Notes on the Bill Nye / Ken Ham Debate
2014-02-05
A couple days ago, Bill Nye debated Ken Ham, the CEO of an organization devoted to defending a literal interpretation of the biblical creation story, including a world that is only 6,000 years old. It’s both fun and scary seeing an otherwise experienced public educator take a stab at an unfamiliar opponent like this. Bill did a better job at the debate than I expected, and honestly so did Ken, and so did the moderator. Things went smoothly, people were polite. You can see it all here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI&feature=share&t=13m14s
To Ken’s credit, video clips featuring young-earth creationist scientists and engineers were a pretty powerful reminder that it’s possible for people that know how to parse a scientific paper to believe this stuff. I was also glad to see Ken acknowledge that holding YEC views isn’t prerequisite to salvation in the Bible. I do agree with him that evolution is incompatible with the Bible, but it’s most important that people simply embrace science, and thus leaving the door for salvation open, nonsensical as I find it, is a win for science.
Bill made a few relatively fresh points in his speech I enjoyed, in particular by crunching the numbers on the fly to illustrate that if you make sense of Noah’s ark by assuming only a small number of rudimentary “kinds” of animals were required to fit (and be fed for a YEAR!), you’re left with a reciprocal problem: those few kinds must have all evolved into today’s distinct species far faster than modern science estimates the process to occur, to the point where we should all easily see it happening everywhere! I was a little surprised to see him spend so much time reiterating the general importance of science and the need for scientists and engineers in the USA, when he could have been bolstering his actual arguments instead, but his message is an important one in general, and I suppose he was thinking about more than just the debate itself when he chose to participate.
There are a few specific points that I feel should have been addressed differently:
What Would Change Your Mind When asked what would change his mind, Bill said that just one example of an exception to a long list of properties of nature. It’s a powerful statement, but I expect for the most part, a single exception wouldn’t do it. A single fossil turning up in the wrong rock layer, for example, would evoke a great deal of study I’m sure, but if we couldn’t explain it, we’d probably credit to some sort of exceptional circumstances we cannot detect today. I think it would take something more systematic to really undermine the rest of the evidence – 0.1% of fossils being out of place, for example. Also, unless you’ve pre-studied and can address every questionable example presented during the debate, which is almost impossible to do, you’re opening yourself up to being “proven” wrong then and there.
Scientists Don’t Know Bill was asked questions like “what was before the big bang?” and “how can matter produce consciousness?” He was right to respond that we don’t know, but I’d add two very important things:It’s OKAY that we don’t know. It should be expected. It’s far better to say “I don’t know” than to jump on any hypothesis you can get your hands on. This does run the risk of alienating the audience by calling the Biblical story no better than anything else you could pull out of thin air, and I imagine that’s why Bill didn’t focus on it.In the case of consciousness, we might have a lot left to understand about HOW they’re connected, but we certainly know THAT they’re connected. Chemical substances can alter a person’s personality, perception, memory, or consciousness. So can physical injuries. Consciousness is unambiguously associated with the physical world.
Poetic Interpretation Bill took the opportunity to object to Ken’s interpretation of the Bible as poetic sometimes and literal at other times, but Ken didn’t actually say anything unreasonable or inconsistent in that moment. Had he been asked some more pointed question about how to deal with certain Biblical laws that seem barbaric today, I’m sure he would have opened himself up to this criticism, but that didn’t happen this time.
Testability Bill repeatedly asked for testable predictions from the creation model. It’s a good point, and one that Ken had no choice but to ignore, but I don’t like the emphasis on it for this reason: the creation model might make no predictions, but that doesn’t make it wrong, just useless to science. It’s wrong because of the many tests that it fails, not because of the lack of tests that it passes. Of course you can make many predictions with the creation model, and it fails them completely (we won’t see light from stars more than 6000 light years away, species will all show a distribution pattern originating at Mt. Sinai, the landing site of Noah’s ark, plant life sensitive to water and sea life sensitive to salt levels in water will be devastated, etc. for example), but that’s beside the point.
You Weren’t There Although Bill’s points were valid, I would have been considerably more forceful in my tone and language in rejecting this “observational vs historical science” point which forms the foundation of Ken’s entire argument. “You weren’t there” he keeps saying. It’s true that things could have been different in the past. Maybe the fundamental forces, the decay rates of radioactive materials, the speed of light, etc. were all different in the past. Scientists are open to that possibility – the establishment of the fundamental forces in the opening moments of the big bang is actually a debated topic these days. But we have no reason to assume they were different, and mountains of data showing complete consistency so far, which all fits together to form a relatively coherent (though certainly incomplete) picture of how the universe would have formed. If the Bible seems to indicate that the universe is young, “we can’t prove with complete certainty that everything we know about the universe wasn’t completely different right up until recorded history starts to tell us it wasn’t” isn’t a valid objection.
The above were all specific points I would have addressed differently, but I believe there’s a systematic problem with the general approach debaters use to defend evolution:
THE EVIDENCE Most defenders of evolution start by reminding everyone that there really IS no debate in the scientific community, and that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and then they mention that there’s a lot of intermediate fossils, that the rock layers are pretty consistent, and they list some obvious problems with the Genesis story. It’s all true, of course, but it doesn’t paint the big picture, and I really don’t think it identifies the heart of what makes biologists trust evolutionary theory. It’s a list of points, predictably countered by creationists with a list of exceptions to the apparent rules of biology and geology that we expect – fossils in the wrong layer, incorrect radiometric dating errors, oddball species that don’t seem to fit with their family, etc.. The list is short and explainable, but it adequately fills a debate timeslot, or the attention span of the typical reader, and the explanations frequently do not.
To make matters worse, creationists will brazenly throw “the flood” at huge categories of evidence. Their hypotheses are almost never produced by anyone knowledgeable in the appropriate fields, and they certainly haven’t been put to any kind of test, but a debate’s audience will generally accept all “could haves” as basically equal, no matter how unsupported. Ice layers could have been the flood; rock layers could have been the flood; concentration of elements in the atmosphere could have been the flood; fossilization could have been the flood; land bridges to islands could have been the flood; the Grand Canyon could have been the flood; craters on the moon could have been a result of ice meteors that provided water for the flood (seriously!) – the list goes on.
Listing points is exhausting, and disconnects you from the big picture. The big picture is this: it all fits. You can independently produce a tree – not a web or any other shape, but a distinct TREE of life – from any number of major and well-understood branches of research, and those trees will agree with and bolster each other. We started with trees of life based on a limited set of specimens and fossils. Then we developed the technology necessary to coordinate efforts around the world, to excavate countless dig sites and build a global catalog. Digging deeper and broader, the tree became more obvious, with samples spreading out geographically across continents predictably in tune with their geological journey through the rock layers. In other words, if you find species X at layer 1 in Argentina, and species Z at layer 3 in Nunavut, you can not only make a prediction that species Y existed, but that you might check layer 2 in Mexico first (simplified, obviously). There isn’t cyclic logic here – we don’t date the rocks based on the fossils and the fossils based on the rocks, except as a shortcut once we’ve independently established that the two are linked. They re-enforce each other.
Then, and only then, did we learn about radiometric dating. Creationists will question whether it works or not, throw a tiny number of contaminated or mishandled samples at us out of countless numbers of consistent results, but they won’t explain why it’s not only consistent with itself, but fits perfectly with what we had predicted long ago. The geological layers, and the fossils they contain, date with near perfect agreement in the order we anticipated. Use either one, and you can derive the other. Now. Today. “Historical science”, you see, is science like any other, with testable predictions in the present.
More recently, and most powerfully at all, we have come to understand the role of DNA. DNA doesn’t just allow us to develop yet another tree of life in measurable agreement with all the others. DNA lets us measure with reasonable accuracy the number of generations that separate us from each other, proving that there are far, far more than 6000 years’ worth of humanity between each of us and our last common ancestor, never mind the 4000 years since the clock was supposedly reset by Noah’s flood. Not just us, either, but all animals, and our relationship to all animals. Lastly, DNA finally unlocks the mechanism of how evolution MUST occur. Reproduction, which we know to produce random DNA mutations, combined with natural selection, enabling only those best fit to their environments to propagate, is simply all it takes. We KNOW it occurs. The question of how quickly and effectively it occurs is answered by the tree of life we’ve come to understand over the last 150 years.
Updated Oct 15, 2020 11:53:19pm
Feb 07, 2014 9:37:42pm