My standard for judging a debate between creation and evolution is simple: Would I show this debate to a precocious youngster who feels caught between what she learned from school and what she was taught to believe in Sunday School? Someone on the fence, who is old enough to understand scientific reasoning but young enough not to have settled on a firm position yet. Someone who is well-situated to have their mind opened to science despite religious conditioning against it. Someone like the countless high-school and college students throughout the Bible Belt, who grew up with access to two confusingly divergent narratives about how humans came to be here.
By that standard, this was no contest. This was a full-on curb-stomping of epic proportions. This was Super Bowl XLVIII. Hell, it was practically Super Bowl XX. I’ve never seen a science debate this one-sided, and I’ve seen most of the debates on this page. Ham basically gave away the game when he straight-up admitted that no scientific evidence could possibly sway him because he already has all the answers in his holy book, “No one is ever going to convince me that the word of God is untrue.” Beyond that point, this was no longer a debate between creation “science” and real science, but rather between faith and reason.
Throughout the debate, Nye continued driving home the hypothetical-deductive nature of scientific method. Formulate your hypothesis, rooted in your theory of how the world works, make testable predictions, then go forth and test them out. Nye gave several examples of how science proceeds in this manner, and repeatedly challenged Ham to give us a single confirmable or falsifiable prediction from creation science. Time and again Ham ducked the question.
Ham’s strongest suit, of course, was that he could (and did) confidently claim to have answers for everything in his holy book. This trick may work for those who desire to believe on faith and have no interest in learning anything more about the natural world than was known by the nomadic peoples of the ancient near east, but for those who are inclined to a certain intellectual curiosity, Nye forthrightly offered the tantalizing invitation of “I don’t know” whenever science has not yet solved a given problem. This dynamic once again illustrated the difference between a Biblical (or Quranic) worldview that purports to have all the answers revealed in an ancient book, and a scientific worldview that joyfully welcomes new challenges and new information.
For another take on this debate, check out Staks’ post, and also Smilodon’s upcoming series of posts treating creationist arguments one by one. I’ve heard that the YouTube video may be available for only a limited time, but for now here it is:
Share and enjoy!
