(Music)
Oh, hi kids! I have an incredible message for you!
Hey, can someone take Thelma back to the petting zoo?
Wow, that looks like fun!
Now where was I? Oh yes, in 2014, kids 12 and under can come free!
Hey, shouldn't the comets be in the planetarium?
For the entire year, kids 12 and under come free.
Hey, T-rex, you better get back to the dinasour den!
As you can see, it's a very exciting place.
Now tell your parents, kids 12 and under free in 2014
when accompanied by a paying adult.
We hope to see you soon.
Good evening, I'm please to welcome you to Legacy Hall
of the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky
in the Metropolitan area of Cincinnati.
I'm Tom Forman from CNN.
And I'm please to be tonight's moderator for
this Evolution vs. Creation debate.
This is a very old question, where did we come from?
My answer is from Washington this morning by airplane.
(Laughter) But there is a much more profound, longer answer,
That people have sought after for a long time.
So, tonight's question to be debated is the following:
Is Creation a viable model of origins in today's modern Scientific era?
Our welcome extends to hundreds of thousands of people
who are watching on the internet at debatelive.org.
We're glad you have joined us.
Of course, your auditorium here,
all of the folks who've joined us as well.
We're joined by 70 media representatives from many
of the world's great news organizations.
We're glad to have them here as well.
And now let's welcome our debaters: Mr. Bill Nye and Mr. Ken Ham.
(audience applauds)
We had a coin toss earlier to determine
who would go first of these two men.
The only thing missing was Joe Namath in a fur coat.
But it went very well. Mr. Ham won the coin toss
and he opted to speak first. But first, let me tell you
a little bit about both of these gentlemen.
Mr. Nye's website describes him as a scientist,
engineer, comedian, author, and inventor.
Mr Nye, as you may know, produced a number of award-winning TV shows,
including a program he became so well-known for:
Bill Nye the Science Guy.
While working on the Science Guy show, Mr. Nye won
seven national Emmy awards for writing, performing,
and producing the show. Won 18 Emmys in five years!
In between creating the shows, he wrote five kids books about science,
including his latest title, Bill Nye's Great Big Book of Tiny Germs.
Billy Nye is the host of three television series:
his program, "The 100 Greatest Discoveries"--
airs on the Science Channel. "The Eyes of Nye"--
airs on PBS stations across the country. He frequenly appears
on interview programs to discuss a variety of science topics.
Mr. Nye serves as Executive Director of the Planetary Society,
the world's largest space interest group.
He is a graduate of Cornell, with a Bachelors
of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering.
Mr. Ken Ham is the president and co-founder of Answers in Genesis,
a bible-defending organization that upholds the authority
of the scriptures from the very first verse.
Mr. Ham is the man behind the popular, high-tech
Creation Museum, where we're holding this debate.
The museum has had 2 million visitors in six years
and has attracted much of the world's media.
The Answers in Genesis website, as well, trafficked
with 2 million visitors alone last month. Mr. Ham is also
a best-selling author, a much in-demand speaker,
and the host of a daily radio feature carried on 700 plus stations.
This is his second public debate on Evolution and Creation.
The first was at Harvard, in the 1990s.
Mr. Ham is a native of Australia. He earned
a Bachelors degree in Applied Science, with an emphasis in
Environmental Biology, from the Queensland's Institute of Technology,
as well as a Diploma of Education at the University
of Queensland in Brisbon, Australia.
And now...Mr. Ham, you opted to go first, so you will
be first with your five minute opening statement.
Well, good evening. I know that not everyone watching
this debate will necessarily agree with what I have to say,
but I'm an Aussie and live over here in America
and they tell me I have an accent and so it doesn't matter
what I say, some people tell me. We just like to hear you saying it.
(laughter) So...um...I hope you enjoy me saying it anyway.
Well, the debate topic is this: Is Creation
a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era?
You know, when this was first announced on the internet,
there were lots of statements-- like this one
from the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
"Scientists should not debate Creationists. Period."
And this one from one of the Discovery.com websites.
"Should Scientists Debate Creationists?"
You know, right here I believe there's a gross misrepresentation
in our culture. We're seeing people being indoctrinated
to believe that Creationists can't be Scientists.
I believe it's all a part of secularists hi-jacking the word "Science".
I want you to meet a modern-day scientist who's a Biblical Creationist.
My name is Stuart Burgess.
I'm a professor of Engineering Design at Bristol University in the U.K.
My name is Stuart Burgess.
I'm a professor of Engineering Design at Bristol University in the U.K.
I have published over 130 scientific papers on
the science of design in Engineering and Biological systems.
From my research work, I have found that the scientific evidence
fully supports Creationism as the best explanation to origins.
I've also designed major parts of spacecrafts,
launched by ESA and NASA.
So here's a biblical Creationist,
who's a scientist, who's also an inventor.
And I want young people to understand that.
You know, the problem, I believe, is this: we need to define terms correctly.
We need to define Creation/Evolution in regard to origins
and we need to define science. And in this opening statement,
I want to concentrate on dealing with the word "science".
I believe the word "science" has been hijacked by secularists.
Now, what is science?
Well, the origin of the word comes from the Classical Latin "scientia",
which means know;. And if you look up a dictionary,
it'll say science means "the state of knowing, knowledge".
But there's different types of knowledge and I believe
this is where the confusion lies.
There's experimental or observational sciences, as we call it.
That's using the scientific method, observation,
measurement, experiment, testing. That's what produces
our technology, computers, spacecraft, jet planes,
smoke detectors, looking at DNA, antibiotics, medicines and vaccines.
You see, all scientists, whether Creationists or Evolutionists,
actually have the same observational or experimental science.
And it doesn't matter whether you're a Creationist or an Evolutionist,
you can be a great scientist.
For instance, here's an atheist, who is a great scientist--
Craig Venter, one of the first researchers to sequence the human genome.
Or Dr. Raymond Damadian. He is a man who invented
the MRI scan and revolutionized medicine. He's a biblical Creationist.
But I want us to also understand molecules-to-man
evolution belief has nothing to do with developing technology.
You see, when we're talking about origins, we're talking about the past.
We're talking about our origins. We weren't there.
You can't observe that, whether it's molecules-to-man evolution,
or whether it's a creation account.
I mean, you're talking about the past.
We'd like to call that Origins of Historical Science,
knowledge concerning the past. Here at the Creation Museum,
we make no apology about the fact that our Origins or Historical science
actually is based upon the biblical account of origins.
Now, when you research science textbooks being used
in public schools, what we found is this:
by and large, the Origins of Historical Science
is based upon man's ideas about the past--for instance, the ideas of Darwin.
And our research has found that public school textbooks
are using the same word "science" for Observational Science
and Historical Science. They arbitrarily define science
as naturalism and outlaw the supernatural.
They present molecules-to-man evolution as fact.
They are imposing, I believe, the religion
of naturalism or atheism on generations of students.
You see, I assert that the word "science" has been hijacked
by secularists in teaching evolution to force the religion
of naturalism on generations of kids.
Secular evolutionists teach that all life developed
by natural processes from some primordial form.
That man is just an evolved animal, which has great bearing
on how we view life and death.
For instance, as Bill states, "It's very hard to accept,
for many of us, that when you die, it's over.";
But, you see, the Bible gives a totally different account of origins,
of who we are, where we came from, the meaning of life, and our future.
That through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin.
But that God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son.
Whoever believes in Him should not perish and have everlasting life.
So is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era?
I say the creation/evolution debate is a conflict
between two philosophical worldviews based on two different accounts
of origins or science beliefs and creation
is the only viable model of historical science confirmed
by observational science in today's modern scientific era.
And that is time. I had the unenviable job of being the time-keeper here.
So I'm like the referee in football that you don't like,
but I will periodically, if either one of our debaters
runs over on anything, I will stop them in the name of keeping it fair for all.
Uh, Mr. Ham, thank you for your comments. Now it's Mr. Nye's
turn for a five minute opening statement. Mr. Nye.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
I very much appreciate you including me in your, uh, facility here.
Now, looking around the room I think I see just one bow tie.
Is that right? Just one. And I'm telling you, once you try it--
oh, there's yes, two! That's great. I started wearing bow ties
when I was young, in high school.
My father showed me how. His father showed him.
And there's a story associated with this, which I find remarkable.
My grandfather was in the rotary, and he attended
a convention in Philadelphia, and even in those days,
at the turn of the last century, people rented tuxedos.
And the tuxedo came with a bow tie--untied bow tie.
So he didn't know how to tie it.
So...wasn't sure what to do, but he just took a chance.
He went to the hotel room next door, knocked on the door,
"Excuse me? Can you help me tie my tie?"
And the guy said, "Sure. Lie down on the bed."
So...my grandfather wanted to have the tie on,
wasn't sure what he was getting into, so he's said
to have lain on the bed and the guy tied a perfect bow tie knot and,
quite reasonably, my grandfather said,
"Thank you. Why'd I have to lie down on the bed?"
The guy said, "I'm an undertaker."
(audience laughs)
"It's the only way I know how to do it."
Now that story was presented to me as a true story.
It may or may not be. But it gives you something to think about.
And it's certainly something to remember.
So, here tonight, we're gonna have two stories
and we can compare Mr. Ham's story to the story
from what I will call the outside, from mainstream science.
The question tonight is: Does Ken Ham's Creation Model hold up?
Is it "viable"?
So let me ask you all: what would you be doing if you weren't here tonight?
That's right, you'd be home watching CSI.
CSI Petersburg. Is that coming--I think it's coming.
And on CSI, there is no distinction made between
historical science and observational science.
These are constructs unique to Mr. Ham.
We don't normally have these anywhere in the world except here.
Natural laws that applied in the past apply now.
That's why they're natural laws. That's why we embrace them.
That's how we made all these discoveries
that enabled all this remarkable technology.
So CSI is a fictional show, but it's based absolutely
on real people doing real work.
When you go to a crime scene and find evidence,
you have clues about the past. And you trust those clues
and you embrace them and you move forward to convict somebody.
Mr. Ham and his followers have this remarkable view
of a worldwide flood that somehow influenced everything that we observe in nature.
A 500 foot wooden boat, eight zookeepers for 14,000 individual animals,
every land plant in the world underwater for a full year?
I ask us all: is that really reasonable?
You'll hear a lot about the Grand Canyon, I imagine, also,
which is a remarkable place and it has fossils.
And the fossils in the Grand Canyon are found in layers.
There's not a single place in the Grand Canyon
where the fossils of one type of animal cross over
into the fossils of another. In other words,
when there was a big flood on the earth, you would expect
drowning animals to swim up to a higher level.
Not any one of them did. Not a single one.
If you could find evidence of that, my friends, you could change the world.
Now, I just wanna remind us all:
there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious,
who get enriched, who have a wonderful sense of community from their religion.
They worship together, they eat together, they live
in their communities and enjoy each others company. Billions of people.
But these same people do not embrace the extraordinary view
that the earth is somehow only 6,000 years old. That is unique.
And here's my concern: what keeps the United States ahead,
what makes the United States a world leader, is our technology,
our new ideas, our innovations. If we continue to eschew science,
eschew the process and try to divide science
into observational science and historic science,
we are not gonna move forward. We will not embrace natural laws.
We will not make discoveries. We will not invent and innovate and stay ahead.
So if you ask me if Ken Ham's Creation model is viable, I say no.
It is absolutely not viable. So stay with us over the next period
and you can compare my evidence to his. Thank you all very much.
(audience applauds) (moderator) All right.
Very nice start by both of our debaters here.
And now each of one will offer a thirty minute,
illustrated presentation to fully offer their case for us to consider.
Mr. Ham, you're up.
Well, the debate topic was "Is creation a viable model
of origins in today's modern scientific era?"
And I made the statement at the end of my opening statement:
creation is the only viable model of historical science
confirmed by observational science in today's modern scientific era.
And I said what we need to be doing is actually defining
our terms and, particularly three terms: science, creation, and evolution.
Now, I discussed the meaning of the word "science"
and what is meant by experimental and observational science briefly.
And that both Creationists and Evolutionists
can be great scientists, for instance. I mentioned Craig Venter, a biologist.
He's an atheist and he's a great scientist.
He was one of the first researchers to sequence the human genome.
I also mentioned Dr. Raymond Damadian, who actually invented the MRI scanner.
I want you to meet a biblical creationist who is a scientist and an inventor.
Hi, my name is Dr. Raymond Damadian.
I am a Young Earth Creation Scientist and believe that God
created the world in six 24 hour days,
just as recorded in the book of Genesis.
By God's grace and the devoted prayers of my Godly mother-in-law,
I invented the MRI scanner in 1969.
The idea that scientists who believe the earth
is 6,000 years old cannot do real science is simply wrong.
Well, he's most adamant about that.
And, actually, he revolutionized medicine! He's a biblical Creationist.
And I encourage children to follow people like that, make them their heroes.
Let me introduce you to another biblical Creation Scientist.
My name is Danny Faulkner.
I received my PhD in astronomy from Indiana University.
For 26 and a half years, I was a professor
at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster,
where I hold the rank of distinguished professor emeritus.
Upon my retirement from the university in January of 2013,
I joined the research staff at Answers in Genesis. I'm a stellar astronomer.
That means my primary interests is stars, but I'm particularly
interested in the study of eclipsing binary stars.
And I've published many articles in the astronomy literature,
places such as the the Astrophysical Journal,
the Astronomical Journal, and the Observatory.
There is nothing in observational astronomy that contradicts a recent creation.
I also mentioned Dr. Stuart Burgess,
professor of Engineering Design at Bristol University in England.
Now he invented and designed a double-action worm gear set
for the three hinges of the robotic arm on a very expensive satellite.
And if that had not worked, if that gear set had not worked,
that whole satellite would've been useless.
Yet, Dr. Burgess is a biblical Creationist. He believes, just as I believe.
Now, think about this for a moment.
A scientist like Dr. Burgess,
who believe in Creation, just as I do,
a small minority in this scientific world.
But let's see what he says about scientists believing in Creation.
I find that many of my colleagues in academia are sympathetic
to the creationist viewpoint, including biologists.
However, there are often afraid to speak out because of the criticisms
they would get from the media and atheists lobby.
I agree. That's a real problem today.
We need to have freedom to be able to speak on these topics.
You know, I just want to say, by the way, that Creationists,
non-Christian scientists, I should say,
non-Christian scientists are really borrowing
from the Christian worldview anyway to carry out their experimental,
observational science. Think about it. When they're doing
observational science, using the scientific method,
they have to assume the laws of logic,
they have to assume the laws of nature,
they have to assume the uniformity of nature.
I mean, think about it. If the universe came about by natural processes,
where'd the laws of logic come from? Did they just pop into existence?
Are we in a stage now where we only have half-logic?
So, you see, I have a question for Bill Nye.
How do you account for the laws of logic and the laws of nature
from a naturalistic worldview that excludes the existence of God?
Now, in my opening statement I also discussed
a different type of science or knowledge, origins or historical science.
See again, there's a confusion here. There's a misunderstanding here.
People, by and large, have not been taught to look at
what you believe about the past as different to what you're observing in the present.
You don't observe the past directly.
Even when you think about the creation account.
I mean, we can't observe God creating.
We can't observe the creation of Adam and Eve. We admit that.
We're willing to admit our beliefs about the past.
But, see, what you see in the present is very different.
Even some public school textbooks actually sort of acknowledge
the difference between historical and observational science.
Here is an Earth Science textbook that's used in public schools.
And we read this. In contrast to physical geology,
the aim of historical geology is to understand Earth's long history.
Then they make this statement.
Historical geology--so we're talking historical science--
tries to establish a timeline of the vast number of physical
and biological changes that have occurred in the past.
We study physical geology before historical geology
because we first must understand how Earth works before we try to unravel its past.
In other words, we observe things in the present and then,
okay, we're assuming that that's always happened in the past
and we're gonna try and figure out how this happened.
See, there is a difference between what you observe
and what happened in the past. Let me illustrate it this way:
If Bill Nye and I went to the Grand Canyon,
we could agree that that's a Coconino sandstone in the Hermit shale.
There's the boundary. They're sitting one on top of the other.
We could agree on that. But you know what we would disagree on?
I mean, we could even analyse the minerals and agree on that.
But we would disagree on how long it took to get there.
But see, none of us saw the sandstone or the shale being laid down.
There's a supposed 10 million year gap there.
But I don't see a gap.
But that might be different to what Bill Nye would see.
But there's a difference between what you actually observe
directly and then your interpretation regarding the past.
When I was at the Goddard Space Center a number of years ago
I met Creationists and Evolutionists who were
both working on the Hubble telescope.
They agreed on how to build the Hubble telescope.
You know what they disagreed on? Well, they disagreed on
how to interpret the data the telescope obtained
in regard to the age of the universe.
And, you know, we could on and talk about lots
of other similar sorts of things. For instance,
I've heard Bill Nye talk about how a smoke detector works,
using the radioactive element Americium. And, you know what?
I totally agree with him on that. We agree how it works.
We agree how radioactivity enables that to work.
But if you're then gonna use radioactive elements
and talk about the age of the Earth,
you've got a problem cause you weren't there.
We gotta understand parent elements, daughter elements and so on.
We could agree whether you're Creationist or Evolutionist
on the technology to put the rover on Mars, but we're gonna
disagree on how to interpret the origin of Mars.
I mean, there are some people that believed it
was even a global flood on Mars, and there's no liquid water on Mars.
We're gonna disagree maybe on our interpretation of origins
and you can't prove either way because, not from
an observational science perspective, because we've only got the present.
Creationists and Evolutionists both work on medicines and vaccines.
You see? It doesn't matter whether you're a Creationist or an Evolutionist,
all scientists have the same experimental observational science.
So I have a question for Bill Nye: Can you name one piece
of technology that could only have been developed
starting with the belief in molecules-to-man evolution?
Now, here's another important fact.
Creationists and Evolutionists all have the same evidence.
Bill Nye and I have the same Grand Canyon. We don't disagree on that.
We all have the same fish fossils. This is one from the Creation Museum.
The same dinosaur skeleton, the same animals, the same humans,
the same DNA, the same radioactive decay elements that we see.
We have the same universe...actually, we all have the same evidences.
It's not the evidences that are different.
It's a battle over the same evidence in regard to how we interpret the past.
And you know why that is?
Cause it's really a battle over worldviews and starting points.
It's a battle over philosophical worldviews
and starting points, but the same evidence. Now, I admit,
my starting point is that God is the ultimate authority.
But if someone doesn't accept that, then man has to be the ultimate authority.
And that's really the difference when it comes down to it.
You see, I've been emphasizing the difference
between historical origin science, knowledge about
the past when you weren't there,
and we need to understand that we weren't there.
Or experimental observational science, using
your five senses in the present, the scientific method,
what you can directly observe, test, repeat.
There's a big difference between those two.
And that's not what's being taught in our public schools
and that's why kids aren't being taught to think
critically and correctly about the origins issue.
But you know, it's also important to understand,
when talking about Creation and Evolution, both involve
historical science and observational science.
You see, the role of observational science is this:
it can be used to confirm or otherwise
one's historical science based on one's starting point.
Now, when you think about the debate topic and what I have
learned concerning creation, if our origins
or historical science based on the bible, the bible's account
of origins is true, then there should be predictions
from this that we can test, using observational science.
And there are. For instance, based on the bible,
we'd expect to find evidence concerning an intelligence,
confirming an intelligence produced life.
We'd expect to find evidence confirming after their kind.
The bible says God made kinds of animals and plants
after their kind, implying each kind produces it's own,
not that one kind changes into another.
You'd expect to find evidence confirming a global flood of Noah's day.
Evidence confirming one race of humans because we
all go back to Adam and Eve, biologically, that would mean there's one race.
Evidence confirming the Tower of Babel, that God gave different languages.
Evidence confirming a young universe.
Now, I can't go through all of those, but a couple of them we'll look at briefly.
After their kind, evidence confirming that--
in the Creation Museum, we have a display featuring replicas,
actually, of Darwin's finches. They're called Darwin's finches.
Darwin collected finches from the Galapagos
and took them back to England and we see the different species,
the different beak sizes here. And, you know,
from the specimens Darwin obtained in the Galapagos,
he actually pondered these things and how do you explain this.
And in his notes, actually, he came up with this diagram here, a tree.
And he actually said, "I think." So he was talking about
different species and maybe those species came from some common ancestor,
but, actually, when it comes to finches, we actually would agree,
as Creationists, that different finch species came from a common ancestor, but a finch.
That's what they would have to come from.
And see, Darwin wasn't just thinking about species.
Darwin had a much bigger picture in mind.
When you look at the Origins of Species and read that book,
you'll find he made this statement: from such low and intermediate form,
both animals and plants may have been developed;
and, if we admit this, we must likewise admit that
all organic beings which have ever lived on this Earth
may be descended from some one primordial form.
So he had in mind what we today know as an evolutionary tree of life,
that all life has arisen from some primordial form.
Now, when you consider the classifications system,
kingdom phylum class or the family genus species,
we would say, as Creationists, we have many creation scientists
that research this and, for lots of reasons,
I would say, the kind in Genesis 1 is really more at
the family level of classification. For instance, there's one dog kind.
There's one cat kind. Even though you have different
generative species, that would mean, by the way,
you didn't need anywhere near the number of animals
on the ark as people think.
You wouldn't need all the species of dogs, just two.
Not all the species of cats--just two.
And, you see, based on the biblical account there in Genesis One,
Creationists have drawn up what they believe is a creation origin.
In other words, they're saying, "Look. There's great variation
in the genetics of dogs and finches and so on."
And so, over time, particularly after Noah's flood,
you'd expect if there were two dogs, for instance,
you could end up with different species of dogs because
there's an incredible amount of variability in the genes of any creature.
And so you'd expect these different species up here, but there's limits.
Dogs will always be dogs, finches will always be finches.
Now, as a Creationist, I maintain that observational science
actually confirms this model, based on the bible.
For instance, take dogs. Okay?
In a scientific paper dated January 2014--that's this year--
scientists working at the University of California stated this:
We provide several lines of evidence supporting
a single origin for dogs, and disfavoring alternative models
in which dog lineages arise separately
from geographically distinct wolf populations.
And they put this diagram in the paper.
By the way, that diagram is very, very similar
to this diagram that Creationists proposed based upon
the creation account in Genesis. In other words,
you have a common dog ancestor that gives rise
to the different species of dogs, and that's exactly
what we're saying here. Now, in the Creation Museum,
we actually show the finches here and you see the finches
with their different beaks, beside dogs skulls, different species of dogs.
By the way, there's more variation in the dog skeleton
here than there are in these finches. Yet, the dogs,
wow, that's never used as an example of evolution,
but the finches are, particularly in the public school textbooks.
Students are taught, "Ah! See the changes that are occurring here?"
And here's another problem that we've got.
Not only has the word "science" been hijacked by secularists,
I believe the word "evolution" has been hijacked by secularists.
The word "evolution" has been hijacked using what I call a bait and switch.
Let me explain to you.
The word "evolution" is being used in public school textbooks,
and we often see it in documentaries and so on,
is used for observable changes that we would agree with,
and then used for unobservable changes, such as molecules-to-man.
Let me explain to you what's really going on because
I was a science teacher in the public schools
and I know what the students were taught and I checked
the public school textbooks anyway to know what they're taught.
See, students are taught today, look, there's all
these different animals, plants, but they're all part
of this great, big tree of life that goes back to some primordial form.
And, look, we see changes. Changes in finches,
changes in dogs and so on. Now, we don't deny the changes.
You see that. You see different species of finches, different species of dogs.
But then they put it all together in this evolutionary tree--
but that's what you don't observe. You don't observe that.
That's belief there. That's the historical science
that I would say is wrong. But, you know, what you do observe,
you do observe different species of dogs, different species of finches,
but then there are limits. You don't see one kind changing into another.
Actually, we're told that if you teach creation
in the public schools as teaching religion,
if you teach evolution as science, I'm gonna say, "Wait a minute!"
Actually, the creation model here, based upon the Bible,
observational science confirms this. This is what you're observe!
You don't observe this tree.
Actually, it's the public school textbooks that are teaching a belief,
imposing it on students, and they need to be teaching them
observational science to understand the reality of what's happening.
Now, what we found is that public school textbooks present
the evolutionary tree as science, but reject the creation orchard as religion.
But observational science confirms the creation orchard--
so public school textbooks are rejecting observational science
and imposing a naturalistic religion on students.
The word "evolution" has been hijacked using a bait and switch
to indoctrinate students to accept evolutionary belief
as observational science.
Let me introduce you to another scientist, Richard Lenski,
from Michigan State University. He's a great scientist,
he's known for culturing e-coli in the lab...
and he found there was some e-coli that actually seemed
to develop the ability to grow on cistrate on substrate.
But Richard Lenski is here, mentioned in this book,
and it's called "Evolution in the Lab".
So the ability to grow on citrate is said to be evolution.
And there are those that say, "Hey! This is against the Creationist."
For instance, Jerry Coin from University of Chicago says,
"Lenski's experiment is also yet another poke in the eye
for anti-evolutionists."
He says, "The thing I like most is it says you can get
these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events."
But is it a poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists?
Is it really seeing complex traits evolving?
What does it mean that some of these bacteria are able to grow on citrate?
Let me introduce you to another biblical Creationist, who is a scientist.
Hi, my name's Dr. Andrew Fabich.
I got my PhD from University of Oklahoma in Microbiology.
I teach at Liberty University and I do research on e-coli in the intestine.
I've published it in secular journals from the American Society for Microbiology,
including infection immunity and applied environmental microbiology
as well as several others.
My work has been cited even in the past year in the journals Nature,
Science Translational Medicine, Public Library of Science,
Public Library of Science Genetics. It's cited regularly
in those journals and while I was taught nothing but evolution,
I don't accept that position.
I do my research from a creation perspective.
When I look at the evidence that people cite as e-coli,
supposedly, evolving over 30 years, over 30,000 generations in the lab,
and people say that it is now able to grow on citrate,
I don't deny that it grows on citrate,
but it's not any kind of new information.
The information's already there and it's just a switch
that gets turned on and off and that's what they reported in there.
There's nothing new.
See, students need to be told what's really going on here.
Certainly there's change, but it's not change necessary for molecules-to-man.
Now, we could look at other predictions.
What about evidence confirming one race?
Well, when we look at the human population we see lots of differences.
But based on Darwin's ideas of human evolution,
as presented in The Descent of Man, I mean,
Darwin did teach in The Descent of Man there were
lower races and higher races.
Would you believe, that back in the 1900s, one of the most
popular biology textbooks used in the public schools in America taught this:
At the present time there exists upon Earth
five races or varieties of man...and finally,
the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented
by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
Can you imagine if that was in the public schools today?
And, yet, that's what was taught, but it was based on
Darwin's ideas that are wrong. You have a wrong foundation.
You're gonna have a wrong worldview.
Now, had they started from the Bible, and from
the creation account in the Bible, what does it teach?
Well, we're all descendants of Adam and Eve.
We go through the Tower of Babel, different languages,
so different people groups formed distinct characteristics.
But we'd expect, we'd say, you know what,
that means there's biologically only one race of humans.
Well, I mentioned Dr. Venter before.
And he was a researcher with the human genome project.
And you'll remember, in the year 2000, this was headline news,
and what we read was this: they had put together
a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome
and unanimously declared, there is only one race - the human race.
Wow! Who would have guessed?
But you see there we have observational science
confirming the Creation account,
not confirming at all Darwin's ideas.
Now, there's much more that can be said
on each of these topics.
Obviously, you can't do that in a short time like this.
And you could do a lot more research.
I suggest you visit our website at Answers in Genesis
for a lot more information.
So, the debate topic: Is creation a viable model
of origins in today's scientific era?
I said, we need to define the terms,
and particularly, the term science
and the term evolution. And I believe we need
to understand how they are being used to impose
an anti-God religion on generations of unsuspecting students.
You see, I keep emphasizing we do need to
understand the difference between experimental or
observational science and historical science.
And you know what?
The secularists don't like me doing this
because they don't want to admit
that there's a belief aspect to what they're saying.
And there is. And they can't get away from it.
Let me illustrate this with a statement from Bill Nye.
"You can show the Earth is not flat.
You can show the Earth is not 10,000 years old."
By the way, I agree. You can show the Earth is not flat.
There's a video from the Galileo spacecraft showing
the Earth, and speeded up of course, but spinning.
You can see it's a sphere. You can observe that.
You can't observe the age of the Earth.
You don't see that. You see again, I emphasize,
there's a big difference between historical science,
talking about the past, and observational science,
talking about the present.
And I believe what's happening is this, that students are being
indoctrinated by the confusion of terms:
the hijacking of the word science and the hijacking
of the word evolution in a bait-and-switch.
Let me illustrate further with this video clip.
Because here I assert that Bill Nye is equating
observational science with historical science.
And I also say it's not a mystery when you understand the difference.
Howie, people with these deeply held religious beliefs,
they embrace that whole literal interpretation
of the Bible as written in English, as a worldview.
And, at the same time, they accept aspirin,
antibiotic drugs, airplanes, but they're able
to hold these two worldviews. And this is a mystery.
Actually, I suggest to you it's not a mystery.
You see, when I'm talking about antibiotics,
aspirin, smoke detectors, jet planes,
that's Ken Ham the Observational Science Bloke.
I'm an Australian. We call guy's "blokes", okay?
But when you're talking about creation and thousands of years
of the age of the Earth,
that's Ken Ham the Historical Science Bloke.
I'm willing to admit that.
Now, when Bill Nye's talking about aspirin,
antibiotics, jet planes, smoke detectors,
he does a great job at that.
I used to enjoy watching him on TV too.
That's Bill Nye the Observational Science Guy.
But when he's talking about evolution and millions of years,
I'm challenging him that that's Bill Nye the Historical Science Guy.
And I challenge the evolutionist to admit the belief
aspects of their particular worldview.
Now, at the Creation Museum, we're only too willing
to admit our beliefs based upon the Bible,
but we also teach people the difference between
beliefs and what one can actually observe
and experiment with in the present.
I believe we're teaching people to think critically
and to think in the right terms about science.
I believe it's the creationists that should be
educating the kids out there because we're teaching
them the right way to think. You know, we admit it.
Our origins of historical science is based upon the Bible,
but I'm just challenging evolutionists to admit
the belief aspects of evolution
and be upfront about the difference here.
As I said, I'm only too willing to admit
my historical science based on the Bible.
And let me further go on to define the term "creation" as we use it.
By creation, we mean, here at Answers in Genesis
and the Creation Museum, we mean the account based on the Bible.
Yes, I take Genesis as literal history, as Jesus did.
And, here at the Creation Museum, we walk people through that history.
We walk them through creation, the perfect creation.
That God made Adam and Eve, land animal kinds, sea-creatures and so on.
And then sin and death entered the world.
There was no death before sin.
That means how can you have billions of dead things before man sinned?
And then, the catastrophe of Noah's flood. If there was a global flood,
you'd expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.
Had to say that because a lot of our supporters would want me to.
And what do you find?--Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.
Confusion, the tower of Babel. God gave different languages so you get different people groups.
So this is the geological, astronomical, anthropological, biological history as recorded in the Bible.
So this is concerning what happened in the past that explains the present.
And then, of course, that God's Son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the God-Man
to die on the cross, be raised from the dead. And one day there's going to be
a new heavens and a new earth to come. And, you know, not only
is this an understanding of history to explain the
geology, biology, astronomy, and so on to connect the present to the past.
But it's also a foundation for our whole world view.
For instance, in Matthew 19, when Jesus was asked about marriage, he said,
"Have you not read He who made them at the beginning made them male and female?"
And said, "For this cause shall a man leave his mother and father and be joined to his wife. And they'll be one flesh"
He quoted from Genesis as literal history--Genesis 1 and 2. God invented marriage, by the way.
That's where marriage comes from. And it's to be a man and a woman.
And not only marriage. Ultimately, every single Biblical doctrine of theology
directly or indirectly, is founded in Genesis.
Why is there sin in the world? Genesis.
Why is there death? Genesis.
Why do we wear clothes? Genesis.
Why did Jesus die on the cross? Genesis.
It's a very important book. It's foundational to all Christian doctrine.
And you see, when we look at that, what I call the seven C's of History
that we walk people through here at the museum,
think about how it all connects together--a perfect creation.
It'll be perfect again in the future.
Sin and death--end of the world. That's why God's son died on the cross
to conquer death and offer a free gift of salvation.
The flood of Noah's day, a reminder that the flood was a
judgement because of man's wickedness but at the same time
a message of God's grace and salvation.
As Noah and his family had to go through a door to be saved,
so we need to go through a door to be saved.
Jesus Christ said, "I am the door. By me, if any man
enter in, he'll be saved. And we make no apology
about the fact that what we're on about is this:
"If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and
believe in your heart God has raised him from the dead,
you'll be saved. Now, as soon as I said that,
see if people say, "See, if you allow creation in schools,
for instance, if you'll ask students to even hear about it,
ah, this is religion."
You know, let me illustrate this,
talking about a recent battle in Texas over textbooks
in the public school. A newspaper report said this:
"Textbook and classroom curriculum battles have long
raged in Texas pitting creationists - those who see
God's hand in the creation of the universe-
against academics..."
Stop right there. Notice creationists... academics.
Creationists can't be academics. Creationists can't be scientists.
See, it's the way things are worded out there.
It's an indoctrination that's going on.
We worry about religious and political ideology
trumping scientific fact. Wait a minute.
What do I mean by science? You're talking about
what you observe, or are you talking about your beliefs about the past?
Now, Kathy Miller is the president of the Texas Freedom Network and
she has vocally spoken out. She's spoken out about this textbook battle there in Texas.
And the mission statement of the organization she's president of says, "The Texas Freedom Network
advances a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties
to counter the religious right." Religious freedom... individual liberties. Hmm.
And then she makes this statement: "Science education..." What does she mean by science?
"should be based on mainstream science education, not on personal idealogical beliefs
of unqualified reviewers." Wait a minute. They want religious liberty and not personal
ideological beliefs? I assert this: public school textbooks are using the same word "science"
for observational and historical science. They arbitrarily define science as naturalism
and outlaw the supernatural. They present molecules-to-man evolution as as fact.
And they are imposing the religion of naturalism on generations of students.
They're imposing their ideology on the students
and everything's explained by natural processes.
That is a religion. What do you mean by religious liberty?
They tolerate their religion.
See, the battle is really about authority.
It's more than just science or evolution or creation.
It's about who is the authority in this world, man or God?
If you start with naturalism, then what about morals?
Who decides right and wrong? Well, it's subjective.
Marriage? Well, whatever you want it to be.
Get rid of old people. I mean, why not?
They're just animals, they're costing us a lot of money.
Abortion. Get rid of spare cats, get rid of spare kids. We're all animals.
But if you start from God's word, there are moral absolutes.
God decides right and wrong. Marriage--one man and one woman.
Sanctity of life--we care for old people. They're made in the image of God.
Life begins at fertilization, so abortion is killing a human being.
We do see the collapse of Christian morality
in our culture and increasing moral relativism
because generations of kids are being taught the religion
of naturalism and that the Bible can't be trusted.
And so, again, I say creation is the only viable model
of historical science confirmed by observational science
in today's modern scientific era. You know what?
I'm a science teacher. I want to see kids taught science.
I love science. I want to see more (inaudible) in the world.
You know, if we teach them the whole universe
is a result of natural processes and not designed
by a creative God, they might be looking in the wrong places
or have the wrong idea when they're looking
at the creation in regard to how you develop technology
because if they look at it as just random processes,
that could totally influence the way they think.
If they understand it was a perfect world marred by sin,
that could have a great affect on how they then look
for overcoming diseases and problems in the world.
I want children to be taught the right foundation,
that there's a God who created them, who loves them,
who died on the cross for them and that they're special.
They're made in the image of God.
(moderator) There you go. Thank you, Mr. Ham.
-We can applaud Mr. Ham's presentation. -(audience applauds)
And, you know, it did occur to me when you had
my old friend Larry King up there, you could've just asked him.
He's been around a long time. And he's a smart guy!
He could probably answer for all of us. Now, let's all be
attentive to Mr. Nye as he gives us his 30 minute presentation.
Thank you very much and, Mr. Ham, I learned something.
Thank you. But let's take it back around to question at hand:
does Ken Ham's creation model hold up? Is it viable?
So, for me, of course...well...take a look.
We're here in Kentucky on layer upon layer upon layer of limestone.
I stopped at the side of the road today and picked up
just a piece of limestone. It has a fossil right there.
Now, in these many, many layers, in this vicinity of Kentucky,
there are coral animal--fossils, Zooxanthella--
and when you look at it closely,
you can see that they lived their entire lives.
They lived typically 20 years, sometimes more than that
when the water conditions are correct.
And so we are standing on millions of layers of ancient life.
How could those animals have lived their entire life,
and formed these layers, in just 4,000 years?
There isn't enough time since Mr. Ham's flood
for this limestone that we're standing on to come into existence.
My scientific colleagues go to places like Greenland,
the Arctic, they go to Antarctica, and they drill
into the ice with hollow drill bits. It's not that extraordinary.
Many of you have probably done it yourselves, drilling other things.
Hole saws to put locks in doors, for example.
And we pull out long cylinders of ice, long ice rods.
And these are made of snow and it's called "snow ice".
And snow ice forms over the winter as snowflakes fall
and are crushed down by subsequent layers. They're crushed together,
entrapping the little bubbles and the little bubbles must
needs be ancient atmosphere. There's nobody running around
with a hypodermic needle, squirting ancient atmosphere into the bubbles.
And we find certain of these cylinders to have 680,000 layers.
680,000 snow/winter/summer cycles.
How could it be that just 4,000 years ago all of this ice formed?
Let's just run some numbers.
This is some scenes from the lovely Antarctic.
Let's say we have 680,000 layers of snow ice
and 4,000 years since the Great Flood.
That would mean we'd need 170 winter-summer cycles
every year, for the last 4,000 years.
I mean, wouldn't someone have noticed that? Wow!
Wouldn't someone have noticed that there's been
winter-summer-winter-summer 170 times one year?
If we go to California, we find enormous stands of bristlecone pines.
Some of them are over 6,000 years old. 6,800 years old.
There's a famous tree in Sweden, Old Tjikko, is 9,550 years old.
How could these trees be there if there was an enormous flood just 4,000 years ago?
You can try this yourself, everybody.
Get, I mean, I don't mean to be mean to trees,
but get a sapling and put it under water for a year.
It will not survive in general. Nor will its seeds.
They just won't make it. So how could these trees
be that old if the Earth is only 4,000 years old?
Now, when we go to the Grand Canyon--which is an astonishing place
and I recommend to everybody in the world to someday visit the Grand Canyon--
you find layer upon layer of ancient rocks.
And if there was this enormous flood that you speak of,
wouldn't there have been churning and bubbling and roiling?
How would these things have settled out?
Your claim that they settled out in an extraordinary short amount of time
is for me, not satisfactory. You can look at these rocks. You can look at rocks that are younger.
You can go to seashores where there's sand. This is what geologists on the outside do,
study the rate at which soil is deposited at the end of rivers and deltas.
And we can see that it takes a long, long time for sediments to turn to stone.
Also, in this picture you can see where one type of sediment has intruded on another type.
Now, if that was uniform, wouldn't we expect it all to be even, without intrusion?
Furthermore, you can find places in the Grand Canyon where you see an ancient riverbed on that side
going to an ancient riverbed on that side and the Colorado River has cut through it.
And by the way, if this great flood drained through the Grand Canyon,
wouldn't there have been a Grand Canyon on every continent?
How could we not have Grand Canyons everywhere if this water drained away in this extraordinary
short amount of time? Four thousand years? Now when you look at these layers carefully,
you find these beautiful fossils. And when I say beautiful, I am inspired by them. They are remarkable
because we are looking at the past. You find down low. You'll find what you might consider
is, uh, rudimentary sea animals. Up above you'll find the famous trilobytes.
Above that you might find some clams, some oysters. And above that you find some mammals.
You never, ever find a higher animal mixed in with a lower one. You never find a lower one
trying to swim its way to a higher one. If it all happened in such an extraordinary short amount of time,
if this water drained away just like that, wouldn't we expect to see some turbulence?
And by the way, anyone here, really, if you can find one example of that, one example of that
anywhere in the world, the scientists of the world challenge you. They would embrace you. You would be a hero.
You would change the world if you could find one example of that anywhere.
People have looked, and looked and looked. They have not found a single one.
Now here's an interesting thing. These are fossil skulls that people have found all around the world.
It's by no means representative of all the fossil skulls that have been found, but these are all over the place.
Now, if you were to look at these, I can assure you, not any of them is a gorilla. Right?
If as Mr. Ham and his associates claim, there was just man and then everybody else, there were just
humans and all other species, where would you put modern humans among these skulls?
How did all these skulls get all over the earth in these extraordinary fashion? Where would you put us?
I can tell you we are on there and I encourage you, when you go home, to look it up.
Now, one of the extraordinary claims associated with Mr. Ham's worldview is that this giant boat
a very large wooden ship, went aground safely on a mountain in the Middle, what we now call the Middle East.
And so places like Australia are populated then by animals who somehow managed to get
from the Middle East all the way to Australia in the last 4,000 years.
Now that, to me, is an extraordinary claim. We would expect then, somewhere between the Middle East
and Australia, we would expect to find evidence of kangaroos. We would expect to find
some fossils, some bones in the last 4,000 years. Somebody would have been hopping along there
and died along the way, and we'd find them. And furthermore, there's a claim
that there was a land bridge that allowed these animals to get from Asia all the way
to the continent of Australia. And that land bridge has disappeared, has disappeared in the last
4,000 years. No navigator, no diver, no U.S. Navy submarine, no one has ever detected any evidence
of this, let alone any evidence of fossils of kangaroos. So, your expectation is not met.
It doesn't seem to hold up. So, let's see. If there are 4,000 years since Ken Ham's flood
and let's say, as he said many times, there are 7,000 kinds,
today the very, very lowest estimate is that there are about 8.7 million species.
But a much more reasonable estimate is it's 50 million, or even 100 million,
when you start counting the viruses and the bacteria and all the beetles that must be extant
in the tropical rain forests that we haven't found. So we'll take a number which I think is pretty reasonable,
16 million species today. If these came from 7,000 kinds,
let's say we have 7,000 subtracted from 15 million,
that's 15,993. If 4,000 years, we have 365.25 days a year,
we would expect to find 11 new species every day.
So you'd go out into your yard, you wouldn't just find a different bird, a new bird
you'd find a different kind of bird, a whole new species, a bird!
Every day, a new species of fish, a new species of organisms you can't see, and so on.
I mean, this would be enormous news. The last 4,000 years people would have seen these changes among us.
So the Cincinnati Enquirer, I imagine, would carry a column right next to the weather report:
Today's New Species, and it would list these 11 every day, but we see no evidence of that.
There's no evidence of these species. There simply isn't enough time.
Now as you may know, I was graduated from engineering school and I was,
I got a job at Boeing. I worked on 747s. I, okay everybody relax, I was very well supervised.
Everything's fine. There's a tube in the 747 I kind of think of that's my tube.
But that aside, I travelled the highways of Washington state quite a bit.
I was a young guy. I had a motorcycle. I used to go mountain climbing in Washington state... Oregon.
And you can drive along and find these enormous boulders on top of the ground, enormous rocks,
huge, sitting on top of the ground. Now, out there, in regular academic pursuits, regular geology,
people have discovered that there was, used to be a lake in what is now Montana
which we charmingly refer to as Lake Missoula.
It's not there now but the evidence for it, of course, if I may, overwhelming.
And so, an ice dam would form at Lake Missoula and once in a while it would break.
It would build up and break. And there were multiple floods in my old state of Washington state.
And, just, before we go on, let me just say, go Seahawks! That was very gratifying, very gratifying for me.
Anyway you drive along the road and there are these rocks. So, if as is asserted here at this facility,
that the heavier rocks would sink to the bottom during a flood event,
the big rocks, and especially their shape, instead of aerodynamic,
the hydrodynamic, the water changing shape, as water flows past,
you'd expect them to sink to the bottom. But here are these enormous rocks right on the surface.
And there's no shortage of them. If you go driving in Washington state or Oregon
they're readily available. So how could those be there if the Earth is just 4,000 years old.
How could they be there if this one flood caused that?
Another remarkable thing I'd like everybody to consider, alone inherent in this worldview,
is that somehow Noah and his family were able to build a wooden ship that would house
14,000 individuals. There were 7,000 kinds and then, there's a boy and a girl for each one of those,
so there's about 14,000... 8 people. And these people were unskilled.
As far as anybody knows they had never built a wooden ship before.
Furthermore, they had to get all these animals on there. And they had to feed them.
And I understand that Mr. Ham has some explanations for that, which I frankly find extraordinary but
this is the premise of the bit. And we can then run a test, a scientific test.
People in the early 1900s built an extraordinary, large wooden ship, the Wyoming.
It was a six-masted schooner, the largest one ever built. It had a motor on it for winching cables and stuff.
But this boat had a great difficulty. It was not as big as the Titanic, but it was a very long ship.
It would twist in the sea. It would twist this way, this way, and this way.
And in all that twisting, it leaked. It leaked like crazy. The crew could not keep the ship dry.
And indeed, it eventually foundered and sank, a loss of all 14 hands. So there were 14 crewmen
aboard a ship built by very, very skilled shipwrights in New England.
These guys were the best in the world at wooden shipbuilding. And they couldn't build
a boat as big as the Ark is claimed to have been.
Is that reasonable? Is that possible that the best shipbuilders in the world couldn't do
what eight unskilled people, men and their wives, were able to do?
If you visit the National Zoo, in Washington D.C., it's 163 acres. And they have 400 species.
By the way, this picture that you're seeing was taken by spacecraft in space, orbiting the Earth.
If you told my grandfather, let alone my father, that we had that capability,
they would have been amazed. That capability comes from our fundamental understanding
of gravity, of material science, of physics, and life science, where you go looking.
This place is often, as any zoo, is often deeply concerned and criticized for how it treats its animals.
They have 400 species on 163 acres, 66 hectares. Is it reasonable that Noah and his colleagues,
his family, were able to maintain 14,000 animals and themselves, and feed them, aboard a ship
that was bigger than anyone's ever been able to build?
Now, here's the thing, what we want in science, science as practiced on the outside,
is an ability to predict. We want to have a natural law that is so obvious and clear,
so well understood that we can make predictions about what will happen.
We can predict that we can put a spacecraft in orbit and take a picture of Washington D.C.
We can predict that if we provide this much room for an elephant, it will live healthily
for a certain amount of time. I'll give you an example.
In the explanation provided by traditional science, of how we came to be,
we find as Mr. Ham alluded to many times in his recent remarks,
we find a sequence of animals in what, generally, is called "the fossil record."
This would be to say when we look at the layers, that you would find in Kentucky,
you look at them carefully, you find a sequence of animals, a succession.
And as one might expect, when you are looking at old records
there's some pieces seem to be missing, a gap.
So scientists got to thinking about this.
There are lungfish that jump from pond to pond in Florida
and end up in people's swimming pools.
And there are amphibians, frogs and toads, croaking and carrying on.
And so people wondered if there wasn't a fossil or an organism,
an animal, that had lived, that had characteristics of both.
People over the years had found that in Canada,
there was clearly a fossil marsh--
a place that used to be a swamp that had dried out.
And they found all kinds of happy swamp fossils there:
ferns, organisms, animals, fish that were recognized.
And people realized that if this, with the age of the rocks there,
as computed by traditional scientists, with the age of the rocks there,
this would be a reasonable place to look for an animal,
a fossil of an animal that lived there. And, indeed, scientists found it.
Tiktaalik, this fish-lizard guy.
And they found several specimens, it wasn't one individual.
In other words, they made a prediction, that this animal
would be found and it was found. So far, Mr. Ham and his worldview,
the Ken Ham creation model, does not have this capability.
It cannot make predictions and show results.
Here's an extraordinary one that I find remarkable.
There are certain fish, the Topminnows, that have
the remarkable ability to have sex with other fish,
traditional fish sex, and they can have sex with themselves.
Now, one of the old questions in life science, everybody,
one of the old chin strokers is why does any organism,
whether you're an ash tree, a sea jelly, a squid, a marmot,
why does anybody have sex? I mean, there are more bacteria
in your tummy right now then there are humans on Earth.
And bacteria, they don't bother with that, man.
They split themselves in half, they get new bacteria!
Like, let's get her done! Let's go. But why does any--
think of all the trouble a rose bush goes to make a flower and the thorns
and the bees flying around, interacting--why does anybody bother with all that?
And the answer seems to be...your enemies.
And your enemies are not lions and tigers and bears...oh my!
No, your enemies are germs and parasites.
That's what's gonna get you. Germs and parasites.
My first cousin's son died tragically from essentially the flu.
This is not some story I heard about. This is my first cousin, once removed.
Because, apparently, the virus had the right genes to attack his genes.
So when you have sex you have a new set of genes.
You have a new mixture. So people studied these Topminnows.
And they found that the ones who reproduced sexually
had fewer parasites that the ones who reproduced on their own.
This Black Spot disease--wait, wait, there's more.
In these populations, with flooding and so on, when river ponds get isolated,
then they dry up, then the river flows again.
In between, some of the fish will have sex with other fish,
sometimes, and they'll have sex on their own, what's called asexually.
And those fish, the ones that are in between, sometimes this,
sometimes that, they have an intermediate number of infections.
In other words, the explanation provided by evolution made a prediction.
And the prediction's extraordinary and subtle, but there it is.
How else would you explain it?
And to Mr. Ham and his followers I say this is something we in science want.
We want the ability to predict. And your assertion
that there's some difference between the natural laws
that I use to observe the world today and the natural laws
that existed 4,000 years ago is extraordinary and unsettling.
I travel around. I have a great many family members
in Danville, Virginia, one of the U.S's most livable cities.
It's lovely. And I was driving along and there was a sign in front of a church:
"Big Bang theory? You got to be kidding me. God."
Now, everybody, why would someone at the church, a pastor for example,
put that sign up unless he or she didn't believe
that the big bang was a real thing? I just want to review,
briefly, with everybody why we accept,
in the outside world, why we accept the Big Bang.
Edwin Hubble, sorry, there you go, you gotta be kidding me God.
Edwin Hubble was sitting at Mount Wilson, which is up from Pasadena, California.
On a clear day you can look down and see where the Rose Parade goes.
It's that close to civilization.
But even in the early 1900's, the people who selected this site for astronomy
picked an excellent site. The clouds and smog are below you.
And Edwin Hubble sat there at this very big telescope night after night studying the heavens.
And he found that the stars are moving apart. The stars are moving apart.
And he wasn't sure why. But it was clear that the stars are moving farther and farther apart all the time.
So people talked about it for a couple decades.
And then eventually another astronomer, almost a couple decades, another astronomer
Fred Hoyle just remarked, "Well, it was like there was a big bang.
There was an explosion. This is to say; since everything's moving apart,
it's very reasonable that at one time they were all together.
And there's a place from whence, or rather whence, these things expanded."
And it was a remarkable insight.
But people went still questioning it for decades.
Scientists, conventional scientists, questioning it for decades.
These two researchers wanted to listen for radio signals from space--radio astronomy.
And this is while we have visible light for our eyes, there is a whole other bunch of waves of light
that are much longer. The microwaves in your oven are about that long.
The radar at the airport is about that long. Your FM radio signals about like this.
AM radio signals are a kilometer--they're a couple, several soccer fields.
They went out listening. And there was this hiss, this hisssssss, all the time
that wouldn't go away. And they thought "Oh! Doggone it. There's some loose
connector." They plugged in the connector. They rescrewed it. They made it tight.
They turned it this way. The hiss was still there.
They turned it that way. It was still there.
They thought it was pigeon droppings that had affected the reception of this "horn" it's called.
This thing is still there. It's in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
It's a national historic site. And Arno Pinzius and Robert Wilson had found
this cosmic background sound that was predicted by astronomers.
Astronomers running the numbers, doing math, predicted
that in the cosmos would be left over this echo,
this energy, from the Big Bang that would be detectable.
And they detected it. We built the Cosmic Observatory for Background Emissions, the COBE spacecraft,
and it matched exactly, exactly the astronomers predictions.
You gotta respect that. It's a wonderful thing.
Now, along that line is some interest in the age of the earth.
Right now, it's generally agreed that the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago.
What we can do on earth. These elements that we all know on the Periodic Table of Chemicals,
even ones we don't know, were created when stars explode.
And I look like nobody. But I attended a lecture by Hans Betta who won a Nobel
Prize for discovering the process by which stars create all these elements.
The one that interests me especially is our good friends Rubidium and Strontium.
Rubidium becomes Strontium spontaneously. It's an interesting thing to me.
A neutron becomes a proton. And it goes up the Periodic Table.
When lava comes out of the ground, molten lava,
and it freezes, turns to rock, when the melt solidifies,
or crystalizes, it locks the Rubidium and Strontium in place.
And so by careful assay, by careful, by being diligent, you can tell when the rock froze.
You can tell how old the Rubidium and Strontium are. And you can get an age for the earth.
When that stuff falls on fossils, you can get a very good idea of how old the fossils are.
I encourage you all to go to Nebraska, go to Ashfall State Park
and see the astonishing fossils. It looks like a Hollywood movie.
There are rhinoceroses. There are three-toed horses in Nebraska.
None of those animals are extant today. And they are buried, catastrophically, by a
volcano in what is now Idaho. Is now Yellowstone National Park.
What is called the hot spot. People call it the super-volcano.
And it's the remarkable thing. Apparently, as I can tell you, as a Northwesterner around
for Mount St. Helen's. For full disclosure I'm on the Mount St. Helen's Board.
When it (explosive sound), when it goes off it gives out a great deal of gas
that's toxic and knock these animals out. Looking for relief, they go to a watering
hole. And then when the ash comes they were all buried. It's an extraordinary place.
Now if in the bad old days, you had heart problems, they would right away cut you open.
Now, we use a drug based on Rubidium to look at the inside of your heart without cutting you open.
Now, my Kentucky friends, I want you to consider this. Right now, there is no place
in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to get a degree in this kind of nuclear medicine--
this kind of drugs associated with that.
I hope you find that troubling. I hope you're concerned about that.
You want scientifically literate students in your commonwealth for a better tomorrow for everybody.
You can, you can't get this here. You have to go out of state.
Now as far as the distance to stars. Understand this is very well understood.
We, it's February. We look at a star in February. We measure an angle to it.
We wait six months. We look at that same star again and we measure that angle.
It's the same way carpenters built this building. It's the same way surveyors surveyed the land that we're standing on.
And so by measuring the distance to a star, you can figure out how far away it is, that star,
and the stars beyond it, and the stars beyond that. There are billions of stars.
Billions of stars more than six thousand light years from here.
A light year is a unit of distance, not a unit of time.
There are billions of stars. Mr. Ham, how could there be billions of stars more distant
than six thousand years, if the world's only six thousand years old?
It's an extraordinary claim. There's another astronomer, Adolphe Quetele, who remarked first
about the reasonable man. Is it reasonable that we have ice older by a factor of a hundred than you claim the earth is?
We have trees that have more tree rings than the earth is old.
We have rocks with Rubidium and Strontium, and Uranium-Uranium, and Potassium-Argon dating
that are far, far, far older than you claim the earth is.
Could anybody have built an ark that would sustain the better than any ark anybody was able to build on the earth?
So, if you're asking me, and I got the impression you were,
is Ken Ham's creation model viable? I say "No! Absolutely not!"
Now, one last thing. You may not know that in the US Constitution, from the founding fathers,
is the sentence "to promote the progress of science and useful arts..."
Kentucky voters, voters who might be watching online,
in places like Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas, please
you don't want to raise a generation of science students
who don't understand how we know our place in the cosmos,
our place in space, who don't understand natural law.
We need to innovate to keep the United States where it is in the world.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
Moderator: That's a lot to take in. I hope everybody's holding up well.
That's a lot of information. What we're going to have now is a five minute
rebuttal time for each gentleman to address the other one's comments.
And then there will be a five minute counter rebuttal after that.
Things are going to start moving a little more quickly now.
So at this point in particular, I want to make sure we don't have applauding or anything else going on that slows it down.
So, Mr. Hamm, if you'd like to begin with your five minute rebuttal first.
Mr. Hamm: First of all, Bill, if I was to answer all the points that you brought up,
the moderator would think that I was going on for millions of years. (laughter)
So I can only deal with some of them.
And you mentioned the age of the earth a couple of times, so let me deal with that.
As I said in my presentation, you can't observe the age of the earth.
I would say that comes under what we call historical origin science.
Now, just so you understand where I'm coming from.
Yes, we admit we build our origins from historical science on the Bible.
The Bible says God created in six days. A Hebrew word "yon" as it's used in Genesis 1
with evening/morning number means an ordinary day. Adam was made on day six.
And so, when you add up all those geneologies specifically given in the Bible
from Adam to Abraham you've got 2,000 years; from Abraham to Christ 2,000 years; from Christ to the present 2,000 years.
That's how we get 6,000 years. So that's where it comes from. Just so you know.
Now a lot of people say. Now, by the way, the earth's age is 4.5 billion years old.
And we have radioactive decay dating methods that found that.
But you see, we certainly observe radioactive decay
whether it's rubidium-strontium, whether it's uranium-lead, potassium-argon
But when you're talking about the past, we have a problem.
I'll give you a practical example. In Australia, there were engineers
that were trying to search out about a coal mine.
And so they drilled down and they found a basalt layer, a lava flow that had woody material in it--
branches and twigs and so on. And when Dr. Andrew Snelling, our PhD geologist,
sent that to a lab in Massachusetts in 1994, they used potassium-argon
dating and dated it at 45 million years old.
Well, he also sent the wood to the radio-carbon section of the same lab
and that dated at 45,000 years old. 45,000 year old wood in 45 million year old rock.
The point is there's a problem.
Let me give you another example of a problem.
There was a lava dome that started to form in the 80's after Mt. St. Helen's erupted.
And in 1994 Dr. Steve Austin, another PhD geologist, actually sampled the rock there.
He took whole rock, crushed it, sent it to the same lab actually, I believe, and got a date of .35 million years.
When he separated out the minerals amphibole and pyroxene and used potassium-argon dating,
he got .9 million and 2.8 million. My point is all these dating methods actually give all sorts of different dates.
In fact, different dating methods on the same rock, we can show, give all sorts of different dates.
See there's lots of assumptions in regard to radioactive dating.
Number one, for instance, the amounts of the parent and daughter isotopes at the beginning when the rock formed.
You have to know them. But you weren't there. See that's historical science.
Assumption 2: that all daughter atoms measured today
must have only been derived in situ radioactive decay of parent atoms.
In other words it's a closed system.
But you don't know that. And there's a lot of evidence that that's not so.
Assumption Number 3: that the decay rates have remained a constant.
Now they're just some of them. There's others as well.
The point is there's lots of assumptions in regard to the dating methods.
So there's no dating method you can use that you can absolutely age date a rock.
There's all sorts of differences out there.
And I do want to address the bit you brought up about Christians believing in millions of years.
Yeah, there's a lot of Christians out there that believe in millions of years,
but I'd say they have a problem. I'm not saying they're not Christians, but
because salvation is conditioned upon faith in Christ, not the age of the earth.
But there's an inconsistency with what the Bible teaches.
If you believe in millions of years, you've got death and bloodshed, suffering, and disease
over millions of years leading to man, because that's what you see in the fossil record.
The Bible makes it very clear death is a result of man's sin.
In fact, the first death was in the garden when God killed an animal, clothed Adam and Eve,
first blood sacrifice pointing towards what would happen with Jesus Christ.
He would be the one who would die once and for all.
Now if you believe in millions of years as a Christian, in the fossil record
there's evidence of animals eating each other, Bible says originally all the animals
and man were vegetarian. We weren't told we could eat meat until after the flood.
There's diseases represented in the fossil record like brain tumors, but the Bible
says when God made everything it was very good.
God doesn't call brain tumors very good.
There's fossilized thorns in the fossil record said to be hundreds of millions of years old,
the Bible says thorns came after the curse.
So these two things can't be true at the same time.
You know what? There's hundreds of dating methods out there, hundreds of them.
Actually, 90% of them contradict billions of years. And the point is, all such dating methods are fallible.
And I claim, there's only one infallible dating method, it's a witness who was there,
who knows everything, who told us. And that's from the word of God.
And that's why I would say that the earth is only 6,000 years. And, as Dr. Faulkner said,
there's nothing in astronomy, and certainly Dr. Snelling would say, there's nothing in geology
to contradict a belief in a young age for the earth and the universe.
Moderator: Thank you Mr. Ham. Mr. Nye, your five-minute rebuttal please.
Mr. Nye: Thank you very much. Let me start with the beginning.
If you find 45 million year old rock on top of 45 thousand year old trees,
maybe the rock slid on top. Maybe that's it. That seems much more reasonable explanation
than, "It's impossible." Then as far as dating goes, actually the methods are
very reliable. One of the mysteries, or interesting things that people in my business,
especially at the Planetary Society, are interested in is why all the asteroids seem to be
so close to the same date in age. It's 4.5, 4.6 billion years.
It's a remarkable thing. People at first expected a little more of a spread.
So, I understand that you take the Bible as written in English, translated countless,
not countless, but many, many times over the last three millenia as to be a more accurate,
more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us
than what I and everybody in here can observe. That to me is unsettling, troubling.
And then about the disease thing, are the fish sinners? Have they done something wrong to get diseases?
That's sort of an extraordinary claim that takes me just a little past what I'm comfortable with.
And then, as far as you can't observe the past, I have to stop you right there.
That's what we do in astronomy.
All we can do in astronomy is look at the past.
By the way, you're looking at the past right now. Because the speed of light bounces off of me
and then gets to your eyes. And I'm delighted to see that the people in the back of the room
appear just that much younger than the people in the front.
So this idea that you can separate the natural laws of the past from the natural laws that we have now,
I think is at the heart of our disagreement. I don't see how we're ever going to agree with that
if you insist that natural laws have changed. It's, for lack of a better word, it's magical.
And I have appreciated magic since I was a kid, but it's not really what we want
in conventional, mainstream science. So, your assertion that all the animals were vegetarians
before they got on the ark. That's really remarkable. I have not spent a lot of time with lions,
but I can tell they've got teeth that really aren't set up for broccoli.
That these animals were vegetarians til this flood is something that I would ask you
to provide a little more proof for. I give you the lion's teeth, you give me verses
as translated into English over, what, 30 centuries?
So, that's not enough evidence for me. If you've ever played telephone, I did, I remember very well
in kindergarten where you have a secret and you whisper it to the next person, to the next person,
to the next person. Things often go wrong. So it's very reasonable to me that instead of lions being vegetarians on the ark,
lions are lions, and the information that you used to create your world view is not consistent with
what I, as a reasonable man, would expect. So, I want everybody to consider the implications of this.
If we accept Mr. Ham's point of view, that the Bible as translated into American English,
serves as a science text, and that he and his followers will interpret that for you,
Just, I want you to consider what that means. It means that Mr. Ham's word or his interpretation
of these other words, is somehow to be more respected than what you can observe in nature.
Than what you can find literally in your backyard, in Kentucky.
It's a troubling and unsettling point of view, and it's one I very much like you to address when you come back.
As far as the five races that you mentioned, it's kind of the same thing.
The five races were claimed by people who were of European descent,
and said, "Hey, we're the best! Check us out!" And that turns out to be,
if you've ever traveled anywhere or done anything, not to be that way.
People are much more alike than they are different.
So, are we supposed to take your word for English words translated over the last 30 centuries,
instead of what we can observe in the universe around us?
Moderator: Very good. And Mr. Ham, would you like to offer your five minute counter rebuttal?
Ken Ham: Uh, first of all, Bill, just so, I just don't want a misunderstanding here,
and that is, the 45,000-year-old wood, or supposedly 45,000 was inside the basalt.
Um, so, it was encased in the basalt. Uh, and that's why I was making that particular point.
And I would also say that natural law hasn't changed. As I talked about, you know,
I said we had the laws of logic, the uniformity of nature. And that only makes sense
within a biblical worldview anyway, of a creator God, who set up those laws,
and that's why we can do good experimental science, because we assume those laws are true,
and they'll be true tomorrow. I do want to say this. that you said a few times, you know,
Ken Ham's view or model. It's not just Ken Ham's model. We have a number of PhD scientists
on our own staff. I quoted, had video quotes, from some scientists.
It's Dr. Damadian's model. It's Dr. Fabich's model. It's Dr. Faulkner's model. It's Dr. Snelling's model.
It's Dr. Purdom's model. And so it goes on, in other words. And you go on our website,
and there are lots of creation scientists who agree with exactly what we're saying concerning
the Bible's account of creation. So it's not just "my model" in that sense.
There is so much that I can say, but, as I listen to you, I believe you're confusing terms
in regard to species and kinds. Because we're not saying that God created all those species.
We're saying God created kinds. And we're not saying species got on the ark, we're saying kinds.
In fact, we've had researchers working on what is a kind. For instance, there's a number of papers,
published on our website, where, for instance, they look at dogs. And they say, well, this one
breeds with this one, with this one, with this one. And you can look at all the papers around the world
and you can connect them all together and say that obviously represents one kind.
In fact, as they have been doing that research, they have predicted probably less than actually a thousand
kinds were on Noah's ark, which means just over 2,000 animals. And the average size of a land animal
is not that big so, you know, there was plenty of room on the ark. I also believe that
a lot of what you were saying was really illustrating my point. Uh, you were talking about tree rings
and ice layers and, just talking about kangaroos getting to Australia, and all sorts of things like that.
But see, we're talking about the past, when we weren't there. We didn't see those tree rings actually forming.
We didn't see those layers being laid down. You know, in 1942, for instance, there were some planes
that landed on the ice in Greenland. They found them, what, 46 years later, I think it was,
three miles away from the original location with 250 feet of ice buried on top of them.
So, ice can build up catastrophically. If you assume one layer a year, or something like that,
it's like the dating methods. You are assuming things in regard to the past that aren't necessarily true.
In regard to lions and teeth, bears, most bears have teeth very much like a lion or tiger, and yet, most bears
are primarily vegetarian. The panda, if you look at its teeth, you'd say, maybe it should be a
savage carnivore. It eats mainly bamboo. The little fruit bat in Australia has really sharp teeth,
looks like a savage little creature, and it rips into fruit.
Uh, so, just cause an animal has sharp teeth doesn't mean it's a meat eater. It means it has sharp teeth.
Uh, so again, it really comes down to our interpretation of these things.
I think too, in regard to the Missoula, uh, example that you gave, you know,
creationists do believe there's been post-flood catastrophism.
Noah's flood, certainly, was a catastrophic event. But then there's been post-flood catastrophism since that time as well.
And again, in regard to historical science, why would you say Noah was unskilled?
I mean, I didn't meet Noah, and neither did you. And you know, really, it's an evolutionary view of origins I believe
cause you're thinking in terms people before us aren't as good as us.
Hey, there are civilizations that existed in the past, and we look at their technology,
and we can't even understand today how they did some of the things that they did.
Who says Noah couldn't build a big boat? By the way, the Chinese and the Egyptians built boats.
In fact, some of our research indicates that some of the wooden boats that were built
had three layers interlocking so they wouldn't twist like that and leak, which is why,
here at the Creation Museum, we have an exhibit on the ark, where we've rebuilt 1% of the ark to scale
and shown three interlocking layers like that. And one last thing, concerning the speed of light,
and that is, I'm sure you're aware of the horizon problem. And that is, from a Big Bang perspective,
even the secularists have a problem of getting light and radiation out to the universe
to be able to exchange with the rest of the universe, to get that even microwave background radiation.
On their model, 15 billion years or so, they can only get it about halfway.
And that's why they have inflation theories, which means, everyone has a problem concerning the light issue.
There's things people don't understand. And we have some models on our website
by some of our scientists to help explain those sorts of things.
Moderator: Mr. Nye, your counter rebuttal.
Bill Nye: Thank you Mr. Ham, but I'm completely unsatisfied.
You did not, in my view, address this fundamental question. 680,000 years of snow ice layers
which require winter summer cycle. Let's say you have 2,000 kinds instead of seven.
That makes the problem even more extraordinary, multiplying eleven by what's, three and a half?
We get to 35... 40 species every day that we don't see, they're not extant.
In fact, you probably know we're losing species due to mostly human activity and the loss of habitat.
Then, as far as Noah being an extraordinary shipwright, I'm very skeptical.
The shipwrights, my ancestors, the Nye family in New England, took, spent their whole life learning to make ships.
I mean, it's very reasonable, perhaps, to you that Noah had superpowers
and was able to build this extraordinary craft with seven family members, but to me, it's just not reasonable.
Then, uh, by the way, the fundamental thing we disagree on, Mr. Ham,
is this nature of what you can prove to yourself. This is to say, when people make assumptions
based on radiometric data, when they make assumptions about the expanding universe,
when they make assumptions about the rate at which genes change in populations of bacteria
in laboratory growth media, they are making assumptions based on previous experience.
They're not coming out of whole cloth. So, next time you have a chance to speak,
I encourage you to explain to us why... why we should accept your word for it that natural law changed
just 4,000 years ago, completely. And there's no record of it. You know, there are pyramids that are older than that.
There are human populations that are far older than that, with traditions that go back farther that that.
And it's just not reasonable to me that everything changed 4,000 years ago.
By everything, I mean the species, the surface of the Earth, the stars in the sky,
and the relationship of all the other living things on Earth to humans.
It's just not reasonable to me that everything changed like that. (Snaps fingers.)
And another thing I would very much appreciate you addressing:
there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious. And I respect that.
People get tremendous community and comfort and nurture and support from their religious fellows
in their communities, in their faiths, in their churches.
And yet, they don't accept your point of view.
There are Christians who don't accept that the Earth could somehow be this extraordinary young age
because of all the evidence around them. And so, what is to become of them, in your view?
And by the way, this thing started, as I understand it, Ken Ham's creation model is based on the Old Testament.
So when you bring in, I'm not a theologian, when you bring in the New Testament,
isn't that little, uh, out of the box? I'm looking for explanations of the creation of the world
as we know it, uh, based on what I'm gonna call science. Not historical science, not observational science.
Science: things that each of us can do akin to what we do, we're trying to outguess the characters
on murder mystery shows, on crime scene investigation, especially.
What is to become of all those people, who don't see it your way?
For us, in the scientific community, I remind you, that when we find an idea that's not tenable,
that doesn't work, that doesn't fly, doesn't hold water, whatever idiom you'd like to embrace, we throw it away.
We are delighted. That's why I say, if you can find a fossil that has swum between the layers, bring it on!
You would change the world. If you could show that somehow the microwave background radiation
is not a result of the Big Bang, come on! Write your paper. Tear it up!
So, your view, that we're supposed to take your word for this book written centuries ago,
translated into American English, is somehow more important that what I can see with my own eyes,
is an extraordinary claim. And, for those watching online, especially, I want to remind you
that we need scientists, and especially engineers for the future.
Engineers use science to solve problems and make things. We need these people
so that the United States can continue to innovate and continue to be a world leader.
We need innovation, and that needs science education. Thank you.
Moderator: All right. Thank you both. Uh, now we're going to get to the things moving a little bit faster.
I think they might be quite interesting here. It's 40 to 45 minutes, maybe a little bit more, actually.
We'll have a little more. For questions and answers submitted by our audience here in the Creation Museum.
Beforehand, we handed out these cards to everyone. I shuffled them here in the back,
and in fact, I dropped a lot of them, and then I scooped them up again.
And if you saw me sorting through them here, it was to get a pile for Mr. Nye and a pile for Mr. Ham,
so that we can alternate reasonably between them. Other than that, the only reason I will skip over one
is if I can't read it, or if it's a question that I don't know how to read because it doesn't seem to make any sense,
which sometimes happens just because of the way people write. (Audience laughs.)
What's going to happen is we're gonna go back and forth between Mr. Nye and Mr. Ham.
Each debater will have two minutes to answer the question addressed to him,
and then the other will have one minute to also answer the question, even though it was addressed to the other man.
And I did pull one card aside here, because I noticed it was to both men.
So we may be able to get to that at some point. Mr. Ham, you've been up first, if you'll hop up first this time.
And Mr. Nye, you can stand by for your responses. Two minutes.
How does creationism account for the celestial bodies: planets, stars, moons moving further and further apart?
And what function does that serve in the grand design?
Ken Ham: Well, when it comes to looking at the universe, of course, we believe, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
And I believe our creationist astronomers would say, "Yeah, you can observe the universe expanding."
Why God is doing that? In fact, in Bible it even says He stretches out the heavens.
And seems to indicate that there is an expansion of the universe.
And so, we would say, yeah, you can observe that. That fits with what we call observational science.
Exactly why God did it that way? I can't answer that question, of course,
because, you know, the Bible says that God made the heavens for his glory.
And that's why he made the stars that we see out there. And it's to tell us how great He is and how big He is.
And in fact, I think that's the thing about the universe. The universe is so large, so big out there.
One of our planetarium programs looks at this. We go in and show you how large the universe is.
And I think it shows us how great God is, how big He is, that He's an all-powerful God,
He's an infinite God, an infinite, all-knowing God who created the universe to show us his power.
I mean, can you imagine that, and the thing that's really remarkable in the Bible.
For instance, it says on the fourth day of creation, and oh, he made the stars also.
It's almost like, "Oh, by the way, I made the stars." Um, and just to show us He's an all-powerful God.
He's an infinite God. So, "I made the stars." And he made them to show us how great He is.
And He is. He's an infinite creator God. And the more that you understand what that means,
that God is all-powerful, infinite, you stand back in awe. You realize how small we are.
You realize, wow, that God would consider this planet, is so significant that he created human beings here,
knowing they would sin, and yet stepped into history to die for us and be raised from the dead.
Our verse, the free gift of salvation. Wow! What a God!
And that's what I would say when I see the universe as it is.
Moderator: Mr. Nye, one minute. And your response?
Bill Nye: There's a question that troubles us all from the time when we are absolutely youngest and first able to think.
And that is, where did we come from? Where did I come from?
And this question is so compelling that we've invented the science of astronomy.
We've invented life science. We've invented physics.
We've discovered these natural laws so that we can learn more about our origin and where we came from.
To you, when it says, He invented the stars also, that's satisfying. You're done.
Oh, good. Okay. To me, when I look at the night sky, I want to know what's out there.
I'm driven. I want to know if what's out there is any part of me, and indeed, it is.
The "oh, by the way" I find compelling you are satisfied.
And the big thing I want from you, Mr. Ham, is can you come up with something that you can predict?
Do you have a creation model that predicts something that will happen in nature?
Moderator: And that's time. Mr. Nye, the next question is for you.
How did the atoms that created the Big Bang get there?
Bill Nye: This is the great mystery. You've hit the nail on the head. No, this is so, where did, what was before the Big Bang?
This is what drives us. This is what we want to know. Let's keep looking. Let's keep searching.
Uh, when I was young, it was presumed that the universe was slowing down.
It's a big bang, phrooo! Except it's in outer space, there's no air, so (quietly) it goes out like that.
And so people presumed that it would slow down, that the universe, the gravity, especially,
would hold everything together and maybe it's going to come back and explode again.
And people went out. And the mathematical expression is: is the universe flat?
It's a mathematical expression. Will the universe slow down, slow down, slow down asymptotically without ever stopping?
Well, in 2004, Saul Perlmutter and his colleagues went looking for the rate at which the universe was slowing down.
Let's go out and measure it. And we're doing it with this extraordinary system of telescopes around the world,
looking at the night sky, looking for supernovae. These are a standard brightness that you can infer distances with.
And the universe isn't slowing down. It's accelerating! The universe is accelerating in its expansion.
And do you know why? Nobody knows why! (audience laughs) Nobody knows why.
And you'll hear the expression nowadays, dark energy, dark matter, which are mathematical ideas that seem
to reckon well with what seems to be the gravitational attraction of clusters of stars, galaxies, and their expansion.
And then, isn't it reasonable that whatever's out there, causing the universe to expand, is here also?
And we just haven't figured out how to detect it.
My friends, suppose a science student from the commonwealth of Kentucky pursues a career in science
and finds out the answer to that deep question? Where did we come from? What was before the Big Bang?
To us, this is wonderful and charming and compelling. This is what makes us get up and go to work everyday,
is to try to solve the mysteries of the universe.
Moderator: And that's time. Mr. Ham, a response?
Ken Ham: Uh, Bill, I just want to let you know that there actually is
a book out there that actually tells us where matter came from. (Audience laughs.)
And, the very first sentence in that book says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And really, that's the only thing that makes sense. That's the only thing that makes sense of why, not just matter is here,
where it came from, but why matter, when you look at it, we have information and language systems that build life.
We're not just matter. And where did that come from? Because matter can never produce information.
Matter can never produce a language system. Languages only come from intelligence.
Information only comes from information. The Bible tells us that the things we see, like in the book of Hebrews,
are made from things that are unseen. An infinite creator God who created the universe,
created matter, the energy, space, mass, time universe, and created the information for life.
It's the only thing that makes logical sense.
Moderator: Alright, Mr. Ham, a new question here. The overwhelming majority of people in the
scientific community have presented valid, physical evidence, such as carbon dating and fossils,
to support evolutionary theory. What evidence besides the literal word of the Bible supports creationism?
Ken Ham: Well, first of all, you know, I often hear people talking about "the majority".
I would agree that the majority of scientists would believe
in millions of years and the majority would believe in evolution,
but there's a large group out there that certainly don't.
But, first thing I want to say is, it's not the majority that's the judge of truth.
There have been many times in the past when the majority have got it wrong.
The majority of doctors in England once thought after you cut up bodies,
you could go and deliver babies and wondered why
the death rate was high in hospitals,
till they found out about diseases caused by bacteria and so on.
The majority once thought the appendix was a leftover organ
from evolutionary ancestry, so, you know, when it's okay,
rip it out. When it's diseased, rip it out. Rip it out anyway.
But these days we know that it's for the immune system
and it's very, very important.
So, you know, it's important to understand that just because
the majority believe something doesn't mean that it's true.
And then, I'm sorry, I missed the last part of the question there.
Moderator: What was the--let me make sure I have the right question here--
So what evidence besides the literal word of the bible--
Ken Ham: Okay, one of the things I was doing was making predictions.
I made some predictions. There's a whole list of predictions.
And I was saying, if the Bible's right and we're all descendants
of Adam and Eve, there's one race. And I went through and talked about that.
If the Bible's right and God made kinds, I went through
and talked about that. And, so, really that question comes down
to the fact that we're again dealing with the fact that there's aspects
about the past that you can't scientifically prove because
you weren't there, but observational science in the present.
Bill and I all have the same observational science. We're here in the present.
We can see radioactivity, but when it comes to then talking about the past,
you're not going to be scientifically able to prove that.
And that's what we need to admit. We can be great scientists in the present,
as the examples I gave you of Dr. Damadian or Dr. Stuart Burgess
or Dr. Fabich and we can be investigating the present.
Understanding the past is a whole different matter.
Moderator: Mr. Nye, one minute response.
Thank you, Mr. Ham. I have to disabuse you of a fundamental idea.
If a scientist, if anybody, makes a discovery that changes
the way people view natural law, scientists embrace him or her!
This person's fantastic. Louis Pasteur--you made reference to germs.
Now, if you find something that changes, that disagrees with common thought,
that's the greatest thing going in science.
We look forward to that change. We challenge you--
tell us why the universe is accelerating.
Tell us why these mothers were getting sick.
And we found an explanation for it. And the idea that the majority
has sway in science is true only up a point.
And then, the other thing I just want to point out, what you may
have missed in evolutionary explanations of life
is it's the mechanism by which we add complexity.
The earth is getting energy from the sun all the time.
And that energy is used to make lifeforms somewhat more complex.
Moderator: And that's time.
New question for you, Mr. Nye.
How did consciousness come from matter?
Bill Nye: Don't know. This is a great mystery.
A dear friend of mine is a neurologist. She studies the nature of consciousness.
Now I will say I used to embrace a joke about dogs.
I love dogs. I mean, who doesn't?
And you can say, this guy remarked,
"I've never seen a dog paralyzed by self-doubt." Actually, I have.
Furthermore, the thing that we celebrate, there are three sundials
on the planet Mars that bare an inscription to the future:
"To those who visit here, we wish you a safe journey and the joy of discovery."
It's inherently optimistic about the future of humankind,
that we will one day walk on Mars. But the joy of discovery...
that's what drives us. The joy of finding out what's going on.
So we don't know where consciousness comes from. But we want to find out.
Furthermore, I'll tell you it's deep within us. I claim that I
have spent time with dogs that have had the joy of discovery!
It's way inside us! We have one ancestor, as near as we can figure.
And, by the way, if you can find what we in science call "a second genesis",
this is to say, "Did life start another way on the earth?"
There are researchers at Astrobiology Institute,
researchers supported by NASA, your tax dollars,
that are looking for answers to that very question.
Is it possible that life could start another way?
Is there some sort of life form akin to science fiction
that's crystal instead of membranous. This would be a fantastic
discovery that would change the world!
The nature of consciousness is a mystery.
I challenge the young people here to investigate that very question.
And I remind you--taxpayers and voters that might be watching--
if we do not embrace the process of science,
and I mean in the mainstream, we will fall behind economically.
This is a point I can't say enough.
Moderator: Mr. Ham, a one minute response.
Ken Ham: Bill, I do want to say that there is a book out there... (audience laughs)
that does document where consciousness came from.
And in that book, the one who created us said that he made man in His image,
and He breathed into man, and he became a living being.
And so, the Bible does document that. That's where consciousness came from,
that God gave it to us. And, you know, the other thing I want to say is,
I'm sorta of a little, I have a mystery. That is, you talk about the joy of discovery
but you also say that when you die, it's over, and that's the end of you.
And if when you die, it's over, and you don't even remember you were here, what's the point of the joy of discovery anyway?
I mean, in an ultimate sense? I mean, you know, you won't ever know you were ever here,
and no one who knew you will know they were ever here, ultimately, so what's the point anyway?
I love the joy of discovery because this is God's creation,
and I'm finding more out about that to take dominion for man's good and for God's glory.
Moderator: And that's time. Mr. Ham, a new question.
This is a simple question, I suppose, but one that actually is fairly profound for all of us, in our lives.
What, if anything, would ever change your mind?
Ken Ham: Hmm. Well, the answer to that question is,
I'm a Christian, and as a Christian, I can't prove it to you,
but God has definitely, shown me very clearly
through His Word, and shown Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.
The Bible is the Word of God. I admit that that's where I start from.
I can challenge people that you can go and test that.
You can make predictions based on that. You can check the prophecies in the Bible.
You can check the statements in Genesis. You can check that.
I did a little bit of that tonight. And I can't ultimately prove that to you.
All I can do is to say to someone, "Look, if the Bible really is what it claims to be,
if it really is the Word of God, and that's what it claims, then check it out."
And the Bible says, "If you come to God believing that He is, He'll reveal Himself to you."
And you will know. As Christians, we can say we know.
And so, as far as the Word of God is concerned, no, no one's ever going to convince me
that the Word of God is not true. But I do want to make a distinction here.
And for Bill's sake. We build models based upon the Bible.
And those models are always subject to change.
The fact of Noah's flood is not subject to change.
The model of how the flood occurred is subject to change
because we observe in the current world,
and we're able to come up with different ways this could have happened or that could have happened.
And that's part of that scientific discovery. That's part of what it's all about.
So, the bottom line is that as a Christian, I have a foundation.
That as a Christian, I would ask Bill a question. What would change your mind?
I mean, you said, even if you came to faith, you'd never give up believing in billions of years.
I think I quoted you correctly. You said something like that recently.
So that would be also my question to Bill.
Moderator: Time. Mr. Nye?
Bill Nye: We would just need one piece of evidence.
We would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another.
We would need evidence that the universe is not expanding.
We would need evidence that the stars appear to be far away, but in fact, they're not.
We would need evidence that rock layers can somehow form
in just 4,000 years instead of the extraordinary amount.
We would need evidence that somehow you can reset atomic clocks and keep neutrons from becoming protons.
You bring on any of those things and you would change me immediately.
The question I have for you though, fundamentally,
and for everybody watching. Mr. Ham, what can you prove?
What you have done tonight is spent most of the, all of the time
coming up with explanations about the past. What can you really predict?
What can you really prove in a conventional scientific,
or a conventional, "I have an idea that makes a prediction and it comes out the way I see it?"
This is very troubling to me.
Moderator: Mr. Nye, a new question. Outside of radiometric methods,
what scientific evidence supports your view of the age of the Earth?
Bill Nye: The age of the earth.. Well, the age of stars.
The... let's see... radiometric evidence is pretty compelling.
Also, the deposition rates. It was, it was, Lillel, a geologist,
who realized, my recollection, he came up with the first use of the term "deep time,"
when people realized that the Earth had to be much, much older.
In a related story, there was a mystery as to how the Earth could be old enough to allow evolution to have taken place.
How could the Earth possibly be three billion years old?
Lord Kelvin did a calculation, if the sun were made of coal, and burning,
it couldn't be more than 100,000 or so years old.
But radioactivity was discovered. Radioactivity is why the Earth is still as warm as it is.
It's why the Earth has been able to sustain its internal heat all these millenia.
And this discovery, it's something like, this question, without radiometric dating,
how would you view the age of the Earth,
to me, it's akin to the expression, "Well, if things were any other way, things would be different."
This is to say, that's not how the world is. Radiometric dating DOES exist. Neutrons DO become protons.
And that's our level of understanding today. The universe is accelerating.
These are all provable facts. That there was a flood 4.000 years ago, is not provable.
In fact, the evidence for me, at least, as a reasonable man, is overwhelming that it couldn't possibly have happened.
There's no evidence for it. Furthermore, Mr. Ham, you never quite addressed this issue of the skulls.
There are many, many steps in what appears to be the creation, or the coming into being of you and me.
And those steps, are consistent with evolutionary theory.
Moderator: And that is time. Mr. Ham, your response.
Ken Ham: By the way, I just want people to understand, too,
in regard to the age of the Earth being about four and a half billion years,
no Earth rock was dated to get that date. They dated meteorites,
and because they assumed meteorites were the same age as the Earth,
leftover from the formation of the solar system, that's where that comes from.
People think they dated rocks on the Earth to get the four and a half billion years. That's just not true.
And the other point that I was making, and I just put this slide back up,
cause I happened to just have it here. And that is,
I said at the end of my first rebuttal time, that there are hundreds of physical processes
that set limits on the age of the Earth. Here's the point.
Every dating method involves a change with time. And there are hundreds of them.
And, if you assume what was there to start with, and you assume something about the rate,
and you know about the rate, you make lots of those assumptions. Every dating method has those assumptions.
Most of the dating methods, 90% of them, contradict the billions of years.
There's no absolute age dating method from scientific method because you can't prove scientifically, young or old.
Moderator: And, here is a new question.
It starts with you, Mr. Ham. Can you reconcile the change in the rate continents are now drifting,
versus how quickly they must have traveled at creation, 6,000 years ago?
Ken Ham: Uh, the rate. Sorry I missed that word.
Moderator: Can you reconcile the speed at which continents are now drifting, today, to the rate
they would have had to have travelled 6,000 years ago, to reach where we are now? I think that's the question.
Ken Ham: Okay, I think I understand the question. Um, actually, this again,
illustrates exactly what I'm talking about in regard to historical science and observational science.
We can look at continents today. And we have scientists who have written papers about this on our website.
I am definitely not an expert in this area and don't claim to be.
Uh, but there are scientists, even Dr. Andrew Snelling, our Ph.D. geologist,
has done a lot of research here, too, as well. There are others out there into plate tectonics and continental drift.
And certainly, we can see movements of plates today. And if you look at those movements,
and if you assume the way it's moving today, the rate it's moving, that it's always been that way in the past,
see that's an assumption. That's the problem when it comes to understanding these things.
You can observe movement, but then to assume that it's always been like that in the past,
that's historical science. And in fact, we would believe basically in catastrophic plate tectonics,
that as a result of the flood, at the time of the flood, there was catastrophic breakup of the Earth's surface.
And what we're seeing now is sort of, if you like, a remnant of that movement.
And so, we do not deny the movement. We do not deny the plates.
What we would deny is that you can use what you see today as a basis for just extrapolating into the past.
It's the same with the flood. You can say layers today only get laid down slowly in places,
but if there was a global flood, that would have changed all of that.
Again, it's this emphasis on historical science and observational science.
And I would encourage people to go to our website at Answers in Genesis
because we do have a number of papers, in fact, very technical papers.
Dr. John Baumgardner is one who's written some very extensive work dealing with this very issue.
On the basis of the Bible, of course, we believe there's one continent to start with,
cause the waters were gathered here there into one place. So we do believe that the continent has split up.
But particularly, the flood had a lot to do with that.
Moderator: And time on that. Mr. Nye, a response.
Bill Nye: It must have been easier for you to explain this a century ago
before the existence of tectonic plates was proven.
If you go into a clock store and there's a bunch of clocks, they're not all gonna say exactly the same thing.
Do you think that they're all wrong?
The reason that we acknowledge the rate at which continents are drifting apart,
one of the reasons, is we see what's called sea floor spreading in the Mid-Atlantic.
The earth's magnetic field has reversed over the millennia
and as it does it leaves a signature in the rocks
as the continental plates drift apart.
So you can measure how fast the continents were spreading.
That's how we do it on the outside.
As I said, I lived in Washington state when Mount St. Helen's exploded.
That's a result of a continental plate going under another continental plate
and cracking. And this water-laden rock led to a steam explosion.
That's how we do it on the outside.
Moderator: Time. And this is a question for you Mr. Nye. But I guess I could put it to both of you.
One word answer, please. Favorite color? (laughter)
Mr. Nye: I will go along with most people and say green. And it's an irony that green plants reflect green light.
Moderator: Did I not say one word answer? (laughter) I said one word answer.
Mr. Nye: Most of the light from the sun is green. Yet they reflect it. It's a mystery.
Mr. Hamm: Well, can I have three words seeing as he had three hundred?
Moderator: You can have three.
Mr. Hamm: OK. Observational science. Blue. (laughter)
Moderator: All right. We're back to you, Mr. Nye.
How do you balance the theory of evolution with the second law of thermodynamics? And I'd like to add a question here.
What is the second law of thermodynamics?
Mr. Nye: Oh, the second law of thermodynamics is fantastic. And I call the words of Eddington who said,
"If you have a theory that disagrees with Isaac Newton, that's a great theory.
If you have a theory that disagrees with relativity, wow, you've changed the world. That's great.
But if your theory disagrees with the second law of thermodynamics, I can offer you no hope. I can't help you."
The second law of thermodynamics basically is where you lose energy to heat.
This is why car engines are about 30% efficient. That's it, thermodynamically. That's why you want the hottest explosion
you can get in the coldest outside environment. You have to have a difference between hot and cold.
And that difference can be assessed scientifically or mathematically with this word entropy, this disorder of molecules.
But the fundamental thing that this questioner has missed is the earth is not a closed system.
So there's energy pouring in here from the sun. If I may, day and night. Ha, Ha.
'Cause the night, it's pouring in on the other side.
And so that energy is what drives living things on earth especially for, in our case, plants.
By the way, if you're here in Kentucky, about a third and maybe a half of the oxygen you breathe is made in the ocean by phytoplankton.
And they get their energy from the sun. So the second law of thermodynamics is a wonderful thing.
It has allowed us to have every thing you see in this room because our power generation depends on the
robust and extremely precise computation of how much energy is in burning fuel,
whether it's nuclear fuel, or fossil fuel, or some extraordinary fuel to be discovered in the future.
The second law of thermodynamics will govern any turbine that makes electricity
that we all depend on; and allowed all these shapes to exist.
Moderator: Any response, Mr. Hamm?
Mr. Hamm: Let me just say two things if I can. If a minute goes that fast along.
One is, you know what, here's a point we need to understand.
You can have all the energy that you want, but energy or matter will never produce life.
God imposed information, language system. And that's how we have life.
Matter by itself could never produce life, no matter what energy you have.
And, you know, even if you've got a dead stick, you can have all the energy in the world in that dead stick,
it's going to decay, and it's not going to produce life.
From a creationist perspective, we certainly agree. I mean, before man sinned, you know,
there was digestion, and so on, but because of the Fall, now things are running down.
God doesn't hold everything together as He did back then.
So now we see, in regard to the second law of thermodynamics, we would say it's sort of,
in a sense, a bit out-of-control now, compared to what it was originally, which is why we have a running-down universe.
Moderator: And that's time. A new question for you, Mr. Ham.
Hypothetically, if evidence existed that caused you to have to admit that the Earth was older than 10,000 years,
and creation did not occur over six days, would you still believe in God and the historical Jesus of Nazareth
and that Jesus was the Son of God?
Ken Ham: Well, I've been emphasizing all night. You cannot ever prove using, you know,
the scientific method in the present, you can't prove the age of the Earth.
So you can never prove it's old. So there is no hypothetical. (Mr. Nye quietly chuckles.)
Because you can't do that. Now, we can certainly use methods in the present and making assumptions,
I mean, creationists use methods that change over time. As I said, there's hundreds of
physical processes that you can use, but they set limits on the age of the universe,
but you can't ultimately prove the age of the Earth, not using the scientific method.
You can't ultimately prove the age of the universe.
Now, you can look at methods, and you can see that there are many methods that contradict billions of years,
many methods that seem to support thousands of years.
As Dr. Faulkner said in the little video clip I showed, there is nothing in observational astronomy
that contradicts a young universe. Now, I've said to you before, and I admit again,
that the reason I believe in a young universe is because of the Bible's account of origins.
I believe that God, who has always been there, the infinite creator God, revealed in His Word what He did for us.
And, when we add up those dates, we get thousands of years.
But there's nothing in observational science that contradicts that.
As far as the age of the Earth, the age of the universe, even when it comes to the fossil record.
That's why I really challenge Christians, if you're gonna believe in millions of years for the fossil record,
you've got a problem with the Bible. And that is, then, that you've got to have death and disease and suffering before sin.
So, there is no hypothetical in regard to that. You can't prove scientifically, the age of the Earth or the universe, bottom line.
Moderator: Mr. Nye.
Mr. Nye: Well, of course this is where we disagree.
You can prove the age of the earth with great robustness by observing the universe around us.
And I get the feeling, Mr. Hamm, that you want us to take your word for it.
This is to say your interpretation of a book written thousands of years ago,
as translated into American English, is more compelling for you than everything that I can observe in the world around me.
This is where you and I, I think, are not going to see eye to eye.
You said you asserted that life cannot come from something that's not alive. Are you sure?
Are you sure enough to say that we should not continue to look for signs of water and life on Mars?
That that's a waste. You're sure enough to claim that.
That is an extraordinary claim that we want to investigate.
Once again, what is it you can predict? What do you provide us that can tell us something about the future; not just about your vision of the past?
Moderator: A new question, Mr. Nye.
Is there room for God in science?
Mr. Nye: Well, we remind us. There are billions of people around the world who are religious and who accept science
and embrace it, and especially all the technology that it brings us.
Is there anyone here who doesn't have a mobile phone that has a camera?
Is there anyone here whose family members have not benefited from modern medicine?
Is there anyone here who doesn't use e-mail? Is there anybody here who doesn't eat?
Because we use information sent from satellites in space to plant seeds on our farms.
That's how we're able to feed 7.1 billion people where we used to be barely able to feed a billion.
So that's what I see. That's what we have used science for the process.
Science for me is two things. It's the body of knowledge--the atomic number of rubidium.
And it's the process--the means by which we make these discoveries.
So for me that's not really that connected with your belief in a spiritual being or a higher power.
If you reconcile those two. Scientists, the head of the National Institutes of Health is a devout Christian.
There are billions of people in the world who are devoutly religious.
They have to be compatible because those same people embrace science.
The exception is you, Mr. Ham. That's the problem for me.
You want us to take your word for what's written in this ancient text to be more compelling than what we see around us.
The evidence for a higher power and spirituality is, for me, separate.
I encourage you to take the next minute and address this problem of the fossils, this problem of the ice layers,
this problem of the ancient trees, this problem of the ark. I mean really address it.
And so then we could move forward. But right now, I see no incompatibility between religions and science.
Moderator: That's time. Mr. Ham, response?
Mr. Ham: Yeah, I actually want to take a minute to address the question.
Let me just say this, my answer would be God is necessary for science.
In fact, you know you talked about cell phones. Yeah, I have a cell phone. I love technology.
We love technology here at Answers in Genesis. And, I have e-mail, probably had millions of them
while I've been speaking up here. And, satellites and what you said about the information we get,
I agree with all that. See, they're the things that can be done in the present.
And that's just like I showed you. Dr. Stuart Burgess who invented that gear set for the satellite, creationists can be great scientists.
But, see, I say God is necessary because you have to assume the laws of logic. You have to assume the laws of nature.
You have to assume the uniformity in nature. And that is the question I had for you.
Where does that come from if the universe is here by natural processes.
And, Christianity and science, the Bible and science, go hand in hand.
We love science. But again, you've got to understand. Inventing things, that's very different
than talking about our origins. Two very different things.
Moderator: Mr. Ham, a new question. Do you believe the entire Bible is to be taken literally?
For example, should people who touch pigs' skin, I think it says here, be stoned?
Can men marry multiple women?
Mr. Ham: Do I believe the entire Bible should be taken literally? Remember in my opening address
I said we have to define our terms. So, when people ask that question, say literally, I have to know
what that person meant by literally. Now, I would say this.
If you say "naturally" and that's what you mean by "literally", I would say, yes, I take the Bible "naturally".
What do I mean by that? Well, if it's history, as Genesis is,
it's written as typical historical narrative, you take it as history.
If it's poetry, as we find in the Psalms, then you take it as poetry.
It doesn't mean it doesn't teach truth, but it's not a cosmological account in the sense that Genesis is.
There's prophecy in the Bible and there's literature in the Bible concerning future events and so on.
So, if you take it as written, naturally, according to typal literature, and you let it speak to you
in that way, that's how I take the Bible. It's God's revelation to man. He used different people.
The Bible says that all scripture's inspired by God. So God moved people by his spirit
to write his words. And, also, there's a lot of misunderstanding in regard to scripture
and in regard to the Israelites. I mean we have laws in our civil government here in America
that the government sets. Well there were certain laws for Israel. And, you know, some people
take all that out of context. And then they try to impose it on us today as Christians
and say, you should be obeying those laws. It's a misunderstanding of the Old Testament.
It's a misunderstanding of the New Testament.
And, you know, again, it's important to take the Bible as a whole. Interpreting scripture as scripture.
If it really is the word of God, there's not going to be any contradiction. Which there's not.
And by the way, when men were married to multiple women, there were lots of problems.
(Laughter) ...and the Bible condemns that for what it is, and the Bible is very clear.
You know the Bible is a real book. There were people who did things that were not in accord with scripture,
and it records this for us. It helps you understand it's a real book. But marriage was one man for
one woman. Jesus reiterated that in Matthew 19, as I had in my talk.
And so those that did marry multiple women were wrong.
Moderator: Time there. Mr. Nye, a response?
Mr. Nye: So it sounds to me, just listening to you over the last two minutes,
that there's certain parts of this document of the Bible that you embrace literally
and other parts you consider poetry. So it sounds to me, in those last two minutes,
like you're going to take what you like, interpret literally, and other passages you're gonna interpret as poetic or descriptions of human events.
All that aside, I'll just say scientifically, or as a reasonable man, it doesn't seem possible that
all these things that contradict your literal interpretation of those first few passages,
all those things that contradict that, I find unsettling, when you want me to embrace the rest of it
as literal. Now, I, as I say, am not a theologian. But we started this debate,
Is Ken Ham's creation model viable? Does it hold water? Can it fly? Does it describe anything?
And I'm still looking for an answer.
Moderator: And time on that. Mr. Nye, here's a new question.
I believe this was miswritten here because they've repeated a word. But I think I know what they were
trying to ask. Have you ever believed that evolution was accomplished through way of a higher power?
I think that's what they're trying to ask here. This is the intelligent design question, I think.
If so, why or why not? Why could not the evolutionary process be accomplished in this way?
Mr. Nye: I think you may have changed the question just a little but, no, it's all good.
Moderator: The word for word question is, have you ever believed that evolution partook through way of evolution?
(talking at the same time) Mr. Nye: Let me introduce these ideas for Mr. Ham to comment.
The idea that there's a higher power that has driven the course of the events in the universe
and our own existence, is one that you can not prove or disprove. And this gets into this expression, "agnostic."
You can't know. I'll grant you that.
When it comes to intelligent design, which is, if I understand your interpretation of the question,
intelligent design has a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of nature.
This is to say, the old expression is if you were to find a watch in the field,
and you pick it up, you would realize that it was created by somebody who was thinking ahead,
somebody with an organization chart, somebody at the top. And you'd order screws from screw manufacturers
and springs from spring manufacturers and glass crystals from crystal manufacturers.
But that's not how nature works.
This is the fundamental insight in the explanation for living things that is provided by evolution.
Evolution is a process that adds complexity through natural selection, this is to say,
nature has its mediocre designs eaten by its good designs.
And so, the perception that there is a designer that created all this, is not necessarily true,
because we have an explanation that is far more compelling and provides predictions, and things are repeatable.
I'm sure, Mr. Ham here, at the facility, you have an organization chart.
I imagine you're at the top, and it's a top-down structure.
Nature is not that way. Nature is bottom-up.
This is the discovery. Things merge up. Whatever makes it, keeps going. Whatever doesn't make it, falls away.
And this is compelling and wonderful and fills me with joy and is inconsistent with a top-down view.
Moderator: And that's time. Mr. Ham.
Ken Ham: What Bill Nye needs to do for me is to show me an example of something, some new function
that arose that was not previously possible from the genetic information that was there.
And I would claim, and challenge you, that there is no such example that you can give.
That's why I brought up the example in my presentation of Lensky's experiments in regard to e coli.
And there were some that seemed to develop the ability to exist on citrate,
but as Dr. Fabich said, from looking at his research,
he's found that that information was already there.
It's just a gene that switched on and off. And so, there is no example, because information that's there,
and the genetic information of different animals, plants and so on, there's no new function that can be added.
Certainly, great variation within a kind, and that's what we look at.
But you'd have to show an example of brand-new function that never previously was possible.
There is no such example that you can give anywhere in the world.
Moderator: Uh, fresh question here. Mr. Ham, name one institution, business, or organization,
other than a church, amusement park, or the Creation Museum
that is using any aspect of creationism to produce its product.
Ken Ham: Any scientist out there, Christian or non-Christian, that is involved in
inventing things, involved in scientific method, is using creation.
They are, because they are borrowing from a Christian worldview.
They are using the laws of logic. I keep emphasizing that.
I want Bill to tell me, in a view of the universe, as a result of natural processes,
explain where the laws of logic came from. Why should we trust the laws of nature?
I mean, are they going to be the same tomorrow as they were yesterday?
In fact, some of the greatest scientists that ever lived: Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday were creationists.
And as one of them said, you know, he's thinking God's thoughts after Him.
And that's really, modern science came out of that thinking, that we can do experiments today,
and we can do the same tomorrow. And we can trust the laws of logic. We can trust the laws of nature.
And if we don't teach our children correctly about this, they're NOT going to be innovative.
And they're not going to be able to come up with inventions to advance in our culture.
And so, I think the person was trying to get out that, see, you know,
there are lots of secularists out there doing work. And they don't believe in creation.
And they come up with great inventions, yeah. But my point is, they are borrowing from the Christian worldview to do so.
And as you saw from the video quotes I gave, people like Andrew Fabich
and also Dr. Faulkner have published in the secular journals.
There's lots of creationists out there who publish.
People mightn't know that they're creationists because the topic doesn't specifically pertain to creation vs. evolution.
But there's lots of them out there. In fact, go to our website.
There's a whole list there of scientists who are creationists,
who are out there doing great work in this world and helping to advance technology.
Moderator: Mr. Nye
Bill Nye: There's a reason that I don't accept your Ken Ham model of creation.
Is that it has no predictive quality as you had touched on,
and something that I've always found troubling.
It sounds as though and next time around you can correct me.
It sounds as though you believe your world view, which is a literal interpretation of most parts of the Bible, is correct.
Well, what became of all those people who never heard of it?
Never heard of you? What became of all those people in Asia?
What became of all those first nations people in North America?
Were they condemned and doomed? I mean, I don't know how much time you've spent talking to strangers,
but they're not sanguine about that. To have you tell them that they are inherently lost or misguided.
It's very troubling. And you say there are no examples in nature.
There are countless examples of how the process of science makes predictions.
Moderator: Mr. Nye, since evolution teaches that man is evolving and growing smarter over time,
how can you explain the numerous evidences of man's high intelligence in the past?
Bill Nye: Hang on, there's no evidence that man or humans are getting smarter.
No, especially if you ever met my old boss. Heh, heh, heh. (laughter)
No, it's that what happens in evolution. And there's, it's a British word that was used in the middle 1800's.
It's survival of the fittest. And this usage, it doesn't mean the most push-ups or the highest scores on standardized tests.
It means that those that "fit in" the best. Our intellect, such as it is, has enabled us to dominate the world.
I mean, the evidence of humans is everywhere.
James Cameron just made another trip to the bottom of the ocean, in the deepest part of the ocean,
the first time since 1960. And when they made the first trip, they found a beer can.
Humans are everywhere. And so, it is our capacity to reason that has taken us to where we are now.
If a germ shows up, as it did, for example, in World War I, where more people were killed by the flu
than were killed by the combatants in World War I.
That is a troubling and remarkable fact. If the right germ shows up, we'll be taken out.
We'll be eliminated. Being smarter is not a necessary consequence of evolution.
So far, it seems to be the way things are going because of the remarkable advantage it gives to us.
We can control our environment and even change it, as we are doing today, apparently by accident.
So, everybody, just take a little while and grasp this fundamental idea.
It's how you "fit in" with nature around you. So, as the world changed, as it did, for example, the ancient dinosaurs,
they were "taken out" by a worldwide fireball, apparently caused by an impacter.
That's the best theory we have. And we are the result of people, of organisms that lived through that catastrophe.
It's not necessarily smarter. It's how you "fit in" with your environment.
Moderator: Mr. Ham, a response?
Ken Ham: I remember at university, one of my professors was very excited to give us some evidence for evolution.
He said, "Look at this. Here's an example. These fish have evolved the ability not to see."
And, he was going to give an example of blind cave fish.
And he said, "See, in this cave, they're evolving, because now the ones that are living there, their ancestors had eyes.
Now these ones are blind." And I remember, I was talking to my professor, "But wait a minute!
Now they can't do something that they could do before." Yeah, they might have an advantage in this sense.
In a situation that's dark like that, those with eyes might have got diseases and died out.
Those that had mutations for no eyes are the ones that survived.
It's not survival of the fittest. It's survival of those who survive.
And it's survival of those that have the information in their circumstance to survive,
but you're not getting new information. You're not getting new function.
There's no example of that at all. So, we need to correctly understand these things.
Moderator: Alright. Um, we're down to our final question here, which I'll give to both of you.
And in the interest of fairness here, because it is a question to the both of you,
let's give each man two minutes on this if we can, please.
And also, in the interest of you having started first, Mr. Ham, I will have you start first here.
You'll have the first word. Mr. Nye will have the last word.
The question is: what is the one thing, more than anything else, upon which you base your belief?
Mr. Ham: What is the one thing upon anything else which I base my belief?
Well, again, to summarize the things that I've been saying, there is a book called the Bible.
It's a very unique book. It's very different to any other book out there.
In fact, I don't know of any other religion that has a book that starts off by
telling you that there's an infinite God, and talks about the origin of the universe,
and the origin of matter, and the origin of light, and the origin of darkness,
and the origin of day and night, and the origin of the earth, and the origin of dry land,
and the origin of plants, and the origin of the sun, moon and stars, the origin of sea creatures,
the origin of flying creatures, the origin of land creatures, the origin of man,
the origin of woman, the origin of death, the origin of sin, the origin of marriage,
the origin of different languages, the origin of clothing, the origin of nations,
I mean it's a very, very specific book.
And it gives us an account of a global flood and the history and the tower of Babel,
and if that history is true, then what about the rest of the book?
Well, that history also says man is a sinner and it says that man is separated from God.
And it gives us a message, that we call the gospel, the message of salvation, that God's
son stepped in history to die on the cross, to be raised from the dead,
and offers a free gift of salvation.
Because the history is true, that's why the message based on history is true.
I actually went through some predictions and listed others, and there's a lot more that you can look at,
and you can go and test it for yourself. If this book really is true,
it is so specific, it should explain the world, it should make sense of what we see.
The flood. Yeah, we have fossils all over the world.
The tower of Babel, yeah, different people groups, different languages,
they have flood legends very similar to the Bible. Creation legends similar to the Bible.
There's so much you can look at, and prophesy and so on.
Most of all, as I said to you, the Bible says, if you come to God, believing that he is,
he'll reveal himself to you. You will know. If you search after truth,
you really want God to show you, as you would search after silver and gold,
he will show you. He will reveal himself to you.
Moderator: Mr. Nye?
Mr. Nye: Would you repeat the question?
Moderator: The question is: What is the one thing, more than anything else, upon which you base your belief?
Mr. Nye: As my old professor Carl Sagan said so often,
when you're in love, you want to tell the world. And I base my beliefs on the information
and the process that we call science.
It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I'd never seen before.
It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers.
It is a wonderful and astonishing thing to me, that we are, you and I,
are somehow, at least one of the ways that the universe knows itself.
You and I are a product of the universe. It's astonishing. I admit, I see your faces.
That we have come to be because of the universe's existence.
And we are driven to pursue that. To find out where we came from.
And the second question we all want to know:
Are we alone? Are we alone in the universe? And these questions are deep within us,
and they drive us. So the process of science, the way we know nature is the most compelling thing to me.
And I just want to close by reminding everybody what's at stake here.
If we abandon all that we've learned, our ancestors, what they've learned about nature and our place in it,
if we abandon the process by which we know it,
if we eschew, if we let go of everything that people have learned before us,
if we stop driving forward, stop looking for the next answer to the next question,
we, in the United States, will be outcompeted by other countries, other economies.
Now, that would be okay, I guess, but I was born here. I'm a patriot.
So we have to embrace science education. To the voters and taxpayers that are watching,
please keep that in mind. We have to keep science education in science and science classes. Thank you.
Moderator: One tiny bit of important housekeeping for everyone here, the county is now under a level two snow emergency.
Drive home carefully. You'll have a lot to talk about, but drive carefully.
This debate will be archived at debatelive.org. That's debatelive.org, one word.
It will be found at that site for several days. You can encourage friends and family to watch and take it over.
Thanks so much to Mr. Nye and to Mr. Ham (Loud applause) for an excellent discussion.
I'm Tom Foreman, thank you, good night from Petersburg, Kentucky and the Creation Museum.
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