Debates starts at 17 minutes fyi

From the presence of the two bow ties in the room, can we assume our own Memedumpster and Friend managed to get into the theatre?

Nye held his own very well here. He didn't take the bait early on of Ham trying to imply that belief in evolution leads to immorality and all that nonsense. Instead he wisely kept steering things back towards science and I think that was the key.
Ham made much more of an ass out of himself than I honestly expected. I was initially surprised by his appeal to authority bullshit (These people agree with me and have PHDs!), but after that, he spend his load in the opening comments by using every fallacy or nonsensical bullshit he could think of, and basically he figured that would snowball the debate in his direction but it totally went the opposite way.

I would like to add that while Ham brings up a PhD (from Liberty University, of course) who claims that the Lenski experiments were nonsense, this guy hasn't published a single peer-reviewed paper refuting Lenski's work in anyway, and at this point, Lenski's work has been confirmed by several other experiments.
(Richard Lenski grew colonies of e-coli in his lab over 20 years and eventually one of them evolved to eat and grow using the solution they were kept in instead of just the food they were fed) Something similar happened decades ago when a new form of bacteria that eats nylon was discovered.

Nye did quite well, in my opinion. I think that he could have rebutted Ham's critique of radioisotope dating a bit more forcefully and that he could have called him out a bit more one the obvious contradictions he talked himself into, but overall Bill did a great job. He was well spoken in conveying his message, while avoiding offending those Christians who may have been on the fence over the issue.

I originally thought this debate was a bad idea and I am glad to say that Bill Nye proved me wrong in that regard. It is a shame that the Ken Ham will make money off of this in videos and free publicity, however.

The most baffling thing Ham said was about the dinosaur fossil with the brain tumor. For those that missed it-- he has in his museum a dino fossil with a brain tumor. He says this PROVES it lived AFTER the flood. Because in the Bible, before the flood, God said everything was "good." And hey, we all know that brain tumors aren't a good thing. So this creature must have lived after the flood.

Check and mate, Mr. Ham.

The idea that tumors/diseases/parasites only came into existence post-fall is problematic though. Presumably diseases are living things... so, like the dinosaurs, diseases were created along with other living things, but were benign and good... and post-fall diseases/parasites became bad... the distinction between vegetarian-good dinosaurs and meat-eating-bad-dinosaurs is ridiculous, but the distinction between good-bacteria and bad-diseases is pretty incoherent... How would a parasite exist pre-fall?

I liked Bill Nye's bit about the kangaroos... he should have pressed Ham more on that point...

Maybe next time Nye can debate a geocentrist, or a holocaust denier, or a homeopathic expert, or a chi master, or a breatharian or a 1-800 line psychic, or an alien abduction survivor, or an Otherkin, or one of those chemtrail people, or a targeted individual, or a jar of pickles.

I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I think debating these people lends a sense of weight to their position that it doesn't deserve. On the other hand, with the state of science education and science literacy in this country, you pretty much have to.

I don't think Bill Nye is capable of completely understanding just how deluded his opponents on this issue actually are.

Wow. This is a long version of Ken Ham's "Were you thehh?" argument.

From the beginning, since the theory of evolution was first being written about, scientists have been engaging shrieking zealots who think the theory says something about the existence of god or whether god created the universe.

I can't help but wonder what things would be like if rather than engaging and continuing to engage, they had simply and swiftly responded with "Well, this is science, and it has only to do with the natural, observable world. Science will never ever ever prove or disprove the existence of god or the supernatural," patted the dummies on the head, and moved on.

There might not be nearly as many people today who desperately feel the need to prove to everyone else that every single thing in the Bible happened exactly the way it's written down. They would just have their faith, be happy, and leave science teachers to teach science stuff. (Maybe they would even accept biblical inconsistencies as metaphor or changes when it was oral history or changes in translation or who cares)

Instead there's been this continuing public 'debate.' We may as well debate 'Geology vs Sandwiches'.

I think the real reason the 'debate' rages on to this day is that both sides figured out they could make money from this debate. In short, I'm saying that this debate clearly has at least one charlatan participating.

Eh, I think a lot of people here are kind of missing the point. Ham wasn't trying to convince anyone outside the "bubble" about anything. Instead he was preaching to the converted. That's why he always came back to the Bible, even to the point of illogical statements like parasites couldn't existed before the fall of man. He is trying to keep his followers from straying, from starting to thing that hey maybe the world is billions of years old, I could believe that and still be a Christian. So he puts on a show, oh hey look at me, I am debating a "Darwinist" who doesn't believe the Bible. Oh, you say there are fossils? WELL NOBODY CAN EVER PROVE HOW OLD THE EARTH IS, BLAH BLAH "HISTORICAL SCIENCE". He doesn't have to refute Nye's points, he just has to say a bunch of stuff to YECs to convince them that what they already believe is true.

That's why this was a bad idea and that's why you shouldn't debate creationists. At best, you won't change anybody's mind. At worst, you look like a fool because they tend to be talented orators. Nye didn't look like a fool most of the time, but his readiness to say "we don't know", without explaining that one of science's strengths is the ability to admit what it doesn't know, hurt him IMO.

I loved the kangaroo bit though, I'm gonna steal that point.

HEY EVERYBODY!!!! POTHOLER54 Took a moment from all the "important"(I'm still sad we won't be seeing more videos from him anytime soon) shit he's doing in his to make a post about the debate on his facebook page:

Sadly, Bill Nye hasn’t learned the first rule of staging a formal debate with creationists: Never accept a formal debate with creationists. Their intent is never to win a debate, all they have to do is be on a stage on an equal footing with equal time. If each side simply states its predictable position with no direct questioning, it inevitably ends up as a draw.
The second rule is: If you are going to debate a creationist, at least learn something about his beliefs, how he rationalizes those beliefs, and how he counters the basic scientific evidence.
Because he didn't do his homework, Nye fell into the trap.
Ham brought up the same drivel he has always used in his videos and on answersingenesis, so it should have been easy to prepare a detailed rebuttal. Instead Nye bounced around through dozens of arguments that creationists are all too familiar with. Nye’s points were so predictable that even I could have written out the creationist rebuttal.
Come on Bill, all you had to do was punch your questions into Ken Ham’s answersingenesis.com the week before. He gives away his entire battle plan on that website and yet you still insist on a plodding frontal assault into the machine guns.
It was the deluge of unrelated points that made Ham’s rebuttal so easy, because up front he said Nye had posed “too many questions to answer in the time alloted,” so he just chose to make the standard creationist response to a couple of them.
He countered the predictable radiometric dating point with examples of dating anomolies and the assumption of scientists that radioactive decay rates have always been the same.
Ham also leaped on Nye’s fluffy opinion (posed as a question): “Is it reasonable to suppose that unskilled men could have built an ark that big?” To which Ham, predictably, said that Noah might have been very skilled. To which all Nye could say is that this was “not reasonable” and that he remained “skeptical.” Ouch! Zing!
If you want to stump Ken Ham with a question, use one that you know he can’t answer. Yes, there are plenty of them, but you need to spend time finding out what they are. Then you choose just three or four of these unanswerable questions, explain them in detail, and keep pushing for an answer throughout the debate.
Finally, I had to facepalm when Nye himself was given a couple of softball questions from members of the audience and he couldn’t answer them.
“How did the atoms that created the Big Bang get there?” Bill’s answer: “We don’t know.”
The answer, of course, is that atoms did not create the Big Bang, it was the other way around. And yes, by all means go on to point out that we don’t yet know what caused the Big Bang, but also point out that it doesn’t matter. We still have a natural explanation for what came after the big bang, and therefore the creationist explanation of an instant sun, and instant earth and a Garden of Eden is not viable – which is, after all, the topic of the debate.
And on another question: “How did consciousness come from matter?” Nye also shrugged his shoulders and said “dunno.”
Come on Bill. Why not explain how matter combined chemically to form replicating polynucleotides, and how natural selection would have changed these into more complex molecules? Then explain how these molecules evolved into protocells which evolved into cellular organisms, which developed basic neural functions, which evolved into small brains, then larger brains, until animals – including, gorillas, dolphins, elephants and humans – had a brain big enough to appreciate their own existence.
So inevitably the result was a draw, which for the creationists means a huge win. Any time a creationist can stand on an equal footing with a respected scientist and argue science to a standstill, it gives the “two worldviews” idea merit.
The one thing that was not mentioned during the whole debate is that this “two wordviews” idea has a fundamental flaw. In one of his illustrations, Ken Ham showed “Creationism – God’s word” on one side and “Naturalism – Darwin” on the other.
So it needs to be pointed out what makes them fundamentally different: God’s word cannot be changed. Creationists themselves accept that everything they believe is set in a book that cannot possibly be wrong, so if new evidence comes along it has to fit the existing worldview.
Darwin’s word, however, can be wrong. In science, if new evidence comes along that contradicts the “worldview” then the worldview changes. In fact, Darwin’s conclusions about what drives evolution and how it unfolded have been shown to be wrong – by scientists, not creationists -- and Darwin’s books have not been used as textbooks in biology teaching for decades.
No disrespect to Darwin, he was a genius, but he was a 19th Century genius and we now live in the 21st century.
Creationists are still living with a wordview carved in the 5th century BC.

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