Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham on New-Earth Creationism

Garrett

Thanks for coming in with such a nice positive thread. This is really refreshing because there is so much hate and bitterness in the world. This is just what STR needed, someone taking their time to start a great thread that really helps people out.

Many people start message board threads with no intention other than to irritate people with different beliefs. Again just wanted to say thanks for your efforts …..you have even gained the respect of Unigeezer the most most respected Mountain biker in the forum.

Garrett gets my vote for STR member of the year.

 

Garrett sucks

 

The atom was proposed as a theory, and not immediately truth. Just as was the heliocentric theory, but that one got shut down. Extraordinary facts require extra ordinary evidence. Occam's razor.

 

I thought this was funny

[youtube]A_a6RjR_AHY[/youtube]

Having a degree in evolutionary biology I feel compelled to chime in. I could go on and on, but I'll keep it short.

There is a vast amount of data and research out there to show strong support for the big bang/evolution model. Even with that strong support, we are basing it off of what we have seen here on earth. There is still a universe of info out there that we are not taking into consideration.

If there is no God, and we evolved from some minute organism that would be amazing. If there is a God, and he created everything we know that would be amazing. The odds of either one happening are astronomical.

Is there a way to prove definitively, black and white, which one is correct? Not really, which is why we are still having these kinds of debates.

 

I have often heard, "Life didn't come from nowhere, somebody/something had to create it." I have always wondered then . . . Who created god? Who is god's god? And so forth? Kind of like when you look into one mirror and see the reflection in another mirror and that back and forth reflection seems to go to infinity.

What color were Adam and Eve? Who had incest with who? Adam with his daughter? Eve with her son? Brother with sister?

I am more of a eight fold path, four Noble truths kind of guy.

 

That is awesome !

Not to Hijack Garrett's attempt at a noble peace prize but I'm curious, what does one do with a degree in evolutionary biology ?

Do you teach ?

 

In grad school now. It was actually a degree in evo. bio and ecology. Most of my classmates were more interested in ecology and went to work in environmental consulting type jobs.

 

Sounds like an interesting field of study.

 

Wow, I was forming a reply to this when I decided to leave and ride my bike (in the rain) instead, and came back and this sort of blew up.

Did you watch the debate? If so, I hope you will see why I thought that GIF was humorous and relevant to the topic. Ham actually believes that Humans and Dinosaurs existed simultaneously and that the Earth is 6000 years old. Hopefully anybody who has ever passed a High School science class can see that there are Mountains of evidence that go against those claims.

I was disappointed in the debate as a whole. Not because either party won or lost but because I found Ken Ham's evidence entirely unsatisfying. If you are going to debate, on your own turf, with Bill Nye the Science Guy, you better have more compelling evidence than just "It's in the Bible and the Bible is the infallible word of God". To make claims that are as extraordinary as his are, you're gonna need better evidence than that.

Well said! The mere fact that we exist at all is amazing.

 

you guys forgot:

 

Stars are just pin holes in the curtain of night. Anyone who says otherwise either has a wild imagination or is taking someone else's word for it.

 

What I find interesting and the mind just can't seem to comprehend . . . is that the universe is infinite. In theory it is expanding since the Big Bang, but for all intents and purposes there is no end. There is no spot where there is a wall, a cliff, a . . . Just boggles the mind.

 

Ah, but the universe is not infinite. Time-Space had a beginning as it's energy is winding down and time-space is becoming more disorderly. It's the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics playing out as entropy. Since the universe is expanding, it must have had a starting point. Since there was a big bang, which was the universe's intital burst of energy, or inertia, it needed a force to cause the motion. The First Law of Motion: that an object not subject to any net external force moves at a constant velocity. Thus, an object will continue moving at its current velocity until some force causes its speed or direction to change. If the universe was contained in the hyper-dense mass, but there was no force to "push" it, it would have remained the dense mass.

In all honesty, I was disappointed in the debate between Nye and Ham, both who I don't find entirely qualified to present their side. However, there is sufficient evidence in the universe and the human body to give serious thinking to a Designer of the universe and all contained within it. The "fine tuning" of the universe and body as a self contained operating organism are amazing. Nature is not intelligent, nor can it create. Information dervies from an intelligent source. The human cells contain DNA, which is information. The universe is full of mathmatical equations, of which is information. Even if the by some random chance the human body existed from random mutations (which is mathmatically impossible), information and consciousness cannot be explained naturally. The universe is not all there is. As Dr. John Lennox, professor of Mathmatics and Philosophy of Science at Oxford University once wrote, "If I say “X creates X,” I presuppose the existence of X in order to account for the existence of X. To presuppose the existence of the universe to account for its existence is logically incoherent. Or put simply; From nothing, nothing comes! or No-thing cannot do anything!”

I'm probably not going to return to this thread, but PM me if you want to further discuss. Just keep an open mind. But to call Ham an idiot or worse (not you personally, but others on the thread) is quite closed minded, arrogant, and ignorant. Ham's view of creationism (or intelligent design) is shared by thousands of brilliant scientists, doctors, etc. Many doctor's I personally know as clients have become theists after medical school when they realized the complexity of the human body.


(by the way, the Lennox/Hitchens and Lennox/Dawkins debates are astounding)

 

As said, the universe does have a beggining and an end. As a matter of fact, it is confined to itself, which is the aftermath of the big bang. Space, time, mass, et al all came to be as a result of the big bang. All of these things, essentially, are energy directly coming from products of the big bang.

What is beyond the universe, we cannot know. Science is the study of the physical and the natural world. In its essence, science is limited to what it can observe directly, or indirecty (for when the effects of a phenomena are evident, but the cause is not). As products of this universe, we cannot escape it, and hence cannot observe what is outside it.

Can science explain the existence of God. In the same line of thinking as above, no it cannot. As God, as defined in most literature and beliefs, lies beyond the universe.

Did I just explain the existence of God? No. I can't. As no one can. This is why it is called faith, and why it is relegated to another field of study outside of science. If you look into it, I believe it's in the liberal arts/humanites section of the uni

If it lies outside the plain of the physical and the natural, there is no explaining it as such lies in the supernatural.

 

It seemed like Ham's side of the argument is a bit unfair, as he keeps asserting that processes which science assume to be constant may not have been constant at some point or points in time. This may be true or not true, but it is not necessarily testable.

I think both sides do a disservice to themselves by not giving more credence to the large numbers of those with faith or belief in a higher power who do believe in a long earth timeline and evolution in varying degrees, yet another example of false dichotomization that seems to be so rampant today. I did find it offensive that Ham briefly addressed Christians with a more progressive view of the Bible and Earth history and summarily dismissed them because of their lack of orthodoxy. (And seemingly tacitly called into question their faith and status as Christians for the same, something I would think a Christian would be loath to say about another professed Christian!)

 

A couple stories I found interesting today that are related:

On the subject of age of the Earth, scientists just found a grouping of footprints over 800, 000 years old in the U.K.!

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/02/07/human-footprints-800000-years-old/5277059/

On the subject of space, the Curiosity Rover just sent pictures of earth and our moon back to us from the surface of Mars, more than 99 million miles away!

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/06/tech/innovation/mars-curiosity-earth-image/

 

This is much too deep for a simple guy like me, lol.

 

Seems to me that deciding to believe in a scientific principle is a choice based on observable evidence, while deciding to believe in a religion is a choice made despite a lack of evidence (which is some people's definition of what faith is).

Claim: the universe is expanding.
Evidence: I can demonstrate that light has wavelike properties, and that wavelengths are stretched when the distance between the source and observer is increasing. I can then observe the red-shift (stretched wavelengths) of light from distant stars/galaxies, and it's not too difficult believe that those stars/galaxies are moving away from us and that the universe is expanding.

Claim: Jesus rose from the dead.
Evidence: While there are accounts of this, they're 2 millennia old, and not being an historical scholar makes it hard for me to take as "evidence". Therefore I must choose to believe - and that's a hard choice if you're really making it.


How many people, do you suppose, claim a religion, but haven't really made the hard, informed decision about faith?

 

Faith has many levels. There are people who chose to believe and not question. There are those who question and believe. Both are ok. People are different. They will go with what works for them.

I have faith. I believe in an intelligent design / creation. I believe that the story of Genesis is a folkloric story that was effective in explaining how the world came to be a few thousand years ago. Genesis is one of the early books of the bible written in 580 b.c. or thereabouts. Even then, it was not new. It was already passed down in other written forms, in other religions, and we cannot even fathom how far back it goes as oral tradition (spoken not written history).

Given that, can we we literally take everything in Genesis as truth? I for one say no. Take the good and leave the disconnects aside. If you read into the story of Genesis, it is correct in its progression. First there was light. The Big Bang. But are we to take literally that this all happened in 7 days? I think not.

As for the life of Jesus. Some believe that Jesus was god, some do not. Regarding his coming back to life, one can take it literally or not. The non-literal belief is that he did not come back to life, but his teachings are alive, as in still praticed, word, his teaching transcended his life. Hence, he transcended death.

Whichever it may be, the mystery of Jesus is there. Do I dwell on what REALLY happened. Sometimes. What I focus on is in living a good life according to his teachings. The golden rule for one. Do unto others as you would do to yourself. This single line, as taught in catechism, over rules everything else before it. Doesnt sound so bad does it?

Ergo, if one takes this simple rule, everything in the bible before the New Testament can be discarded if it conflicts with the golden rule. Like for example, any anti-gay passages. If I were gay, I wouldnt want folks to persecute me, so I wouldnt persecute a gay person.

However, as said before, different strokes for different folks. There are many religions, and many version of Christianity, that's just me. If I were born a muslim, I'd be a good Muslim too. It doesnt really matter what religion your are. Just as long as you are a good person, and you are good to your fellow man, and a productive member of society, eees all good

Dont get me started talking about conscience, freewill, the reason why people suffer, misfortune, and all that

 

I envy you...no, seriously! Fongster, I mean....