Connect with us

Creation Corner

Bill Nye, Ken Ham debate: double default

Published

on

Bill Nye orating

Two nights ago (February 4, 2014), Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) and Ken Ham, director of Answers in Genesis, held their debate. The subject should have been easy to defend. Instead, neither side scored a clear victory. In fact, by any objective standard, the outcome was a double default.

An easy subject

The subject of the debate was:

Is creationism a viable model of origins in today’s scientific world?

Had it been “Is creationism the correct model of origins?” the debate would have been more difficult and also more interesting. But surely anyone well-versed in origins science could have won for the affirmative. But Ken Ham went into the debate like a duellist carrying an unloaded gun.

Nor did Bill Nye make things especially difficult. Half his attack on creationism as a viable model consisted of shopworn “findings” of great apparent ages. These “findings” depend on conventional assumptions. Chief of these is an a priori assumption that relevant processes are uniform over time. No one has any reliable evidence that these processes have stayed uniform, but Bill Nye assumes it anyway.

The other half consisted of four different logical fallacies, and arguably five. Evolutionists use these fallacies all the time. Ken Ham could and should have countered them effectively. He did not.

Advertisement

Of course, the National Center for Science Education awarded the debate to Bill Nye. But even they said Bill Nye won with showmanship. “A showman’s flair,” says Josh Rosenau, is “the most vital tool of all in any oral debate over evolution and creationism.”

Elizabeth Dias, in Time, wrote this entertaining and sardonic summary of the debate. She shows no bias, and spares neither side. She does not explicitly call the debate a double default. But when she says,

Your #TBT(uesday) to the ‘90s creation culture wars is complete. You survived. Now go get some sleep.

she does not say who won. Because neither side won.

So this will be the defense Ken Ham should have offered to Bill Nye, but did not.

Bill Nye plays the dating game

Bill Nye orating

Bill Nye orating in 2010. Photo: Ed Schipul, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License

Evolution advocates always play the “dating game” in any debate. The Grand Evolutionary Paradigm of uniformitarianism, abiogenesis and common descent depends on a great age for the earth. Sure enough, Nye brought forth observations from the old standbys: ice cores, tree rings, and radioactive decay. Each of these depends on uniformitarianism: the idea that any process at work today have always worked, at the same rate, since time immemorial.

Bill Nye neglected to mention the pleochroic halos that Robert V. Gentry found beginning in 1965. (See here.) Those halos show that radioactive decay accelerated in the distant past. This violates the central assumption of radiometric dating: that radioactive decay is constant over time. (Decay does vary slightly by the seasons. But seasonal variation would average out over thousands of years, or millions.)

Advertisement

The problem: Ken Ham also did not mention the halos. He did mention Snelling’s 1996 paper, “Radioactive ‘Dating’ in Conflict!” Snelling and his team found fossilized wood, having an apparent age of 45,000 years, buried in basalt with an apparent age in the millions of years. (Why didn’t Nye blithely suggest that a crew of Aborigines buried the tree in some still-hard-to-explain ritual? Ms. Dias didn’t think to ask. Bill Nye never mentioned Aborigines, though SECOA suggested he could have.)

Bill Nye also mentioned bristlecone pines to show an older age than 6,000 years. But in doing so, he forgot that most bristlecone pines are colony-like entities. Trying to date a bristlecone pine colony by some kind of cumulative sum of the ages of its members is fraught with peril. In fact the oldest single organism alive today is the White Mountains bristlecone pine that Edward Schulman and Tom Harlan found. It tops this list at 5,062 years of age as of 2012. Therefore it sprouted in 3051 BC. That is consistent with the astronomical date range that Brown and Hurlbut reported in May of 2013. (Ken Ham might want to revise his age of the earth upward, to 7,000 years, based on this finding.)

Ken Ham mentioned none of this. Bill Nye got away with telling half-truths, because Ken Ham did not think to call him on them.

Bill Nye appeals to numbers, the crowd, and authority

Evolutionists inevitably commit three related logical fallacies, sometimes all in one sentence. Bill Nye was no exception. He repeatedly spoke of “majorities” accepting evolution, and challenged the credentials of those who did not. That’s three different logical fallacies:

  1. Argumentum a numeris (argument from the numbers)
  2. Argumentum a populo or argumentum a multitudine (argument from “the people,” or the crowd.)
  3. Argumentum ab auctoritate (argument from authority, or literally from clout).

Ken Ham tried once to rebut that. He said,

Just because the majority accepts a thing, does not make it right.

True enough. But Ken Ham did not do enough to show why the numbers, the people, and the clout holders, are wrong.

Advertisement

Bill Nye appeals to emotion

[ezadsense midpost]

This last was too much even for Elizabeth Dias to stomach. Bill Nye said at least five separate times, that if Americans do not embrace what he called “the process of science,” it will fall behind the rest of the world in technology.

Ken Ham opened by distinguishing origins science from operational science. Origins science tries to tell us where things came from. Operational science tells us how things work. Bill Nye utterly rejected that distinction. To “prove” the distinction valueless, he cited the popular Crime Scene Investigation franchise on American television. In that, Bill Nye got it half right. Origins theory is like a crime-scene investigation. But Nye seemed to think all he need do was cite the dates, and he had the evidence. He then tried to suggest if anyone doubted these dates, that person would not be fit as an engineer or a medical researcher or an inventor. (Ken Ham also led with quotes from inventors who also accepted creation.)

Bill Nye resorts to lies

Bill Nye told one outright lie that Elizabeth Dias missed. He said if any scientist developed a new theory that trashed the old theories, his fellow scientists would welcome him with open arms. False! And he should know it is false. Every scientist who advocates creation, faces discrimination by his so-called peers. (That also applies to climate-change skeptics, as the Climate-gate archive made abundantly clear.) Nye cited Louis Pasteur as one who changed the paradigm about human disease. He failed to mention that a rival doctor forced Pasteur to recant his germ theory as his price for attending Madame Pasteur’s labor-and-delivery after washing his hands. Nor did he mention Ignaz Semmelweiss, whose peers literally drove him to the insane asylum for suggesting doctors wash their hands after doing autopsies and before attending births.

More to the point, Nye repeatedly accused Ham of asserting that natural law itself changed. Ken Ham never said that. But he never said enough. No natural law says radioactive elements never change their decay rate. Radioactive decay does vary with the seasons, faster in Northern Hemisphere winter (perihelion) than in summer (aphelion). Neutrino flux from the sun regulates this decay. And plasma, or atoms stripped of their electrons, is subject to very high decay rates, and to fusions that are otherwise impossible.

Advertisement

Ken Ham’s defenses

Ken Ham did try to defend his narrative in a few particulars. Nye cited an old experiment in wooden shipbuilding to say no one could possibly build a wooden vessel 515 feet long or longer. Ken Ham reminded him that the ancient Egyptians were better shipwrights than Nye gave them credit for being. But he gave few details. (The Egyptians, according to Tim Lovett, are one of the best examples of the technology that Noah might have commanded when he built his Ark.) Ken Ham also reminded Bill Nye that information cannot write itself. He also defended his model for biological diversity: an orchard of life, not a tree. Many ancestral kinds, not just one. Bill Nye tried to attack this, but offered no proof that all life derived from one ancestor. (An ancestor that, furthermore, self-assembled from a chemical soup only.)

But Ken Ham failed to challenge Bill Nye’s assertion that no polystrate fossils were known. Nor did he challenge the central assumption of conventional paleontology: that all fossils are buried in sequence. Walter T. Brown could have told them both: fossils are buried in order of specific gravity. The fossil layers we see today, sorted that way during the Flood disaster. But Ken Ham also failed to challenge directly the name Bill Nye had to drop: that of Charles Lyell, the father of uniformitarianism.

A sad outcome

Ken Ham could have won handily, especially when defending such an easy proposition as whether creation is a viable model of origins. But even he is not the showman Bill Nye is. He also did not use the most effective arguments against those Nye presented. This could be because the creation movement has its own prejudices, that hinder the kind of cooperation that evolutionists practice.

Walter T. Brown has a long-standing challenge to debate anyone, on telephone conference or in writing. Tellingly, he has no takers. If Bill Nye really wanted to have a debate, he might accept Brown’s recorded telephonic debate challenge. Of course he would have to accept a moderator who would not let him get away with appeals to numbers, the crowd, clout, or emotion. And in Brown he would have an opponent with the most comprehensive model of creation and the Global Flood that anyone has yet devised. That debate would have held even Elizabeth Dias’ interest.

Reprinted from examiner.com

Advertisement

[ezadsense leadout]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
+ posts

Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.

Advertisement
33 Comments
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

33 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

[…] from examiner.com and from Conservative News and […]

danielt

I don’t know too much about Ham. I have heard him on the radio here and there. I think we have some of his books on the shelf. I know I don’t hold a candle to him as it comes to his Biblical knowledge and education. Ham has build a solid following and reputation.

Why is it I feel this debate had more to do with marketing than apologetics?

Fergus Mason

“fossils are buried in order of specific gravity”

Er no, they’re not. That’s just silly.

Fergus Mason

“The strata are all hydrologically sorted.”

No they’re not, unless you’re claiming that humans are better at staying afloat than fish.

Fergus Mason

“is the source of great controversy in paleontological circles”

No, it really isn’t. There is no controversy in stating that humans have not been around as long as fish.

Fergus Mason

“The controversy lies in whether human fossils should have been found in the geological column at all”

No, really, there is no controversy among palaeontologists about this. None.

“According to the conventional model, they shouldn’t be there.”

What makes you say that? We coexist with other primates. There’s no reason at all human fossils shouldn’t be found in deeper strata than other primates. What would force a rethink is if we were found in deeper strata than dinosaurs of Amphioxus, but of course that’s never happened.

MatthewJ

“According to the conventional model, they shouldn’t be there.”
Yeah, I’d like to know who beside you says that human fossils should not be in the geologic column.

Odd that the ichthyosaurs and dolphins got hydrologically sorted into such different layers given their similar habitat, size, shape, etc.

MatthewJ

“They still must have had different specific gravities at the instant of the sortation”

This would imply that fossils formed only during the Flood, and the sortation occurred only once. Thus before the Flood, when dolphins and ichthyosaurs lived in the same surface waters, they were not fossilized in equivalent layers, and the ichthyosaurs didn’t leave any fossils after the Flood – ditto all the dinosaurs, etc. No pteranodons got stuck in a tar pit or opabinias or trilobites got covered in a landslide either before or after the Flood. If not, the Flood sorting argument does not stand (not that it holds up anyway, but leave that be for the moment).

Anyhow, have you found anyone else who says that human fossils don’t belong in the geologic column?

Fergus Mason

“Only during the Flood did the violent conditions that produce fossilization obtain!”

Huh? Fossilisation isn’t a violent process; it’s a very slow one that’s visible mostly at a cellular level.

Fergus Mason

“All the layers are Flood layers.”

But that’s demonstrably untrue. There are many layers with no multicellular organisms at all, and according to your claim that’s where we’d find the slowest, densest animals, like tortoises – which don’t appear until far higher in the column. In fact they don’t appear until after the much lighter, faster-moving dinosaurs do. The “hydrological sorting” idea is a complete non-starter. It doesn’t even begin to fit with what we observe.

MatthewJ

Can you demonstrate someone who says that humans should not be in the geologic column?

MatthewJ

How many notable names would you like? Basically any paleontologist would do, but we can focus just on paleoanthropologists:

Robert Ardrey (1908–1980)
Lee Berger (1965 – )
Davidson Black (1884–1934)
Robert Broom (1866–1951)
Michel Brunet (1940 – )
J. Desmond Clark (1916–2002)
Carleton S. Coon (1904–1981)
Raymond Dart (1893–1988)
Eugene Dubois (1858–1940)
Johann Carl Fuhlrott (1803–1877)
Aleš Hrdlička (1869-1943)
Glynn Isaac (1937–1985)
Donald C. Johanson (1943- )
Kamoya Kimeu (1940- )
Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald (1902–1982)
Jeffrey Laitman (1951- )
Louis Leakey (1903–1972)
Meave Leakey (1942- )
Mary Leakey (1913–1996)
Richard Leakey (1944- )
André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986)
Kenneth Oakley (1911–1981)
Svante Pääbo (1955–)
David Pilbeam
John T. Robinson (1923–2001)
Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948-)
Chris Stringer (1947- )
Ian Tattersall (1945- )
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955)
Phillip V. Tobias (1925-2012)
Erik Trinkaus (1948-)
Alan Walker (1938-)
Franz Weidenreich (1873–1948)
Milford H. Wolpoff (1942- )
Tim D. White (1950- )

As to where in the geologic column humans are found – I suppose it depends on your cutoff criteria. Just genus _Homo_, or _Homo sapiens sapiens_ specifically? For anatomically modern humans the oldest fossils currently known appear to be the Omo remains from Ethiopia dated at ~195,000 years old. If you take the first member of genus _Homo_, _Homo habilis_, then you’re looking at ~2,000,000 years old. So, either way, we’re talking the Quaternary (“quail”). I dunno- maybe you have some weird concept of the geologic column as only having a lower end, and not an upper one.

Now, who says that humans don’t belong in the column? I’ve answered your question.

MatthewJ

That’s nice.

Who says humans don’t belong in the geologic column?

Fergus Mason

“get your team together and answer Walt Brown’s debate challenge.”

Only if he gives me an assurance that he’s not going to hand my personal details over to fascist crackpots like he did last time.

Fergus Mason

“many of the specimens listed as “Homo habilis” are in fact human.”

Well yes. That goes without saying. The clue is in the name “Homo.”

Fergus Mason

“There is only one species of human: Homo sapiens.”

One extant species. We know of several extinct ones.

MatthewJ

Wow, this thread just keeps getting better and better!

“…just one species of humans…”

What of the Neanderthals and Denisovans and Flores specimens? Normal variant humans, diseased humans, or apes?

At least it seems clearer now that your objection is that paleontologists don’t classify all these fossils as _H. sapiens sapiens_. But you might want to do some more reading of the creationist literature – even your baraminologists seem to accept that Neanderthals and others were separate species from _H. sapiens_. Now, whether they were ‘humans’ from a religious standpoint is a separate issue – but bear in mind that those of us of European extraction appear to have gotten up to 4% of our DNA from the Neanderthals, which would put them in the same baramin as us at least.

MatthewJ

Okay. So the Neanderthal burial sites are post-Flood, then?

Trending

33
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x