Bill Nye Debates Creationist Ken Ham Live 2/4/2014

At 7 pm EST:

http://www.billnye.com/

Bump, it just started.

dafaq is Nye doing?

watching this now.

soo interesting

CSI? Hopefully he's just being nice and giving that guy a head start..

nah man, did you hear how he related it to his argument?

He's taken a pretty strong stand against creationism being taught in science and history classrooms. For someone who has dedicated 30 years of his life to education, it makes perfect sense.

Tiktalik. Lol memories of evo bio last semester suddenly flash by

GIT R DUUUUUn

Holy ***these audience questions.

Ken walked in with a presentation, but haha that ***he pulled out on the spot is something else

It's pretty hard not to catch the gigantic leaps in logic that Ham makes on basically every front. You gotta hand it to him, though, the guy can talk out of his *** like the best of them.

The problem with religious debates is that they usually put up scientist against professional debaters.

I miss Hitchens.

Nye: Point

Ham: "Can't know the past"

Nye: Point

Ham: "Bible tells us this"

That's pretty much what I got out of this.

And I guess that's my problem with this view. I do agree that Science does have to make some assumptions and thus starts on a bit of faith, but that is a starting point. You do have to have faith in the way certain things work but as we go, we find evidence that disproves or supports the idea and we build or change based on that.

But Ham's view takes the book as an absolute. You cannot prove anything about it wrong nor change anything about it. Any evidence to the contrary is glazed over with those two above mentioned counters. So rather than just going out and trying to find how things work and piecing it together step by step and fixing wrong answers as we go, they try to take everything and wedge it in to fit the view they want it to. For me it's just hard to reconcile it.

I feel that one major flaw in Ham's "Historical Science" is that he's making claims that should only be made when your historical record is absolute, when in reality his historical record is terrible fiction with sub-par narration at best.

yea im normally a 15 min max kinda video guy, but this is totally worth it. brought up some great topics, and that dude ham.... too funny. if i can repeat an experiment hundreds of times, and you call that false? why can you take a book written with no real proof absolute accuracy. very interesting

Anyone else had the feeling that this whole debate was a setup from the get-go?

Besides a few of the audience questions that obviously both debaters (at the very least Nye knew ahead of time, he even corrected one of the questions as it was being asked) knew in advance, it seemed to me that this was setup to make religion look bad. While I would have to concede that religion should not interfere with science, I believe that you would have to admit that science and religion are two completely different topics, and that they are not mutually exclusive from one another.

To put it in layman's terms, they are not two sides of the same coin, but two different coins. You can flip one to believe or disbelieve science, and you can flip another to believe or disbelieve religion.

They won't be 2 different topics as long as religion tries to interfere in modern science.
When you know that some schools still refuse to teach Darwin's theory of evolution because of some HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE 2000 years old beliefs you can't say that religion and science aren't part of a same coin. Even if they should be.

Religion shouldn't interfere in any way and people shouldn't believe in theories from books (Quran, Bible or any other book) written thousand years ago with absolutely no evidences to back them up.

My god, does Bill Nye age at all? He looks the exact same as when I was watching him in middle school.

In case anyone is wondering, Ken Ham is the guy who runs the "creation museum" in Kentucky. They have depictions of people riding dinosaurs and Noah's ark riding a wave through the grand canyon as it's being formed. He's not happy with religion being religion, he and his supporters are trying to get creation taught in schools as the true account of natural history. It's not enough to even be taught as an alternative theory, even though it's got nothing to do with natural history. He leads a massive disinformation campaign against radio carbon dating, genetics, disease treatment and prevention, was the guy who said that condoms are less than 1% effective and increase your chances of STD's... He's more of a villain than most of us will ever realize.


Science!

I watched the last 35-45 minutes of the debate. Ken didnt really talk about school education till his final 5 min segment, but it was obvious that Bill was trying to drive home a point about making big bang the history lesson that needs to be taught in his state and arguably everywhere. I may have missed something but this may have been the agenda of the debate to sway voters. Like ive said, I only saw the second half so im not 100% sure if that was mentioned or not.

Anyway, Id propose this: why not have both theories taught. Have two separate history classes. The choice could be up to the student on what path to walk and the losing side wouldnt be forced to sit through something they dont believe. Segregation based on personal beliefs.

It wouldnt come without drawbacks like maybe costing more to employ separate teachers to pass on the knowledge. As of right now, thats all I can think of. Maybe someone else could put some input on possible input on what I proposed. Or even on the idea itself.

He opened with a plea to stop denying children the truth and his foundation and museum are dedicated to it.

in the words of Bill Nye "if you want to religion in a theology class, go ahead, but keep it out of the science classroom, because it's not science"

The sad thing about events like this is that they are set up to show one side win over the other. That not a balanced debate forum. Putting Bill Nye up against this clown is a joke. He is a horrible debater of Christianity and a bad representation of Christians.

I have something that addresses some of the points raised by Bill Nye. I'm just going to leave this here and go:

http://creation.com/ham-nye-debate

So...growing up in Texas, my science classes were 2 sided.
The teachers would teach evolution etc but when something about creation came up it was more of an in class student debate with the teacher refing it.

I like both view points on the subject however I think whatever the bible says with creationism is an inaccurate depiction of events that happened. ie a tall tale story book based on some fact

Teachers don't teach history anymore. My nieces history teacher has shown them 300 and Gladiator in class, teaching both as near fact. They are also allowed to read graphic novels in English class.

Ken Ham makes religion look bad without any help at all.

My history teacher in High School was like that. We'd get off the subject of history and get into a class-wide debate/discussion about anything else instead of having class, it was awesome.