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

When does segregation ever sound good?

Save the religion for Sunday school.

of all the posts between mine and yours, and you have to take a little snip-it of mine to counterargue (rather weakly), one has to wonder if you don't get a *** from my posts.

Or if you just like me for some reason and pick me out of a crowd of people to show it.

Different isotopes decay at different rates, something with a half life of thousands of years is worthless when dating things that are millions or billions. Accuracy depends primarily on what isotopes are present (what you are dating) and the half life of the isotope you are using (dating range). People who claim that radiometric dating gives different results and is inconsistent have a very flawed understanding of both radioactive decay and scientific methods.

Edit: just to add, as well, the assumption that radiometric dating is flawed because we don't know the amount of isotopes present at the time that thing was created is also highly flawed. Most things that can be accurately dated are also created today and can be measured (and are). Also the idea that there could have been ionizing radiation at higher levels in the past is also flawed as the creation of those isotopes is not dependent in any way on other forms of radiation.

When I heard this was gonna happen, I cringed just a bit. As a Christian, I'd like it to be known Ken Ham doesn't speak for all of us. I'm an old Earth Creationist. I believe the planet really is 4.5 billion years old and the universe really is 13 or so billion years old and that in no way contradicts the Bible. Ham is defending his interpretation of the Bible as much or more than the Bible itself.

While I have difficulty believing evolution could produce the array of life we have now in the amount of time that's been allotted, it wouldn't hurt my feelings much if it were true. It's still not an origin of existence, but rather a process within creation.

The funny thing is, folks like Ham that believe the Earth is 6k years old and that all life we have today came from the animals on Noah's Ark either then believe in very rapid evolution, or that the Bible isn't giving the whole picture on Noah's Ark. It would clearly need extra-dimensional space to accommodate 2 of everything including the jungle species. The dimension given in the bible would be insufficient. I believe in a localized flood, because the entirety of mankind was hanging out in the fertile crescent region then. So the world would be the world of man, and not necessarily every ecosystem on Earth at the time.

I don't believe the flood created the entire fossil record, or that fossils are attributable to evil. What is wrong with God patiently watching and waiting for the just right time to insert humanity in the ongoing creation process? It's attributing a spirit of deception onto God to suggest fossils are tricksy. (:

One of my personal favorites, Dr. Hugh Ross an astrophysicist who became a Christian, has debated Ken Ham before also. Check him out if this topic interests you. http://www.reasons.org/

I've been to the "Creation Museum" in KY and it made my blood pressure go up. Dioramas of men and dinosaurs side by side, an outright denial that speed of light can help determine the age of the universe, and a tendency to throw under the bus all the early scientists many of whom were Christian.

The whole notion of 6k years since creation was a botched project by one Bishop. We have evidence in the Bible itself of instances where an individual was called father of/son of but the actual relationship was grandfather or great grandfather. The genealogy recounts the more famous individuals, not EVERY one. This was also back when lay persons often couldn't read the Bible for themselves in their native tongue because clergy didn't want to cede any power. This is how we got crusades. An illiterate populace being told the Bible wants them to do something they couldn't check for themselves. A big part of the Reformation was allowing the average Joe to have a translated Bible and several were executed for producing them. anyhow, keep digging if it interests you.

oh yes, plate tectonics is cool. yay for vulcanism.

These sort of threads always bother me, not the fighting but that there is actually people who think that if you spend 70 or so years, praying to the right dude, trying not to be an arsehole and following 10 mostly out dated rules...


You get

Not 1

Not 10

Not 100

But an eternity of joy and happiness in a perfect world...


Seriously, come on! There is so much actual infomation out there but people still cling to such sillyness.

Hamman is totes wrong. He might be a "new earth creationist", but in reality the "surprisingly new earth creationist" theories are the correct ones:


Enjoy your 33 year old earth, humans.

I like the ancient astronaut theory

In fairness, he did play a practical joke involving convincing a man to kill his son.

I'll never understand how people are able to spend hours debating this stuff when these discussions always end up at the exact same point, where creationists will use exhaustive arguments that can be applied to the universe itself just as much.

EX Where did the universe come from?
Where did god come from?
God always existed, he is eternal.
Why can't the universe "always have existed"?

Then instead of answering that question it usually becomes nitpicks at science (such as complaining about dating methods being flawed), which is missing the point of science entirely. Of course science isn't perfect; the difference is that its entire premise is to continuously reshape your theories around new information. The only comparable thing in religion is with new/younger members applying whatever interpretation they want to a book that's thousands of years old. Religion is whatever the individual wants it to be.

Like someone else said, the two wouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence if you didn't constantly have religious people (almost always individuals who probably never read a scientific page in their life, because they don't even know the distinction between cosmology, abiogenesis and evolution) acting like science is corrupting their child or whatever the ***. It fits about as well as debating culture VS science.


The only place religion has in a classroom is in a theology class.

Hmmm...You should probably add that this is after Perry started lining the SBoE with his cronies.

Whether teaching evolution, half-lifes, carbon dating, etc. our teacher (who was Baptist) would remind us that if we took exception to this we could sit in the hallway but it would be reflected on the classroom participation percentage of our grade for the day. There was no room and/or time for a debate.

Yeah... That link isn't going to be biased at all.

And as expected, it's written by someone who doesn't even have a high school level understanding of Biology.

The hypocracy among some people is astounding.

Look, if you're going to bash on an idea that's opposed to your own, at least... the VERY least... do a fair amount of research on the opposing view. There are literally tens of thousdands of doctors, lawyers, professors, SCIENTISTS etc (people YOU would claim are intelligent people) who subscribe to the creation point of view in one form or another and believe it to be true. There is plenty of evidence that supports creation. I still subscribe to evolution but at least I did enough research on creation to know it's not just a bunch of religious nuts trying to oppress us with Jesus. There are the religious nuts that do that, but it's not a representation of that religion at all.

You read the bible or watch a couple debates or do a few google searches and you consider yourself an expert on creation theory? Seriously, get your head out of the sand. You say religious people have just been brought up that way and are brainwashed to ignore the evidence in front of them? Look in the mirror. You accept your theories just as readily/blindly as most religious people do. That's the basis for your presuppositions, and you follow that by learning just enough on what you need to learn about the other side of the argument in order to make fun of it.

Quit being hypocrites. If you really want to support your presuppositions, take the time to seriously learn the other side of the argument. You think Bill Nye would debate a creationist before first learning about the evidence that supports creation? Knowing your opponent's arguments beforehand is how you know how to adequately build evidence against it and show where the flaws are in his/her theory. To just sit there and say "save the religion for Sunday school" when concerning a debate between creation and evolution theories... that's just hypocrisy at it's finest. That's like saying "take your head out of the sand and learn what I believe while I keep my head in the sand about what you believe."

You seriously should read your post. It's so full of ignorance that it's embarrassing, not only to yourself, but to the ideas you represent.

I'll bite. What evidence supports creation?

A book written by random people claiming to be people they weren't that was written hundreds or thousands of years after it was claimed to be and rewritten at least 2 times as well as being translated in 2 or more degrees of separation from it's original form.

TL:DR - The Bible.

I never said that there aren't any educated religious scientists. I was saying that the loudmouthed religious individuals that participate in these debates are pretty much always uneducated idiots that are debating about stuff they'd know about if they didn't drop out of high school.

The educated religious people know that there's a very obvious distinction between religion and science which is why you almost never see such people participate in these inane debates. The atheists that participate in these debates are often no better because they're just picking easy targets to make look like idiots.


No there isn't. That's the whole damn point of religion. It's based in faith. Any arguments for creation in general are almost always exhaustive, as in the opposite would just as likely be true if you applied logic to it.

Sup, appeal to authority. All of these people are intelligent in their respective fields with respects to our arbitrary metrics of grading aptitude but it doesn't mean they know jack ***about evolutionary biology, paleontology, anthropology, history, archaeology, physics, astrophysics or anything pertaining to the creation question.

Like good humans, they've outsourced their beliefs to religion. Intelligent people are free to have as many silly beliefs as the next scrub.


Which creation myth? There are thousands. The arrogance the creationist supposes when they have finished their argument is that their myth supersedes all other origin stories. The fallback is faith, which is unquantifiable.

I think the most amusing part of his post is where he implies people haven't read enough about the topic and don't understand the opposition when he didn't even carefully read my quarter-page post, and the fact that even a single google search is still more research than what most of these clowns have done in their entire life.

The first mistake is reading the Bible with no historical context regarding the text and the peoples mentioned in the text.

Biblical literalism is folly.

Seriously.

The Judeo-Christian creation story is one of the youngest, besides the parts that were hijacked from other faiths.

If we are going to teach creationism in schools lets teach all the creation stories we know about today. If nothing else it would provide students with the opportunity to learn comparative analysis.

I'm clicking through that creation.com site and it's quite maddening that all of the citations sprinkled through their "research" links back to, you guessed it, the creation.com site itself. That's quite the exhaustive information echo chamber they've made.

Much of their evidence consists of pointing out knowledge gaps and filling them in with the not so subtle notion that because we don't know exactly how such-and-such works then it must be of divine origin. Some topics I flipped through were based entirely on incomplete or cherry-picked information. All in all, nothing surprising really.

I don't know if it's a difference in our scholar systems or I was just lucky, but no one of my science teachers ever even dared to mention creationism(my hs teacher would have probably shot you in the head if you did, and I'd have cheered her on). The only place that thing has is in religion class(yes, we have that...and it's bs cause they don't teach you about all religions, but it's just a priest preeching about christianity- I always skipped that class for this reason).

/digressions

The willingness to entertain this spectacle as a "debate" really is telling. What a laughable notion.

I don't feel creationism should be taught in school. But if giving students the option to choose between the two when selecting courses would appease both sides, why not?