If you didn’t watch the debate between Bill Nye, “The Science Guy” and Ken Ham, the money and mover behind “Answers in Genesis,”then you can find the YouTube video here.
Here is a completely non-religiously based view of the debate. They acknowledged the Nye lost the debate. I thought he did as well but didn’t see the actual verdict.
Why was Bill Nye, an excellent scientist and communicator, whose arguments were cogent and well presented. the loser? Because the argument was theological, not scientific. Nye and Ham were using two completely different languages and sets of assumptions for the debate.
Ham pooh-poohed Nye’s assumptions because they didn’t fit with Ham’s absolutist views on creation dogma. Nye’s efforts to examine Ham’s assertions in light of commonly used science principles of making hypotheses based on observable evidence and testing them for accuracy kept running up against the “But God did this and you weren’t there and I know exactly what happened because I can read it in my Bible” assertion.
Nye used scientific models, which don’t use God as a prime mover or creator, but which also don’t rule out the existence of God.
Ham asserted that God wrote out a scientifically accurate story of beginnings and that he, Ken, could clearly and without room for doubt interpret that story. Ham also stated that any who don’t agree with his interpretation of six 24-hour days of creation, a world-wide year-long flood four thousand years ago, with all present life descended from creatures aboard the boat we call “Noah’s Ark,” are simply wrong–but might still be able to keep their salvation.
Ham wanted to sell the world on his version of salvation.
Nye wanted to open the world to the glories of science and the possibilities of great good coming from that.
What needed to be challenged was Ham’s view of Scripture, not his view of science. And Nye was the wrong person to do that. The Bible gives us a glimpse into the ways of God and the challenges of humanity seeking to make sense of a complex world of loves, families, sex, power, drought, famine, blessings and curses, wars, hurt, intrigue, death, and decay.
It has stood tests of time because it speaks to us and invites us into that journey where we, too, struggle with the same things and want the same things: reconciliation with God, with our neighbors and the material world and with our own angst-ridden selves.
We, too, are trying to make sense of a world that so often presents itself with such pain that there is much understanding over the anguishingly awful death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, that brilliantly talented actor who died this week from a heroin overdose.
But the Bible is not and never was a science textbook. To insist that it is does two things.
First, it does violence to the text itself.
Second, it endorses violence against the “other,” with the other being, at various times, people with different religions, skin colors, gender, sexual orientations, the poor, the sick, or any that don’t fit the current definition of “in the image of God.”
So Ham won, our children lost, and an intellectually honest Christianity gets shoved further behind the extremist views.
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