I think the most poignant part of the whole thing was the question “What would it take to change your mind?” Nye said “Evidence.” Ham said “Never.” That alone should completely discredit anything Ham has to say. The way each of them responded to that question pretty much sums up the entire debate.
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I think the most poignant part of the whole thing was the question “What would it take to change your mind?” Nye said “Evidence.” Ham said “Never.” That alone should completely discredit anything Ham has to say./QUOTE]
I think you already have to be on the side of reality to not interpret that as “I’m strong in my faith, not wishy-washy”. If you don’t go in thinking of willingness to change one’s mind as a virtue, that doesn’t damage his position at all.
I can see someone saying that strengthened Ham’s position, because it meant everything Nye said was provisional
Turns out I’m usually a sinner in that category. But not always. And when I’m able to not hate them and love their humanity and their weaknesses too, I find it helps my blood pressure and I’m just a little less of an asshole on those days.
But let’s keep in mind I’m a firm evolutionist and into science and not a fundy. I’m more a soup kitchen liberal. Or as we might call it for a few more weeks, a food stamps liberal.
It’s the no true Scotsman…err Australian argument.
Ham kept launching into his mantra. I swear, it was essentially one long non sequitur whenever he opened his mouth.
And–WTF?–he has a degree in Science and was a Science teacher! I’m wondering if he was whacked out when he did that job or if he came to it later in life.
That’s not a dichotomy in the Christian sense. God will burn me for all eternity for not believing in him out of love and pure justice. Ergo, you can love your enemy as you lovingly jam a red-hot poker through his eye and into his brain.
I think Bill might have had an opportunity for a double play if he had really gone after the whole “no death before the Fall” thing that Ham and other YECs usually claim, as well as Ham’s acceptance that huge variants in morphology do occur (as in the cases of Darwin’s Finches and domestic dogs). The “no death” thing would mean that every animal in the world would have been competing for the same pool of food sources in an increasingly overcrowded environment, and carnivorous animal in the world after the Fall would have had to have undergone unbelievably rapid rates of adaptation to accommodate their new diets and lifestyles, a rate that we might normally associate with viruses and bacteria.
Of course, the thing with Ham and others like him is that they’ll happily accept “microevolution” (after all, the evidence there is so in-your-face that no amount of denial will work) but deny “macroevolution”… so maybe Bill wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with that with Ham, but at least he might have given some viewers something to consider.
The debate was moderated by CNN’s Tom Foreman. Here’s his après-debate take, a pretty good essay:
This is correct and the main problem with presuppositionalism. It doesn’t lead to knowledge, it leads to epistemic skepticism.
If you can’t trust your ability to reason how can you trust what you interpret the Bible is telling you?
I haven’t watched the debate but that’s a fairly milquetoast essay. “People came, everyone behaved themselves, Nye and Ham were worried beforehand but said some stuff and then shook hands and went home. Also, it snowed.”
Yes, but how did it go, Tom? Was there any point at all to the event?
You know, moderators are not like ordinary people.
I watched the whole thing and enjoyed it.
I’m glad Bill Nye agreed to do the debate, especially in light of the fact that he had to enter ‘the lion’s den’ to do it. I expected the audience to be stacked in favor of Ham since it was at his ‘museum,’ and I’m not sure that it was judging by the applause and the post-debate audience questions. I thought the moderator was good, too.
Ham is a great speaker to his audience- he uses sciency-sounding words and ideas that appeal to less his well- or bias-educated creationists. Those educated by creation science textbooks will agree with Ham one hundred percent as he will reinforce all they have been taught. But the first part of his 30 minute intro was just appeals to authority (‘This scientist is a creationist! So is this one! And this one, who conveniently works for me!’), and he finished up with appeals to authority as well.
I was not impressed with Hams’ use of scare quotes around the word science and with his division of science into two realms that he identifies as “observational science” and “historical science”.
(Did anyone catch two of Ham’s slides when he was talking about dogs. One slide contained about 9 pictures of dogs, except one, which was a bear. The other slide was from a publication about genome sequencing in dogs. The slide was upside down and did not support Ham’s position in any way- it just looks sciency. Here is a link to the article and graphic Ham used: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1004016 Note how the graph says “thousands of years” and goes up to 400. Tough slide for a guy who thinks the world is only 6,000 years old. )
Apparently, only “observational science” or according to him, science that one can observe with one of your own 5 senses, can be trusted. “Historical science” cannot be observed and therefore cannot be “proven” or “trusted.” Of course, he allows this sort of “historical” thing for the Bible since he wasn’t around to see God create Adam and Eve, but never mind that.
Bill Nye knew his audience and did a couple of impressive things. One, he asked a simple question to creationists by asking if the Ark landed on Ararat, and kangaroos are found in Australia, why are there no kangaroo fossils found between the two places. Later Ham said the kangaroos crossed on a land bridge (all of them, I guess). Nye asked why there is no evidence of a land bridge. This kind of simple question is what is needed to put that seed of (educational) doubt into the minds of folks who have had a substandard or Christian/homeschool education.
At another point, Nye said something like “Don’t take my word for it. Look it up for yourself.” Christian education really hates and often actively discourages anyone doing that kind of thing.
The final thing Nye did really well was in being approachable and humble. So often, anti-science, fundamentalists, Christians, etc., charge that the anti’s are “arrogant.” Nye was incredibly genuine and nice to the religious views of his audience. Even at the end, Ham ducked off stage and Nye stayed to talk and shake hands.
Yeah, I wish Nye had tackled this ridiculous assertion, but I guess he thought there were more important points to be made. I don’t think even most Creationists agree with Ham on this one.
I know it’s kind of silly to ping on this when there were so many “out there” statements from Ham, but this really made me laugh: Ham’s assertion that all animals, even lions, were herbivores and did not eat meat until after the Biblical Flood.
Not only does he make up new definitions for words to bolster his blather, but he just makes up stuff and says the Bible says that.
ETA: Oh, and the biggest “WTF?” moment was when Ham asserted that humanity is composed of five races, because, of course, “The Bible says so.”
I’ve seen Nye criticized for starting off with an irrelevant story about bow ties, which took up a significant portion of his opening remarks without making any points whatsoever. On the contrary, however, I think it was a subtle, crafty, and well-chosen anecdote that accomplished several things without being obvious about it. Precisely because it was unrelated to the topic, it allowed him to begin speaking to the audience without setting off any alarm bells for the creationists. And this part of his opening was very much aimed at creationists, not the rest of us. The story involved his grandfather, right away presenting himself as someone who values family, a very important value among the Christian right. It also showed that he valued tradition and implied that his grandfather and father are the reason he wears bow ties today. And by making it about bow ties, something very much seen as a trademark part of his image, he did a couple rather important and impressively subtle things. Firstly, he undermined any negative ideas the audience might have had about him as merely an entertainer or a clown–rather than being part of a gimmicky public persona honed on children’s tv shows, the tie, in the context of the story, showed that who he is in public is tied to how he was raised. Not only that, but he placed himself in the position of someone with habits that might seem odd or off-putting to outsiders but that actually has deep personal meaning. All of this presents a very sympathetic position to image- and value-conscious evangelicals. And then once he had done all this, he very casually concluded that “That’s the story I was told; it might not be true!” Anyone still nodding agreeably at that point was halfway to agreeing with his key argument in the debate!
The whole anecdote was a masterful symphony of dog whistles aimed at his opponents in the audience and played so subtly that almost no one on either side would realize he’d said anything at all. (And lest you think I’m giving him too much credit, I don’t think he sat down and crafted this story from whole cloth to accomplish all of those things. He presumably has a repertoire of opening remarks, jokes, and anecdotes, and simply recognized this as one that would work on multiple levels to reach this particular audience. There is no way that as experienced a presenter as he is would simply choose an opening story at random, especially one that long. He clearly thought he was accomplishing something with that particular story.)
Didn’t watch. Did the Science Guy point out that most Christians aren’t YECs and can believe in evolution just fine? Watching the Christian explain how other Christians are tricked by the atheistic whitecoats and/or the devil is a lot of fun.
He did. And as you predicted, it was hilarious watching Ham explain that those Christians must be wrong because we have a fossil of a dinosaur with a brain tumor, and clearly brain tumors couldn’t exist before humans, since we’re responsible for everything bad. Therefore, dinosaurs must be less than 6000 years old.
I think Nye was flabbergasted when Ham spouted the Adam’s Rib story as literal truth and that’s why Nye didn’t address it. Ham is simply too far out there to be taken seriously. It was a mistake to even attempt to take Ham seriously.