolescence, my aggressive conversion attempts usually devolved into long debates about the fossil record, or the age of the earth, or the obvious impossibility of macroevolution.

Somewhere around junior year of high school, my faith imploded. It wasn’t that I stopped believing in the whole Bible. I just got worn out trying to defend every last literal detail, as if the slightest bit of doubt would send me straight to the bad place. And I no longer wished to fight my friends over a view of science and faith that increasingly made no sense of either. After a brief flirtation with atheism, I hobbled back to my faith, praying desperately that God would show me a way to believe without giving up my intellect.

Thankfully, I found a small but growing band of devout Christians like John Walton and Francis Collins who are leading a quiet revolution in the way we look at the origins debate. They helped me realize what I had suspected for a long time: that Ken Ham and his friends and followers are peddling a contradiction.

Ham’s greatest strength is his skepticism; his refusal to accept that Christianity is obligated to fit neatly into the mainstream cultural narrative. As an evangelical, that sort of contrarianism is in my lifeblood. But it’s on this point that Ham defeats himself. He rails endlessly against the dogmatism of scientific naturalism, while peddling an ideology that reduces the Bible into a giant jigsaw puzzle of scientific numbers and formulas, all easily arranged and understood. The only way that Ham gets away with this massive act of oversimplification is with an elaborate sleight of hand known as selective literalism—in other words, interpreting the Bible literally only when convenient.

For instance, the first chapter of Genesis (where we find the Judeo-Christian creation account) is full of terms that only make sense in an ancient cosmological context. The second verse talks of darkness being over the face of the t’hom, a Hebrew word that refers to the giant watery nothingness that preceded creation and undergirds the created world. Several verses later, God is putting a raqia between the sky and the earth. This Hebrew word comes from the premodern idea that a solid dome separated the “waters above”—rain and snow—from the earth and sea. (That same dome was thought to have collapsed, causing Noah’s flood.) These two words obviously do not fit into a modern scientific framework, so they’re conveniently overlooked or explained away in young-earth creationist literature. Ham and friends try to treat the creation narrative as a modern scientific treatise, yet can only do so at the expense of the text itself.

Ham seems blithely unaware that his view of the Bible is only possible in the world of the Enlightenment, where objectivity and reason are still king. The text of the Bible is stripped from its context where it floats in heavenly neutrality, waiting for clear-minded and unbiased interpreters like Ham to seamlessly and easily apply it to modern science. Thus the Bible ceases to be an ancient text, and therefore ceases to really say anything other than what we want it to say.

On the other hand, Nye argues, unlike his subtler atheist comrades, that the only other option is to doom the Bible to the dustbin of history in favor of the modern religion of reason, science, and “discovery.” “Mainstream science,” Nye argued repeatedly in the debate, must eschew any contact between science and the sacred, lest we risk the collapse of American ingenuity and progress. This type of alarmist sectarianism is remarkably close in tone to Ham’s prophetic warnings, and just as founded in the religion of logic and reason.

The good news is that the Enlightenment is over, even if the news has not reached some corners of the West. Its claims of objectivity have been often been found to be little more than hubristic ideology, and its ideal of the clear-eyed, unbiased scientist has suffered a string of damaging blows. Like plenty of other Westerners, many young Christians are tired of being forced to choose between the rationalistic dogmatism of the Ken Hams of the world or the rationalistic dogmatism of the Bill Nyes. We are tired of forcing the Bible to give us neat, clean answers to things it was never meant to solve. We want a faith that allows God and life and creation and nature to be bigger, more mysterious, more complex, and more beautiful than we could ever imagine. We believe alongside our questions, not in spite of them.

The contemporary debate over evolution is going nowhere. Both sides are as polarized as ever, and yesterday’s encounter demonstrates just how asinine the debate can get. The better discussion is the larger one: the place of the sacred in modern secular life, and more specifically, the place of sacred texts like the Bible in the postmodern world. Yet until the middle voices in the public sphere, both secular and religious, can both have the humility and the courage to disown the dogmatism of Nye and Ham, we will be stuck with the polemics of last night’s debate.


http://news.yahoo.com/christians-against-creationism-123900126--politics.html

[Buster's Uncle]

5 Things You Missed From Bill Nye's 'Evolution Vs. Creationism' Debate
Good Morning America
By ALYSSA NEWCOMB  3 hours ago






Bill Nye "The Science Guy," a bow-tied television personality and staunch evolutionist, faced off against Ken Ham, founder of Kentucky's Creation Museum.

Nye believes the Earth was created billions of years ago after the Big Bang. Ham believes God created the planet 6,000 years ago.

Here are five things you missed from the epic 150-minute showdown. We'll let you decide who won.


1. Nye Says Plenty of Religious People Believe in Science

"I just want to remind us all there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious, who get enriched by the wonderful sense of community by their religion," Nye said.

"But these same people do not embrace the extraordinary view that the Earth is somehow only 6,000 years old."


2. Ham Said He Trusts the Word of God

"I'm only too willing to admit my historical science is based on the Bible," Ham said.

The Australian, who has built a ministry in Kentucky, said that although tests have indicated the planet has existed for far longer than 6,000 years, he believes those tests are fallible.

"I find there's only one infallible dating method," Ham said. "It's a witness who was there, who knows everything and told us, and that's from the word of God."


3. 'Science Guy' Brings A Prop

Nye's quirky television persona that made him a staple of science classrooms was out in full force during the debate.

At one point, he held up a chunk of Kentucky limestone he said he picked up on the side of the road.

"We are standing on millions of layers of ancient life. How could those animals have lived their entire life and formed these layers in 4,000 years?" he asked, referring to the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible.

Nye concluded the limestone couldn't have existed if "Mr. Ham's flood" really happened 4,000 years ago.


4. What About the Children?

Ham, who is a science teacher, argued children are being harmed by not being taught creationism in the classroom.

"I love science," Ham said. "If we teach them the whole universe is a result of natural processes and not designed by a creative god, they might be looking in the wrong places or have the wrong idea when they are looking at the creation in regard to how you develop technology, because if they look at just random processes, that could totally influence the way they think."

"I want children to be taught the right foundation," Ham said.


5. Kangaroos Explain Everything

If there really was a kangaroo on Noah's ark then Nye wonders why any kangaroo bones haven't been found between the Middle East and Australia.

"Somebody would have been hopping along there and died and we'd find him," he said.


http://news.yahoo.com/5-things-missed-bill-nye-39-39-evolution-183740565--abc-news-topstories.html