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

Omniscience could well mean that one can see the full branching possibility of all possible decisions. Thus "god" can see the results of every choice you (and everything else from subatomic particles on up) will make and know the outcome.

You're thinking of time as too much of a straight line and opting for the "it's an ineffable plan and shut up" argument that tends to get fed to the plebs, I think. And relying on far too limited a definition of omniscience. Although I feel like an *** for saying that because the notion of a human even glimpsing the idea of omniscience is rather like finding a lobster that can play a Beethoven symphony.

As for the whole "I'm going to give you a difficult test and if you fail, you're *** forever" aspect of Christianity... yeah, just and merciful God except when you're talking to a Calvinist, which means most Protestants and a fair number of Catholics these days. My old priest liked to tell a sermon where, at the end of time, all the people of the world are gathered before God's throne and He says to the saints, "Come, enter my kingdom," and then says to the sinners, "Come, enter my kingdom." My congregation hated that sermon because it highlights the essential problem with Calvinist ideology. Oddly, no one ever seemed to grasp that it was just a variation on the Prodigal Son parable that Jesus told.

Whether god knows you will fail or succeed is irrelevant. Think of it like a script that's already been written, not by god, but by everything in existence but god already has a copy of that script. So you go through life making your own choices and he already knows because in his existence he's already experienced everything there is to experience from the beginning til the end.

Also, don't make this about who believes what or any of that because that's not what this is. Just providing an alternate to your little game of hey I'm going to propose this scenario, ask for an answer and then tell you you're wrong anyways lol...

You are trying to apply logic to Judeo-Christian theology. I know this sounds dumb but part of "blind-faith" is having faith in something that doesn't completely make sense. Anyone in science who believes in a "God" understands this, but we still continue to do it.
I personally never apply the same logic or methodology as used in science. When I was younger I did struggle with conflicts between science and faith. In part I still do.

The only reason why you're denying it to be a good argument is because it comes from the Christian. As I have stated before, uncertainty exists in science so if it needs to be disputed, their religious orientation shouldn't matter. You're only calling it specious because it is an argument that comes from the speaker who happens to be Christian.

Criticism is how science advances. Criticism is the driving force to why peer-review works.

This seems that you have faith in science. Is this true?

A script is determinism. A script is a contradiction to free will. Who wrote the script? You're using flowery verbiage to obfuscate the contradiction Flavin.

Though true in some regard, I do not acquiesce to the idea of "beyond our knowledge" easily. I would more readily acknowledge myself insufficient or our current technology insufficient, before claiming something is beyond humanity entirely.

I find the definition fed to the plebs the most telling, personally. It is the apologetic and philosophical approach that obscures and spirals out in strange, acrobatic contortions to explain contradictions, becoming too big of a knot to be unraveled in one life-time. Break it at the base and none of the rest matters.

@Bacon: Faith is fine. I won't argue with it.

@Keit: There is uncertainty in Science, yes. Science is attempting to explain it still, yes. A creationist pointed it out, yes, but he isn't the first and he won't be the last. That same creationist, however, follows this observation with "because: god." He is without credibility, and should not be considered an equal to those with intellectual integrity. "Because: god" is not an acceptable response in the pursuit of knowledge.

Wow. You totally managed to miss the important part, didn't you?

I'm a rhetorician, a grammarian, a lexicographer, and a polyglot. My training is with words. My hobbies include psychology, sociology, political science, and genetics. My areas of amateur knowledge include medicine and mechanical engineering.

If I am called upon to provide criticism, I am qualified to do so in the area of the written and spoken word. I can comment on psychology and medicine but have no real authority in doing so. Even with a firm grounding in several scientific subjects, I am in no way qualified to peer-review because I lack the fundamental training and experience.

So, yes, of course I take a great deal of scientific data on faith. No one in the world has the time to learn quantum physics, molecular biology, astrophysics, and everything in between. Nor does any one person have to. You're claiming that one uninformed idiot choosing to disbelieve the same peer-review process YOU JUST CITED is qualitatively as valuable as the informed skepticism of a specialist in the field. Wrong. Just wrong.

As I said, context matters. I don't give one iota of credence of the schizophrenics that shout conspiracy theories on downtown streetcorners and I am under no obligation to extend credence to a skilled rhetorician like Ken Ham when he admits he has no interest in facts and data. His questioning of sound science on the basis of nothing whatsoever is worth even less than the schizophrenic's ravings because his brain is nominally working at full capacity and he still chooses ignorance.

Science can take criticism. Experiments get criticized all the time. What difference does it make if it was made from a christian? Science rebuttals with more facts. As more facts are provided, there is less to criticize. When there is nothing else to criticize, then we have a working theory that predicts.

Creationism is an ever receding entity in this case because they will run out of things to question. This is what I'm hitting at. Let them question if they want to, and if there are scientific gaps, let's go out there and find them.

I was quietly following the discussion butI disagree here. They might be pointing at the same flaw, but where they go with it matters a great deal. "This isn't certain, so it needs to be researched further" is very different from "This isn't certain, so I'm right and you're wrong".

Your acquiescence is irrelevant, though telling of why you seem to have trouble with the concept. "Omniscience" is too big. Actually, it's hypothetically too big for the entire universe, which is why it gets attributed to extradimensional entities constrained by different boundaries.

The real question to ask with omniscience is not some pedestrian little query about free will, anyhow. That's kids' stuff. More interesting questions arise when considering how a single creature would adapt to absolute knowledge. If some being is literally aware of every sub-subatomic particle and its position at any given point in space-time (something that is ostensibly impossible by our current understanding), why would it be particularly concerned with the specific cluster of matter that we call Earth? Would it even regard the feeble electron flow through the cloud we call our brain as intelligence and thought?

The plebeian idea of omniscience, the notion of a truly all-powerful entity that somehow actually cares about ephemeral apes on a single planet, is laughable. It's also why I find the notion of the Christian deus being synonymous with the hypothetical Creator of the Universe so ridiculous. I am personally more likely to expend time and energy on the individual motes of shed skin cells floating in the air of my apartment than an ultimate being would do for individuals of a species that only lives a handful of solar revolutions.

Dandy and all, and these are all ideas I humor myself, and around people who I find intellectually stimulating, but you have to consider audience in this context.

Immortality and consciousness is a juxtapoisition I dote on quite a bit myself.

I am well aware of the audience. It's why I hold many religious folks in so much contempt. If they had even a basic philosophical grasp of the concepts they purport to understand, much less all the science that they habitually disregard or actively oppose, well... there's a reason that theology departments are full of quiet atheists.

Every so often I meet someone with a D.Theo. and a clerical collar and I have to resist the urge to take him aside and get him to confess.

But that doesn't mean the scientific community won't listen to you. If you critiqued an article with insight and solutions, even if you didn't have the credentials, if the logic was strong enough, a Ph.D would listen to you. Is it likely that you will come up with such radical new idea? Ha, No. Will we listen? Yes. This is because scientists function on logic and criticism

Let's extrapolate to Ham. He makes some good arguments but people fail to acknowledge them because they can't get past his initiative. I also do not like his initiative but that doesn't mean he only makes poor arguments. Anything that he mentions about "God" and the "Bible" are a figment for his imagination. This is where the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes in. However, most of the things he mentioned about science are factually correct.

The whole point of science is that anyone can criticize and make it better. It takes time and effort to criticize. No one is expected to understand complex geology, biology, chemistry, physics to understand his arguments. He explained them in plain vernacular.

You know that picture that he had where there are "dog kinds", "cat kinds", "horse kinds" explaining his "Noah's Ark"? I don't believe in Noah's Ark. Nor does the graph suggests that Noah's Ark ever exist. But do you know what? Based on the information we know, we don't have enough evidence to refute it. That's not going to make me subscribe to Noah's Ark. That only means that science needs to bridge that gap between organic molecules to cells and cells into organisms. Do I think that it's plausible that a full animal appears out of thin air? Of course not. But with an unbiased intellect, there is truth in that image. It's disturbing, but this is all the information that we have.

For what it's worth, I type in exactly the same manner as I speak. Well, that is, the way I speak when I assume I am addressing well-educated people. I can and do adjust my diction depending on circumstance, which has probably saved my life on a couple occasions (not exaggerating). And if writing stuff here paid my bills, I would spend a lot more time tailoring my word choice to a broader audience.

So, basically, take it as a mark of respect, even if it comes off as pretentious or overblown.

Anyhow, I don't doubt that Ken Ham made some valid points. What I do doubt is that he made novel points. The likelihood of someone who is actively arguing on behalf of non-science actually making a coherent or clever point that would inspire further examination is very low. As human beings with a finite amount of time on our hands, it behooves us to choose who best to listen to. Someone like me (this is going to sound arrogant as hell) who both has a background in serious learning and a belief in the primacy of facts and the scientific method is more likely to have something useful to add to the discussion than a Bible-thumping denier of observable reality.

But I do take your point. Religions have regularly enshrined ideas that have turned out to be scientifically correct. The time when Jews say an infant boy should be circumcized mutilated is coincident with when his immune system is best able to deal with the infection risk and trauma. Avoiding shellfish and pig flesh mitigate parasite infection. Those rules, in spite of being in the Bible, are very likely the result of scientific observation of phenomena. A really spectacular example, though, exists with the Jains who have such respect for life that some of them have worn face masks for centuries in order to not breathe in and eat/destroy invisible micro-organissm. No one knows how they managed to trump science by such a huge factor in predicting micro-organisms.

However, for all those examples, I could name dozens more that have no defensible basis (mixing fabrics, for instance) and are just cultural artifacts. So while it may be true that a religious person occasionally stumbles on a good point, wherein "religious person" contextually means someone who opposes scientific inquiry and discovery, the weight of probability suggests they won't.

The weight of probability moreover suggests that most people will have nothing to contribute to human scientific knowledge. Most of us are interested in what are called the arts and, in that capacity, we should inspire the passionate few who will invent interstellar spaceships, cancer cures, and passable prosti-droids. Standing on the sidelines smugly saying, "You *** with your data and facts and demonstrable proof have it all wrong because my imaginary friend/ancient book says so!" are not helping much. I'll admit that spite is a hell of a motivator, but I really don't need or want someone wasting several months of his life to prove that Noah's Ark is a fallacy.

This is possibly better known/described informally as "Process of elimination".
Dating considerations in Radiocarbon Dating

Yes, it benefits. It benefits enormously. What it doesn't benefit from is:
- declaring something invalid without basis, or providing a testable hypothesis
- declaring findings as valid simply because scientists did it

The point of science is being able to reproduce the stated findings within some acceptable level of error.

One of the problems of today's practice is that it is increasingly difficult (in terms of time/money/facilities) to reproduce results, and it is often de-emphasized as being worthwhile to do.

The problem isn't taking the time to prove it is a fallacy; the problem is that proving it is a physical impossibility based upon the "observed" or "described" characteristics has no effect.

When people discount rationality in favor of belief, you cannot successfully engage them in meaningful discussion.

Not long after writing the above... there is this.

In first reading, it states that all studies and associated data/methodologies used for determining regulations be publicly available.

So if the regulation is based upon scientific study, then the evidence must be declared and provided.
Funnily enough, if it is not based upon scientific studies, then you don't need to declare or provide it.

In principal I agree that they shouldn't be regulating and obstructing things that have not been proven thoroughly, but the rational side of me concedes that it would be nothing more than a loophole for companies to spend years fighting new regulations while continuing the practice. There is a lot of benefit to them to tie up new regulations by challenging them in court under that law to buy you a few more years to finish fracking the last of what you're on. It's not like they'd ever have to repay the profits or collateral damages if the regulations ended up going into effect.

Companies are already doing that, anyhow.

Though I should clarify. For every company that has a team of lawyers working overtime to skirt regulations to make a quick buck, there is another company that meets or exceeds regulations because they recognize that the planet needs to still be viable next week. It's easy to demonize on the basis of the worst examples.

And a lot of legislation is dubious at best. The Endangered Species Act has been a bureaucratic nightmare and, in all probability, a total flop at serving its intentions.

Read that again. It isn't praise.

And it is delivered to young earth creationists who are often pro war, pro death penalty, and pro life all at once.

So you don't have to go back and find it again:

I used radiocarbon dating as an example to demonstrate the process of criticism, experimentation and improvement. If you can imagine, in the nascence of radiocarbon dating, the atmospheric composition argument occurred much later. From the first use of radiocarbon dating, the de Vries correction factor occurred 9 years later. This discovery likely didn't occur serendipitously; it was criticized and fortified with additional evidence.

As someone who studies the history and philosophy of science and technology for a living I found the debate pretty degrading. People like Ham do not deserve to be taken seriously, and should not be acknowledged by scientists for debates. You empower them and validate them by taking them seriously.

People will try to argue that religion and science are two sides of the same coin but in reality that couldn't be further from the truth. One is a methodology for learning more and attempting to understand mechanisms in our universe while the other is an absolutist answer to our existence. It's not comparing apples and oranges, it's comparing an apple to a hammer.

It doesn't matter if you try to use this methodology to prove that absolutist answer. It doesn't work, because science doesn't work that way - it isn't capable of justifying absolutes.

Also stop using words like proven when referring to science. Nothing is "proven" in science, only enough evidence to make something probable, and we pick the theory with the most amount of evidence. At least in the current meta of science nothing beyond empirical concepts like 1+1=2 or the definition of a centaur are absolute. Words like "proven" + "always" etc don't belong in science.

Theories don't work that way, but nice attempt of white knighting "science."

Oh by the way: anecdotal views from a person on the internet really don't have any credit behind them, just saying.

The analogy of how omniscience can co-exist with free will based your script example is confusing considering if a God is the Alpha and Omega and created existence as we know it, how is a script "already written", and God only ends up with a copy of the script and not the original source?

He literally created everything, so he would in turn, have been the original author of said proverbial "script." and would in turn, both know AND dictate how and when something has or will occur.

Also, what makes you an authority in stating that an omniscient being is actually in all tenses of time at once? (past, present, and future?) rather that simply an all-knowing entity that has always existed, presently exists, and simply understands and knows without failure how the future will pan out as the future occurs?

Your describing a God as existing in all tenses at once wouldn't be possible based on how we understand the concept of time, but we are talking about a God here so what does a little thing such as a testable Law of Nature matter? Even if we are comparing something that has not nor can ever be proven vs. actual science.

Omniscience as we mere humans define it is simply having the capacity to know everything that is and ever will be. It has no bearing relating to the ability of being in all forms of tense simultaneously. At least not from what I could find. I feel like you are skewing it's literal definition with some inaccurate assumptions.

Let's say you do manage to find a way to explain the ability for a God to be both omniscient and provide free will (you haven't even come close by the way)

A question still remains as to why a God would allow bad things to happen to people who lack the ability to avoid said bad situation regardless of the free will they possess. Such as natural disasters, genetic or hereditary illnesses etc that would require that you simply not be born in order to avoid. Yet he is a God that loves all his children.

Perhaps love is used as a metaphor for hate in the Bible, rather than as its literal meaning. It is the Bible we are talking about so who knows really.

So either God isn't omniscient, or he's a douchebag. Take your pick.

I haven't commented on this topic yet because I wasn't sure where to start, these TV shows like this one are designed to make Christians look bad, even I cringed at the questions given on this show....

This is verse in the bible that was reveled to me this weekend in my studies. It basically talks about those that seek signs yet are unwilling to be receptive to the truth before them.

The bible verses are Matthew 16:1-4
There is also commentary in the spoiler as well to explain the verse.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Ken Ham invite Nye to take the defensive stance? I don't think the founder of the Creationist Museum had any intention of making Christians look bad.

he does a good job even if that's not the intent

Exactly how are they designed to make Christians look bad?

Considering that the entire "Oh, you want me to do a miracle right now, just to show you? Sorry, I don't do party tricks" is pretty much the basis for making false claims, it seems that having a doctrine or teaching that you shouldn't question people's claims does that on its own.
Related:
Starting at 5:48, for the more pertinent section.

Oldest cop-out in history. It's literally Biblical.