Notes from the Ken Ham- Bill Nye Debate

I might flush some of these out later, but here are my real-time notes. The video can be found here . My timestamps are off a little from the YouTube video, but it should be close enough.  

Jot list:

Ham's Opening

·         18:00 minutes - No. Virtually no scientists are creationist. You found one. Cool, Mr. Ham...

·         19:10 - No scientists use "science" as a synonym for knowledge. It is closer to a synonym for "the process of  observation and experimentation."

·         20:28 - Historical sciences are testable.

·         20:50 - How the hell could we "test" the supernatural? How could we observe it?

Nye's Opening

·         24:45 - Bill is right. Science is science is science. If we couldn't do historical science, we couldn't do forensics.

·          26:00 - Great job Bill (although a bit too simplistic) Uniformitarianism baby!!!!

·         26:40 - You don't have to be a creationist to be a Christian. Yay Bill!

Ham's 30 minutes

·         29:00 - I need to look up what else the MRI scanner is used for....

·         31:20 - So I guess Ken Miller is really interesting just because he believes in Jesus, even though he assumes uniformitarianism?

·         31:50 - Bill is not a philosopher. Not his problem. Ask Dr. Garrett.

·         32:30 - SO DO BIOLOGISTS!!!! SO DO PHYSICISTS!!!! And uniformitarianism isn't absolute. Extraordinary things have happened in Earth history and those things can be demonstrated; it's the kinds of processes that do not change (i.e. oxygen will not suddenly become a greenhouse gas, glaciers won't form at the equator, etc.)

·         33:50 - You are not a geologist, clearly. Otherwise, you would see that glaring unconformity.

·         34:40 - So you don't understand how half-lives are experimentally determined OBSERVATIONALLY IN THE LAB!!!

·         36:30 - Geoscientists literally observe, test, repeat "historical science" every single day. Fossils in outcrops, man...

·         37:30 - What the hell is a "kind?"

·         39:20 - And you can use DNA, homologous structures, etc. to confirm the tree of life.

·         39:50 - So all we have to demonstrate is a couple of instances of changes between families in the fossil record? EASY!!!

·         41:00 - PLoS is not the best journal but let it slide....

·         42:10 - HOW IS THE FOSSIL RECORD UNOBSERVABLE??? Mr. Ham, can I please take you to one of any number of Cincinnati Arch outcrops?

·         43:00 - When did you establish that creationism is science? All you have done is  bash evolution. If you disproved evolution tonight, you still would not have proved creationism. You need positive evidence...

·         45:00 - So, for realz, it is telling that you can only find a handful of scientists who agree with you, and some of them are not even PhDs.

·         46:00 - Thank you, Dr. Fabich, for explaining exactly how most of evolution works.

·         47:00 - So what if Darwin was racist? Who the hell cares?

·         48:20 - Anti-God religion????? What the hell does that mean?

·         49:00 - I can see the age of the Earth.

·         49:30 - Because historical science IS observational science, Mr. Ham. You made up the distinction (and abused the title of a fundamental geoscience course).

·         52:00 - No death before the fall? So what did Adam and Eve eat? Rocks?

·         52:30 - Is the gospel really necessary to explain your so-called "science"?

·         53:00 - Oh no you didn't!

·         53:45 - Tehehe... he talked about marriage and then when Christ comes it's "consummation".... Ken Ham clearly needs some sexy time.... His wife should get on that.

·         54:40 - But you're not an academic....

·         55:30 - NO!!! She doesn't want Buddhist and Hindu and atheist and Wiccan and Jewish and Muslim and liberal Christian young people forced to believe your nonsense.

·         56:30 - You just don't get it...

·         56:40 - Divorce, out-of-wedlock babies, teen pregnancies, STDs and abortions are all more prevalent in areas with a higher density of conservative Protestants. Just so you know.

Nye's 30 minutes

·         59:00 - And now Mr. Bill Nye is bringing out the science... :)

·         1:00:00 - Why are we going to the ice cores? Cores drilled by oil and gas industry might be a better argument.

·         1:01:15 - Bad choice... They'll call each one a single snow fall.

·         1:02:00 - Mmmm... sexy  disconformities.

·         1:03:40 - Yeah, why aren't we a world of Grand Canyons?

·         1:04:00 - The classic "rabbit in the Cambrian" challenge. I love it.

·         1:05:20 - Bad choice. Never ever say "Take my word for it, none of these is a gorilla."

·         1:06:30 - What? A testable prediction of creationists just didn't work out. How strange...

·         1:07:00 - 1:08:59 - Today's 11 new species!

·         1:09:30 - I LOVE ANCIENT LAKE MISSOULA!

·         1:13:30 - Bill Nye just accused Noah of animal abuse. That will go over well...

·         1:14:45 - Excellent cladogram choice. Putting mammals to the left of the upper right corner gives a less human-centric view of evolution as it really is: goal-less.

·         1:16:10 - Tiktaalik - the ideal transition between kinds.

·         1:17:00 - Shit. Bill Nye said "sex." Oh my God. In the creation museum in Kentucky.

·         1:17:50 - If you acknowledge that viruses and bacteria evolve, then we must also evolve in order to survive as a species.

·         1:20:00 - This section is about why we accept the Big Bang. I am not really qualified to critique this, so I am going to just assume Nye knows what he is talking about. 

·         1:25:00 - Understanding of nuclear decay is applicable to medicine as well as radiometric dating.

·         1:26:30 - 1:28:00 - How could there be billions of stars further than 6,000 lightyears away if the universe is only 6,000 years old? and so on... A wonderful finale!

Rebuttles

·         1:29:30 - Why can't we observe the age of the Earth? Didn't Nye give you at least two ways (if you assume the Earth and the universe are about the same age for the sake of your argument)?

·         1:30:50 - Was it a basalt flow or was it a dike? Were there unconformities? What lab?

·         1:31:00 - K-Ar is not too accurate after a few tens of millions of years and that is known. U-Pb would be more accurate for any dates over 1 million years. Look it up.

·         1:35:15 - Two millennia, Nye. Go back to grade school on that one.

·         1:35:50 - I love you, Bill Nye. Did the fish sin? lol

·         1:37:00 - Veggie lions.... prove it. "I give you lions teeth, you give me verses ... from a book ... that was translated to English..."

·         1:37:00 - NOT 30 CENTURIES!

·         1:28:20 - It means Mr. Ham's words are somehow to be trusted over the fossils in your backyard in Kentucky.

·         1:39:10 - Thank you, Nye, for distancing us from Darwin's racism.

·         1:40:30 - The fact that you can list creation scientists, MR. Ham, proves Nye's point.

·         1:41:10 - Bill's confused because you made up the term "kinds."

·         1:41:30 - But you already declared "kinds" = families.

·         1:41:40 - But some animals came onto the ark in 7s... your calculation is wrong, Ken.

·         1:42:30 - Ken Ham's first decent point of the night.

·         1:43:45 - Seriously. The pyramids? READ THE INTERNETS!!!

·         1:44:30 - Cool. You established that scientists are allowed to say "I DON'T KNOW." Big whoop.

·         1:48:00 - You are right, Nye. You are not a theologian. You only throw out the OT when you don't want to kill adulterers or poorly behaved children. lol

·         1:49:30 - If I wasn't engaged, Mr. Nye...

Q&A (by the way, I was upset they were not accepting e-submissions) 

·         1:50:00 - The moderator made a Kentucky joke.

·         1:51:20 - Well, in context, the Earth is flat and God wants to kill people: Isaiah 40

·        21 "Do you not know? Have you not heard?Has it not been told you from the beginning?    Have you not understood since the earth was founded?²² He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,    and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,    and spreads them out like a tent to live in.²³ He brings princes to naught    and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.²⁴ No sooner are they planted,    no sooner are they sown,    no sooner do they take root in the ground,than he blows on them and they wither,    and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff."

·         1:54:00 - "I don't know." Thank you for your intellectual honesty, Mr. Nye.

·         1:56:00 - THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH!!! ;D

·         1:59:00 - All your so-called predictions are also consistent with modern evolutionary theory, Ken.

·         2:01:30 - Yay Nye.

·         2:02:00 - Astrobiologists looking for a second genesis. Go be one!

·         2:03:44 - Live for now! Discover for now! Why else?

·         2:04:20 - Why do you have this museum is you cannot demonstrate creationism? Why did you have this debate? What is the point?

·         2:05:10 - So I was once a sincere believer who genuinely repented and sought God, and yet I still accepted evolution and later became an athiest. How do you explain that, Ken?

·         2:06:30 - Nye is actually willing to change his mind. It takes one sound paper. That's it. Ham refuses to change his mind because God.

·         2:07:30 - Nye fell flat. Sad.

·         2:08:00 - Nye came back. Yessss!

·         2:11:10 - Do you believe in plate tectonics, Ham?

·         2:12:10 - Cool, you do. Then you should know that catastrophic plate movement (like that in the pre-Cambrian) is very very bad for multicellular life.

·         2:12:50 - It is really really easy to get published in the journals of creation research. The peer review is a joke compared to the mainstream.

·         2:15:00 - Earth is not a closed system; therefore, we are allowed to build complexity here so as long as we create more randomness elsewhere (like heat, smaller hydrocarbons, etc.)

·         2:17:10 - Really? If life is not composed of matter and energy, then what the hell is it and how do you demonstrate it without appeals to matter and energy?

·         2:18:30 - Way to dodge the big question. Obviously, you are trying to get more liberal Christians to visit your Musuem.

·         2:20:40 - Nye has done a fantastic job at bringing us back to the basics of the scientific method and of skepticism.

·         2:22:10 - Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a method.

·         2:24:30 - Either you take it all literally, or you admit some of this is metaphorical. Also, the Isaiah passage you quoted earlier as God discussing the expanding universe is obviously poetry. Most of Isaiah is poetry.

·         2:26:00 - If the Bible is the inerrant work of God, then you say that killing disobedient children and taking virgin girls as sex slaves is somehow morally justifiable as God ordered it and you (I assume) believe God is moral?

·         2:28:00 - 2:30:20 - Bill Nye daftly avoids saying anything that might imply that God is improbable. Well done.

·         2:31:40 - So what does Ken Miller do? Do you really want to say that Jesus informs his science, or that his church informs his science, even though he is a pro-evolution advocate?

·         2:32:30 - So atheists cannot create technology???? 

·         2:33:00 - Nye. Stay away from theology!

·         2:35:00 - The Anthropocene is the evidence of the remarkable advantages we have obtained over other animals via natural selection.

·         2:37:20 - Again, Ken, you just explained evolution. The ones that survive, survive and REPRODUCE.

·         2:40:10 - Carl Sagan "When you are in love, you want to tell the world."