Debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on Creationism and Evolution

let&#39;s welcome our debaters mr bill nye and mr ken ham 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&#39;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 the 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&#39;s great big book of tiny germs bill nye is the host of three television series his program the 100 greatest discoveries heirs on the science channel the eyes of nye airs on pbs stations across the country he frequently appears on interview programs to discuss a variety of science topics mr nye serves as executive director of the planetary society the world&#39;s largest space interest group he is a graduate of cornell with a bachelor&#39;s 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&#39;re holding this debate the museum has had two million visitors in six years and has attracted much of the world&#39;s media the answers in genesis website is 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 hamm is a native of australia he earned a bachelor&#39;s degree in applied science with an emphasis in environmental biology from the queensland institute of technology as well as a diploma of education at the university of queensland in brisbane 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&#39;m an aussie and live over here in america and they tell me i have an accent and so it doesn&#39;t matter what i say some people tell me we just like you hear saying it so i hope you enjoy me saying it anyway well the debate topic is this is creation a viable model of origins in today&#39;s modern scientific era you know when this was first announced on the internet there are 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&#39;s a gross misrepresentation in our culture uh we&#39;re seeing people in in being indoctrinated to believe that creationists can&#39;t be scientists i believe it&#39;s all a part of secularists hijacking the word science i want you to meet a modern day scientist who is a biblical creationist my name is stuart burgess i&#39;m a professor of engineering design at bristow university in the uk my name is stuart burgess i&#39;m a professor of engineering design at bristol university in the uk 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&#39;ve also designed major parts of spacecraft launched by issa and so here&#39;s a biblical creationist who&#39;s a scientist who&#39;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 cientia which means to know and if you look up a dictionary it&#39;ll say science means state of knowing knowledge but there&#39;s different types of knowledge and i believe this is where the confusion lies there&#39;s experimental observational science as we call it that&#39;s using the scientific method observation measurement experiment testing that&#39;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 doesn&#39;t matter whether you&#39;re a creationist or an evolutionist you can be a great scientist for instance here&#39;s an atheist who is a great scientist craig vender one of the first researchers to sequence the human genome or dr raymond damadian he is a man who invented the mri scanner and revolutionized medicine he&#39;s a biblical creationist but i want us to also understand molecules to man evolution believe has nothing to do with developing technology you see when we&#39;re talking about origins we&#39;re talking about the past we&#39;re talking about our origins we weren&#39;t there you can&#39;t observe that whether it&#39;s molecules to main evolution or whether it&#39;s a creation account when you&#39;re talking about the past we like to call that origins or 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 their origins or historical science is based upon man&#39;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 thorn 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&#39;s very hard to accept for many of us that when you die it&#39;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&#39;s modern scientific era i say the creation evolution debate is a conflict between two philosophical world views 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&#39;s modern scientific era and that is time i have the unenviable job of being the time keeper here so i&#39;m like the referee in football that you don&#39;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&#39;s mr nye&#39;s turn for a five-minute opening statement mr nye thank you it&#39;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 i&#39;m telling you once you try oh there&#39;s yes two that&#39;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&#39;s a story associated with this which i find remarkable my grandfather was in the rotary and he uh 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&#39;t know how to tie it so i wasn&#39;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 we wanted to have the tie on wasn&#39;t sure was getting into so he is said to have laying on the bed and the guy tied a perfect bow tie knot and quite reasonably my grandfather said thank you uh why&#39;d i have to lie down on the bed you guys said i&#39;m an undertaker that&#39;s really the only way i know how to do it now that that 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&#39;s certainly uh something to remember so here tonight we&#39;re going to have two stories and uh we can compare mr ham&#39;s story to the story from what i will call the outside from mainstream science the question tonight is does ken ham&#39;s creation model hold up is it viable so let me ask you all what would you be doing if you weren&#39;t here tonight that&#39;s right you&#39;d be home watching csi csi petersburg is that common i think it&#39;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&#39;t normally have these anywhere in the world except here natural laws that applied in the past apply now that&#39;s why they&#39;re natural laws that&#39;s why we embrace them that&#39;s how we made all these discoveries that enabled all this remarkable technology so csi is a fictional show but it&#39;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 zoo keepers for 14 000 individual animals every land plant in the world under water for a full year i ask us all is that really reasonable you&#39;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 is 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 want to 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 enjoys other 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&#39;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 astute science as chew the process and try to divide uh science into observational science and historic science we are not going to move forward we will not embrace natural laws we will not make discoveries we will not uh invent and innovate and stay ahead so if you ask me if ken ham&#39;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 a very nice start by both of our debaters here and now each one will offer a 30-minute illustrated presentation to fully offer their case for us to consider mr hamm you&#39;re up well the debate topic was this creation a viable model of origins in today&#39;s modern scientific era and i made this statement at the end of my opening statement creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today&#39;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 observational science briefly and that both creationists and evolutionists can be great scientists for instance i mentioned craig venter a biologist he&#39;s an atheist and he&#39;s a great scientist uh he was one of the first researchers to sequence a 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 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&#39;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 as simply wrong well he&#39;s most adamant about that and actually he revolutionized medicine he&#39;s a biblical creationist and i encourage children to follow people like that and make them uh 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 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&#39;m a stellar astronomer that means my primary interest is stars but i&#39;m particularly interested in the study of eclipsing binary stars and i&#39;ve published many articles in the astronomy literature places such as 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 design engineering design at bristol university in england now he invented uh 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 have been useless yet dr burgess is a biblical creationist who believes just as i believe now think about this for a moment are scientists like dr burgess who believe in creation just as i do a small minority in the scientific world but let&#39;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 they are often afraid to speak out because of the criticisms they would get from the media and atheist lobby i agree that&#39;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 creations christian non-christian scientists should say non-christian scientists are really borrowing from the christian worldview anyway to carry out their experimental or observational science think about it when they&#39;re doing observational science using a 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 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&#39;s a there&#39;s a confusion here there&#39;s a misunderstanding here people by and large have not been taught to look at you know what you believe about the past as different to what you&#39;re observing in the present you don&#39;t deserve them you don&#39;t observe the past directly uh even you know when you think about uh the creation account i mean we can&#39;t observe god creating we can&#39;t observe the creation of adam and eve admit that we&#39;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 well they sort of acknowledge the difference between historical and observational science here is an earth science textbook that&#39;s used in public schools and we read this in contrast to physical geology the aim of historical geology is to understand earth&#39;s long history and then they make the statement historical geology so we&#39;re talking about 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&#39;re assuming that that&#39;s always uh happened in the past and we&#39;re going to try and figure out how this happens see there is a difference between what you observe and what happened in the past uh let me illustrate it this way if bill nye and i went to the grand canyon we could agree that that&#39;s a coconino sandstone in the hermit shale and there&#39;s the boundary they&#39;re sitting one on top of the other we could agree on that but do you know what we would disagree on i mean we could even analyze 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&#39;s a supposed 10 million year gap there but i don&#39;t see a gap but that might be different to what bill and i would see but but see there&#39;s a difference between what you actually observe directly and then your interpretation in regards to 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 a hubble telescope you know what they disagreed on well they disagreed on how to interpret the data that telescope obtained in regard to the age of the universe and you know we could go and talk about lots of other uh similar sorts of things for instance i&#39;ve heard bill nye talk about how a smoke detector works using the radioactive element amer 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&#39;re then going to use radioactive elements and talk about the age of the earth you&#39;ve got a problem because you weren&#39;t there we&#39;ve got to understand parent elements daughter elements and and so on we could agree with your creationist or evolutionist on the technology to put the rover on mars but we&#39;re going to disagree on how to interpret uh the origin of mars i mean there are some people that believe there was even a global flight on mars and there&#39;s no liquid water on mars but you know we&#39;re going to disagree maybe on our interpretation of origins and you can&#39;t prove either way because not from an observational science perspective because we&#39;ve only got the present creationists and evolutionists both work on medicines and vaccines you see it doesn&#39;t matter whether you&#39;re creationist or an evolutionist all scientists have the same experimental or 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 a belief in molecules command evolution now here&#39;s another important fact creationists and evolutionists all have the same evidence bill nye and i have the same grand canyon we don&#39;t disagree on that we will have the same fish fossil this is one from the creation museum the same dinosaur skeletons 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&#39;s not the evidences that are different it&#39;s a battle over the same evidence in regard to how we interpret the past and you know why that is because it&#39;s really a battle over world views and starting points it&#39;s a battle over philosophical world views and starting points but the same evidence now i admit my starting point is that god is the ultimate authority but if someone doesn&#39;t accept that then man has to be the ultimate authority and that&#39;s really the difference when it comes down to it you see i&#39;ve been emphasizing the difference between historical origin science knowledge about the past when you weren&#39;t there and we need to understand that&#39;s that we weren&#39;t there or experimental or observational science using your five senses in the present the scientific method what you can directly observe test repeat there&#39;s a big difference between those two and that&#39;s not what&#39;s been taught in our public schools and that&#39;s why kids aren&#39;t being taught to think critically and correctly about the origins issue but you know it&#39;s also important to understand when talking about creation 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&#39;s historical science based on one&#39;s starting point now when you think about the debate topic and what i affirmed concerning creation if our origins or historical science based on the bible uh the bible&#39;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&#39;d expect to find evidence concerning an intelligence confirming an intelligence produced life we&#39;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 its own not that one kind changes into another uh you&#39;d expect behind evidence confirming a global flood of noah&#39;s day evidence confirming one race of humans because we all go back to adam and eve biologically that would mean there&#39;s one race evidence confirming the terror babel that god gave different languages evidence confirming a young universe now i can&#39;t go through all of those but a couple of them we&#39;ll look at briefly after their kind evidence confirming that in the creation museum we have a display featuring replicas actually of darwin&#39;s finches they&#39;re called darwin&#39;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 that 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 maybe those species came from some common ancestor actually when it comes to finches we actually would agree as creationists that different finch species came from a common ancestor but a finch is what they would have to come from but you see darwin wasn&#39;t just thinking about species darwin had a much bigger picture in mind when you look at the origin of species and and read that book you&#39;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 classification system kingdom phylum class order family genus species we would say as creationists and we have many creation scientists who&#39;ve researched this and for lots of reasons i would say the kind in genesis 1 really is more at the family level of classification for instance there&#39;s one dog kind there&#39;s one cat kind even though you have different generally different species that would mean by the way you didn&#39;t need anywhere near the number of animals on the ark as people think you wouldn&#39;t need all the species of dogs just two not all species of cats just two and you see based on the biblical account there in genesis 1 creationists have drawn up what they believe is a creation orchard in other words they&#39;re saying look there&#39;s great variation in the genetics of dogs and finches and so on and so over time particularly after noah&#39;s flood you&#39;d expect if there were two dogs for instance you could end up with different species of dogs has because there&#39;s an incredible amount of variability in the genes of of any creature and so you&#39;d expect these different species up here but there&#39;s limits dogs will always be dogs finches will always be finches now as a 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&#39;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 propose 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&#39;s exactly what we&#39;re saying here now in the creation museum we actually show the finches here and you see the finches with their different beaks beside dog skulls different species of dogs by the way there&#39;s more variation in the dog skulls here than there are in these pictures yet the dogs well that&#39;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&#39;s another problem that we&#39;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 in public school textbooks and we often see it in documentaries and so on it&#39;s used for observable changes that we would agree with and then use for unobservable changes such as molecules to man let me explain to you what&#39;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&#39;re taught see students are taught today look there&#39;s all these different animals plants but they&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s what you don&#39;t observe you don&#39;t observe that that&#39;s belief there that&#39;s that&#39;s their 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 and you don&#39;t see one kind changing into another actually we&#39;re told that if you teach creation in the public schools as teaching religion if you teach evolution that&#39;s science and i&#39;m going to say wait a minute actually the creation model here based upon the bible observational science confirms this this is what you observe you don&#39;t observe this tree actually it&#39;s the public school textbooks that are teaching i believe imposing it on students and they need to be teaching them observational science to understand the reality of what&#39;s happening now what we found is that public school textbooks present the evolutionary tree a 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 michigan state university he&#39;s a great scientist he&#39;s known for culturing e coli in the lab and he found there were some e coli that actually seemed to develop the ability to grow on substrate on citrate in the substrate but richard lenski is here mentioned in this book and it&#39;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 this is against the creationists for instance jerry coyne from university of chicago says lenski&#39;s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists he says the thing i like most is that 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 uh is it really uh 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 is 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&#39;ve published 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 the past year in the journal&#39;s nature science translational medicine public library of science public library of science genetics i cited regularly in those journals and while i was taught nothing but evolution i don&#39;t accept that position and i do my research from a creation perspective when i look at the evidence that people cite of e coli supposedly evolving over 30 years over 30 000 generations in the lab and people say that it is now able to grow in citrate i don&#39;t deny that it grows on citrate but it&#39;s not any kind of new information it&#39;s the information&#39;s already there it&#39;s just a switch that gets turned on and off and it that&#39;s what they reported in there there&#39;s nothing new see students need to be told what&#39;s really going on here certainly there&#39;s change but it&#39;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&#39;s ideas of human evolution as presented in the descent of man i mean darwin did teach in the descent of man there are 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 exist upon earth five races or varieties of men 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&#39;s what was taught but it was based on darwin&#39;s ideas that are wrong you you have a wrong foundation you&#39;re going to have a wrong world view now had they started from the bible and from the creation account in the bible what does it teach well we&#39;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&#39;d expect we&#39;d say you know what that means there&#39;s biologically only one race of humans well i mentioned dr venter before and uh he was a researcher with the human genome project and you 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 signs confirming the creation account not confirming at all darwin&#39;s ideas now there&#39;s much more that could be said on each of these topics obviously you can&#39;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 and genesis for a lot more information so the debate topic is creation a viable model of origins in today&#39;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&#39;re 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&#39;t like me doing this because they don&#39;t want to admit that there&#39;s a brief aspect to what they&#39;re saying and there is and they can&#39;t get away from it let me illustrate this with a statement from bill nye that you can show the earth is not flat you can show the earth is not ten thousand years old by the way i agree you can show the earth is not flat there&#39;s a video from the galileo spacecraft showing the earth and speed it up of course but spinning you can see it&#39;s a sphere you can observe that you can&#39;t observe the age of the earth you don&#39;t see that you see again i emphasize there&#39;s a big difference between historical science talking about the past and observational science talking about the present and i believe what&#39;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&#39;s not a mystery when you understand the difference apparently 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&#39;re able to hold these two world views and this is a mystery actually i suggest you it&#39;s not a mystery you see when i&#39;m talking about antibiotics aspirin smoke detectors jet planes that&#39;s ken hem the observational science bloke i&#39;m an australian we call guys blokes okay uh but when you&#39;re talking about creation in thousands of years or the age of the earth that&#39;s can hem the historical science break i&#39;m willing to admit that now when bill nye is 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&#39;s bill nye the observational science guy but when he&#39;s talking about evolution of millions of years i&#39;m i&#39;m challenging him that that&#39;s bill nye the historical science guy and i challenge the evolutionists to admit the belief aspects of their particular uh worldview now at the creation museum we&#39;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&#39;re teaching people to think critically and and to think uh in the right terms about science i believe it&#39;s the creationists that should be educating uh the kids out there because we&#39;re teaching them the right way to think you know i we admit our origins of historical science is based upon the bible but i&#39;m just challenging evolutionists to admit the belief aspects of evolution and be up front about the difference here as i said i&#39;m i&#39;m only too willing to admit my historical science based on the bible and let me further go on and define the term creation as we use it by creation we mean here at answers in genesis in the in 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 a perfect creation a god made adam and eve land animal kinds sea creatures and so on and then sin and death entered the world so 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&#39;s flood if there was a global flood you&#39;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 laying 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&#39;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&#39;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 the present to the past but it&#39;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 which made his beginning made them male and female and said for this course shall a man of his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they&#39;ll be one flesh he quoted from genesis as literal history genesis 1 and 2 god invented marriage by the way that&#39;s where marriage comes from and 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 a cross genesis it&#39;s a very important book it&#39;s foundational to all christian doctrine and you see when we look at that what i call the seven seas of history that we walk people through here at the museum think about how it all connects together a perfect creation it&#39;ll be perfect again in the future sin and death ended the world that&#39;s why god&#39;s son died on the cross and to conquer death and offer a free gift to salvation the flood of noah&#39;s day a reminder that the flood was a judgment because of man&#39;s wickedness but at the same time a message of god&#39;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&#39;ll be saved and we make no apology about the fact that what we&#39;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&#39;ll be saved now as soon as i say that see people say see if you allow creation in schools for instance if you allow students to even hear about it ah this is religion you know let me illustrate this talking about uh a recent battle in texas over textbooks in the public school a newspaper report said this textbook and classroom curriculum battles have long ranged in texas pitting creationists those who see god&#39;s hand in the creation of the universe against academics stop right there notice creationists academics creationists can&#39;t be academics creationists can&#39;t be scientists see it&#39;s the way things are worded out there it&#39;s an indoctrination that&#39;s going on who worry about religious and political ideology trumping scientific fact wait a minute what do i mean by science you talking about what you observe or you&#39;re talking about your beliefs about the past now kathy miller is the president of the texan texas freedom network and she&#39;s uh vocally uh spoken out she&#39;s spoken about this textbook battle there uh in and uh in texas and the mission statement of the organization she&#39;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 and then she makes this statement science education what does she mean by science should be based on mainstream science education not on personal ideological 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 fact and they&#39;re imposing the religion of naturalism on generations of students they&#39;re imposing their ideology on the students that everything is explained by natural processes that is a religion what does she mean by religious liberty they tolerate their religion see the battle is really about authority it&#39;s more than just science or evolution or creation it&#39;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&#39;s subjective marriage well whatever you want it to be get rid of old people i mean why not i mean they&#39;re just animals they&#39;re costing us a lot of money abortion get rid of spare cats get rid of spare kids we&#39;re all animals but if you start from god&#39;s word there are moral absolutes god decides right and wrong marriage one man and one woman sanctity of life we care for all people they made an 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&#39;t be trusted and so again i say creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today&#39;s modern scientific era you know what i&#39;m a science teacher i want to see kids taught science i love science i want to see more dr damadians in the world you know if we teach them the whole universe as a result of natural processes and not designed by a creator god they might be looking in the wrong places or have the wrong idea when they&#39;re looking at the creation in regard to how you develop technology because if they look on it as just random processes that could totally influence the way they think if they understand it was a perfect world made by sin that could have a great effect on and how they then look for overcoming diseases and problems in the world i want children to be taught the right foundation that there&#39;s a god who created them who loves them who died on the cross for them and that they&#39;re special they&#39;re made in the image of god there you go thank you mr ham we can applaud mr ham&#39;s presentation [Applause] and you know it it did occur to me when you had uh my old friend larry king up there you could have just asked him he&#39;s been around a long time and he&#39;s a smart guy he could probably answer for all of us uh now uh let&#39;s all be attentive to mr nye as he gives us his 30-minute presentation thank you very much and uh mr ham i i learned something thank you but let&#39;s uh take it back around to uh the question at hand does ken ham&#39;s creation model hold up is it viable so for me of course uh well take a look we&#39;re here uh in kentucky on layer upon layer upon layer of limestone i stopped at the side of the road today and picked up uh this piece of limestone that has a fossil right there now in these many many layers uh in this vicinity of kentucky there are coral animals uh fossil zoaxanthelli and when you look at it closely you can see that they lived their entire lives they they lived typically 20 years sometimes more than that and the water conditions are correct and so we are standing on millions of of layers of ancient life how could those animals have lived their entire life and formed these layers in just 4 000 years there&#39;s not there isn&#39;t enough time since uh mr ham&#39;s flood for this limestone that we&#39;re standing on to have come into existence uh 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&#39;s not that extraordinary many of you have probably done it yourselves at 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 by long tradition it&#39;s called snow ice and snow ice forms over the winter as snowflakes fall and are crushed down by subsequent layers they&#39;re crushed together and trapping the little bubbles and the little bubbles must needs be ancient atmosphere there&#39;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&#39;s just run some numbers this is some scenes from lovely antarctic let&#39;s say we have 680 000 layers of snow ice and 4 000 years since the great flood that would mean we&#39;d need 170 summer winter summer cycles every year for the last 4 000 years i mean wouldn&#39;t someone have noticed that well wouldn&#39;t someone have noticed that there&#39;s been winter summer winter summer 170 times one year if we go to uh california we find enormous stands of bristle cone pines some of them are over six thousand years old six thousand eight hundred years old there&#39;s a famous tree in sweden old tico is nine thousand five hundred and fifty 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&#39;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 it seeds they just they just won&#39;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&#39;t there 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&#39;s sand this is what geologists on the outside do study what 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&#39;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 through the grand canyon wouldn&#39;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 4 000 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&#39;re remarkable because we are looking at the past you find down low you&#39;ll find what you might consider as rudimentary sea animals up above you&#39;ll find the famous trilobites 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 the higher one if it all happened in such an extraordinary short amount of time if this water drained away just like that wouldn&#39;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&#39;ve not found a single one now here&#39;s an interesting thing these are fossil skulls that people have found all around the world it&#39;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 uh 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 well 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 hamm&#39;s world view is that this giant boat very large wooden ship went aground safely on a mountain in the middle of 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 four thousand 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 uh some fossils some bones in the last four thousand years somebody would have been hopping along there and died along the way and we&#39;d find him and furthermore there is 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 four thousand years no navigator no diver no u.s navy submarine no one&#39;s ever detected any evidence of this let alone any fossils of kangaroos so your expectation is not met it doesn&#39;t seem to hold up so let&#39;s see if there are 4 thousand years since ken ham&#39;s flood and let&#39;s say as he said many times there are 7 000 kinds today uh the very very lowest estimate is that there are about 8.7 million species but a much more reasonable estimate is it&#39;s 50 million or even 100 million when you start counting the viruses and the bacteria and all the beetles that must be extent in the tropical rain forest that we haven&#39;t found so we&#39;ll take a number which uh i think is pretty reasonable 16 million species today okay if these came from seven thousand kinds that&#39;s let&#39;s say we have uh seven thousand subtracted from fifteen million that&#39;s fifteen nine ninety three we have four thousand years we have 365 and a quarter days a year we would expect to find 11 new species every day so you&#39;d go out into your yard you wouldn&#39;t just find a different bird a new bird you&#39;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&#39;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 inquirer i imagine would carry a column right next to the weather report today&#39;s new species and it would list these 11 every day but we see no evidence of that there&#39;s no evidence of these species there just simply isn&#39;t enough time now as you may know i uh 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&#39;s fine there&#39;s a tube in the 747 i kind of think of as my two but that aside i traveled 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 uh regular uh 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&#39;s not there now but the evidence for it of course is 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 but 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 uh 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&#39;d expect them to sink to the bottom but here are these enormous rocks right on the surface and there&#39;s no shortage of them if you go driving in washington state or oregon they&#39;re uh they&#39;re readily available so how could those be there if the earth is just 4 000 years old how how could they be there if this one flood caused that another uh remarkable thing i&#39;d like everybody to consider along inherent in this world view is that somehow noah and his family were able to build a wooden ship that would house 14 000 individuals there are 7 000 kinds and then and every there&#39;s a boy and a girl for each one of those so it&#39;s about 14 000 eight 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 uh 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 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 ship building and they couldn&#39;t build a boat as big as the ark has claimed to have been is that reasonable is that possible that the best shipbuilders in the world couldn&#39;t do what uh eight unskilled people uh men and their wives uh were able to do if you visit the uh national zoo in washington dc it&#39;s 163 acres and they have 400 species by the way this picture that you&#39;re seeing was taken by spacecraft in space orbiting the earth if you told my grandfather let alone my father that we were 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 these 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 fourteen thousand animals and themselves and feed them aboard a ship that was bigger than anyone&#39;s ever been able to build now here&#39;s the thing what we want in science science as practiced out 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 dc we can predict that if we provide this much room for an elephant it will live healthily for a certain amount of time so i i&#39;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 uh 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&#39;re looking at old records there&#39;s some pieces seem to be missing a gap so scientists got to thinking about this they&#39;re lung fish that jump from pond to pond in florida and end up in people&#39;s swimming pools and they&#39;re amphibians frogs and toads croaking and carrying on and so people wondered if there wasn&#39;t a a fossil or wonder 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 had dried out and they found all kinds of happy swamp fossils there ferns so on and organisms animals fish that were recognized and people realized that if this with the age of the rocks there uh as as computed by traditional uh scientists with the age of the rockstar 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 there&#39;s no this it wasn&#39;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 world view the kenham creation model does not have this capability it cannot make predictions and uh show results here&#39;s an extraordinary one that i find i find remarkable there are certain fish the top minnows that have the remarkable ability to have uh sex with other fish uh traditional fish sex and they can have sex with themselves now one of the old questions in life science everybody one of the old sort of chin strokers is why does any organism whether you&#39;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 than there are humans on earth and bacteria they don&#39;t bother with that man they just like split themselves in half they get new bacteria like let&#39;s get her done let&#39;s go but why does any think of all the trouble a rose bush goes to to make a flower and the thorns and and the bees would swim 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&#39;s what&#39;s going to get you germs and parasites my first cousin&#39;s son died tragically from essentially the flu this is not some story i heard about 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 top minnows and they found that the ones who reproduced sexually had fewer parasites than the ones that reproduced on their own this black spot disease wait wait there&#39;s more uh in these populations with flooding and so on with river ponds get isolated then they dry up and the river flows again in between some of the fish will have sex with other fish sometimes and they&#39;ll have sex on their own what&#39;s uh 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&#39;s extraordinary and subtle but there it is how how else would you explain it uh and to mr ham and his followers i say this is something that we in science want we want the ability to predict and your assertion that there&#39;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 a one of the world one of the us&#39;s most livable cities it&#39;s lovely and uh 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&#39;t believe that the big bang was a real thing i just want to review briefly with everybody why we accept on in the outside world why we accept the big bang uh edwin hubble oh sorry there you go you got to 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&#39;s it&#39;s that close to civilization but even in the early 1900s the people who selected this site for astronomy picked an excellent site the the the clouds and smog are below you and edwin hubble sat there at his 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&#39;t sure why but it was 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 uh well it was like there was a big bang there was an explosion this is to say since everything&#39;s moving apart it&#39;s very reasonable that at one time they were all together and there&#39;s a place from whence or rather whence these things expanded and it was a remarkable insight but people went uh still questioning it for decades science and 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&#39;s a whole nother 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 uh fm radio signal&#39;s about like this uh am radio signals are kilometers there are a couple several soccer fields they went out uh listening and there was this hiss this all the time that wouldn&#39;t go away and they thought oh doug on it there&#39;s some loose connector they plugged in the connector they they re-screwed it they made it tight they turned it this way the hiss was still there they heard it that way this is still there they thought it was pigeon droppings that had affected the reception of this horn it&#39;s called this thing is still there it&#39;s in basking ridge new jersey it&#39;s a national historic site and arno pinzias 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 this energy from the big bang that would be detectable and they detected it we built the cosmic observatory for background emissions the kobe spacecraft and it matched exactly exactly the astronomers predictions you got to respect that it&#39;s a wonderful thing now along that line is some interest in the age of the earth right now it&#39;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&#39;t know are uh were created when stars explode and i look like nobody but i attended a lecture by hans beta who won a nobel prize for discovering the process by which stars create all these elements the one that uh interests me especially is our good friends rubidium and strontium rubidium becomes strontium spontaneously it&#39;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 crystallizes it locks the rubidium and strontium in place and so by careful assay by careful by being diligent you can tell how 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 were buried catastrophically by a volcano in what is now idaho is now yellowstone national park what&#39;s called the hot spot people call it the super volcano and it&#39;s a remarkable thing apparently as i can tell you as a northwesterner around for mount st helens i&#39;m a full disclosure i&#39;m on the mount st helens board uh when it when it goes off it gives out a great deal of gas that&#39;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&#39;s an extraordinary place now if uh 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&#39;re concerned about that you want scientifically literate students in your commonwealth for a better tomorrow for everybody you can you can&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s the same way carpenters built this building it&#39;s the same way surveyors surveyed the land that we&#39;re standing on and so by measuring the distance to a star you can figure out how far away it is uh that star and then the stars beyond it and stars beyond that there are billions of stars billions of stars more than 6 000 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&#39;s only six thousand years old it&#39;s an extraordinary claim there&#39;s another astronomer adolf cattell 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 that 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&#39;re asking me and i got the impression you were is ken ham&#39;s creation model viable i i say no absolutely not now one last thing you may not know that in the u.s 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&#39;t want to raise a generation of science students who don&#39;t understand how we know our place in the cosmos our place and space who don&#39;t understand natural law we need to innovate to keep the united states where it is in the world thank you very much [Applause] that&#39;s a lot to take in i hope everybody&#39;s holding up well it&#39;s a lot of information what we&#39;re going to have now is a five-minute rebuttal time for each gentleman to address the other one&#39;s comments and then there will be a five minute counter rebuttal after that uh things are going to start moving a little more quickly now so at this point in particular i want to make sure we don&#39;t have applauding or anything else going on that slows it down so mr ham if you&#39;d like to begin with your five minute rebuttal first well first of all uh bill if i was to answer all the points that you brought up the moderator would think i was going on for millions of years uh so i can only deal with some of them and uh you mentioned the age of the earth a couple of times so let me let me deal with that as i said in my uh presentation you can&#39;t observe the age of the earth and i would say that comes under what we call historical origin science now just to understand where i&#39;m coming from yes we admit we build our origins of historical science on the bible uh the bible says god created in six days the hebrew word yom as it&#39;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 genealogies specifically given in the bible yeah from adam to uh to abraham you&#39;ve got um two thousand years from abraham to christ two thousand from christ to the present two thousand years that&#39;s how we get six thousand years uh so that&#39;s where it comes from just so you know now a lot of people say now by the way uh the earth&#39;s age is 4.5 billion years old and we have radioactive decay dating methods that that found that but you see we certainly observe radioactive decay whether it&#39;s rubidium strontium whether it&#39;s uranium lead potassium argon but when you&#39;re talking about the past we have a problem 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 lava flow that had woody material in it branches and twigs and so on and when uh dr andrew snelling our phd geologist sent that to a lab in massachusetts in 1994 they used potassium argon dating it dated to 45 million years old well he also sent the wood to the radiocarbon section of the same lab and that data to 45 000 years old 45 000 year old wood and 45 million year old rock the point is there&#39;s a problem uh let me give you another example of a problem there was a lava dome that started to form in the 80s after mounts and helens erupted and in 1994 dr steve austin another phd geologist actually sampled uh the rock there uh he took whole rock crushed it uh sent it to the same lab actually i believe and got a data point point three five million years when he separated out the minerals amphibole and pyroxene and used potassium argon dating you get 0.9 million 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 uh show give all sorts of different dates see there&#39;s lots of assumptions in regard to radioactive dating number one for instance the amounts of the parent and daughter isotopes of the beginning when the rock formed you have to know them but you weren&#39;t there see that&#39;s historical science assumption two that all daughter atoms measured today must have only been derived in situ uh radioactive decay of parent atoms in other words this closed system but you don&#39;t know that and there&#39;s a lot of evidence that that&#39;s not so assumption number three that the decay rates have remained a constant and they&#39;re just some of them there&#39;s others as well the point is there&#39;s lots of assumptions in regard to the dating method so there&#39;s no dating method you can use that you can absolutely age date a rock there&#39;s all sorts of uh differences out there and i do want to address the bit we brought up about uh christians believing in millions of years yeah there&#39;s a lot of christians out there that believe in millions of years but i&#39;d say they have a problem i&#39;m not saying they&#39;re not christians but because salvation is conditioned upon faith in christ not the age of the earth but there&#39;s an inconsistency with what the bible teaches if you believe in millions of years you&#39;ve got death and bloodshed suffering disease over millions of years leading to man because that&#39;s what you see in the fossil record the bible makes it very clear death is a result of man&#39;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 who would be the one who would be a die once and for all now if you believe in millions of years as a christian in the fossil record there&#39;s evidence of animals eating each other the bible says originally all the animals and men were vegetarian we weren&#39;t told we could eat meat until after the flood there&#39;s diseases representing the fossil record like brain tumors but the bible says when god made everything was very good god doesn&#39;t call brain tumors very good there&#39;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&#39;t be true at the same time you know what there&#39;s hundreds of dating methods out there hundreds of them actually 90 percent of them contradict billions of years and the point is all such dating methods are fallible and i claim there&#39;s only one infallible dating method it&#39;s a witness who was there who knows everything who told us and that&#39;s from the word of god and that&#39;s why i would say that the earth is only six thousand years and as dr faulkner said there&#39;s nothing in astronomy and certainly dr snellingwood says nothing in geology to contradict a belief in a young age for uh the earth and the universe thank you mr ham mr nye your five-minute rebuttal please uh thank you very much uh let me start with the beginning if you find 45 million year old rock on top of 45 thousand year old trees maybe maybe the rock slid on top maybe that&#39;s it that seems much more reasonable explanation than it&#39;s impossible uh then uh as far as dating goes uh the 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 it&#39;s a in an age 4.5 4.6 billion years it&#39;s a remarkable thing you people at first expected a little more of a spread so i i understand that you take the bible as written in english translated countless not countless but many many times over the last three millennia 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 uh the are the fish sinners have they done something wrong to get diseases uh that&#39;s a sort of an extraordinary claim that um takes me uh just a little past what i&#39;m comfortable with and then as far as you can&#39;t observe the past i just i have to stop you right there that&#39;s what we do in astronomy all we can do is in astronomy in astronomy is look at the past by the way you&#39;re looking at the past right now because the speed of light bounces off of me and then gets to your eyes and i&#39;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&#39;t i don&#39;t see how we&#39;re ever going to agree with that if you insist that natural laws have changed it&#39;s for lack of a better word it&#39;s magical and i i have appreciated magic since i was a kid but it&#39;s it&#39;s not really what we want in in conventional mainstream science so uh your assertion that all the animals were vegetarians before they got on the ark that&#39;s really remarkable i i have not uh been spent a lot of time with lions but i can tell they&#39;ve got teeth that really aren&#39;t set up for broccoli uh that these animals were vegetarians till till this flood is something that i i would ask you to provide a little more proof for uh i i give you the lion&#39;s teeth uh you give me uh verses as translated into english over what 30 centuries so i that is not enough evidence for me if you&#39;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&#39;s very reasonable to me that instead of lions being vegetarians on the ark lions are lions and the information that you use to create your world view is is not consistent with i as what i as a reasonable man would expect so i want everybody to consider uh the implications of this if we accept mr hamm&#39;s point of view that by the mr ham&#39;s point of view that the bible is translated into american english is 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 hamm&#39;s word or his interpretation of these other words is somehow to be more respected than your what you can observe in nature what you can find literally in your backyard in kentucky it&#39;s a troubling and unsettling point of view and it&#39;s it&#39;s one i&#39;d very much like you to address uh when you come back as far as uh the five races that you mentioned it&#39;s kind of the same thing the five races were claimed by people who were of european descent and they said hey we&#39;re the best check us out and that turns out to be if you&#39;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 very good and mr hamm would you like to offer your five-minute counter rebuttal uh first of all bill just so i i just don&#39;t want a misunderstanding here and that is the 45 000 year old would or supposedly 45 000 was inside the basalt um so it was it was encased in the basalt uh and that&#39;s why i was making that particular point and i would also say that natural law hasn&#39;t changed as i talked about you know we i said we have 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&#39;s why we can do good experimental science because we assume those laws are true and they&#39;ll be they&#39;ll be true uh tomorrow um i i do want to say this that you you said a few times you know ken ham&#39;s you or ken ham&#39;s model it&#39;s not just ken ham&#39;s model we have a number of phd scientists on our own staff i quoted i had video quotes from some scientists it&#39;s it&#39;s dr damadian&#39;s model it&#39;s dr fabish&#39;s model it&#39;s dr faulkner&#39;s model it&#39;s dr uh snelling&#39;s model it&#39;s uh dr perdum&#39;s model and so it goes on in other words and you go on our website and there are a lot of creation scientists who agree uh with exactly what we&#39;re saying concerning the bibles and concerning the bible&#39;s account of creation so it&#39;s not just my model in in that sense uh i there&#39;s so much that i could say but as i listen to you i i believe you&#39;re confusing terms in regard to species and kinds because we&#39;re not saying god created all those species we&#39;re saying create god created kind and we&#39;re not saying species god on the ark we&#39;re saying kinds in fact we&#39;ve had researchers working on what is a kind for instance there&#39;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 there&#39;s this one 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&#39;ve been doing that research they have predicted probably less than actually a thousand kinds uh we&#39;re on noah&#39;s ark uh which means just over two thousand animals and the average size of a land animal is not that big so you know there was plenty of room uh 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 uh just talking about kangaroos getting to australia and all sorts of things like that but see we&#39;re talking about the past when we weren&#39;t there we didn&#39;t see those tree rings actually forming we didn&#39;t see those layers being laid down you know in 1942 for instance there were some planes that were landed on the ice in greenland and 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&#39;s like the dating methods you&#39;re assuming things in regard to the past that aren&#39;t necessarily true in regard to uh lions and teeth that 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&#39;d say maybe it should be a savage carnivore it&#39;s mainly mainly bamboo a little fruit back in australia has really sharp teeth looks like a savage little creature and it rips into fruit so just because an animal has sharp teeth doesn&#39;t mean it&#39;s a meat eater it means it has sharp teeth uh and so again it it 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&#39;s been post-blood catastrophism uh noah&#39;s flood certainly uh was a catastrophic event but then there&#39;s been post-flight catastrophism uh since that time as well and again in regard to historical science why would you say noah was unskilled i mean i didn&#39;t meet noah and neither did you and you know really it&#39;s an evolutionary view of origins i believe because because you&#39;re thinking in terms people before us aren&#39;t as good as us hey there are civilizations that existed in the past and we look at that technology and we can&#39;t even understand today how they did some of the things that they did who says noah couldn&#39;t build a big boat by the way the chinese and the egyptians built boats in fact some of our research uh indicates that some of the wooden boats that were built had three layers interlocking so they wouldn&#39;t twist like that in the league which is why here at the creation museum we have an exhibit on the arc where we&#39;ve rebuilt one percent of the arc uh to scale and show uh three interlocking layers like that and one last thing concerning the speed of light and that is i&#39;m sure you&#39;re aware of the horizon problem and that is from a big bang perspective even the secularists have a problem of getting light uh and and radiation out 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 so they can only get it about half way and that&#39;s why they have inflation theories which means everyone has a problem concerning the light issue there&#39;s things people don&#39;t understand and we have some models on our website by some of our scientists to help explain those sorts of things your counter rebuttal thank you mr ham but i&#39;m completely unsatisfied you did not in my view address just fundamental questions 680 000 years of snow ice layers which require winter summer cycle let&#39;s say you have 2 000 kinds instead of seven that makes the problem even more extraordinary multiplying 11 by what&#39;s uh by three and a half we we get to 35 40 species every day that we don&#39;t see they&#39;re not extinct in fact you probably know we&#39;re losing species due to mostly human activity and and the loss of habitat then as far as noaa being an extraordinary shipwright i&#39;m very skeptical the shipwrights my ancestors the knight family in new england to spent their whole life learning to make ships i mean it&#39;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 this just not reasonable then 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&#39;re making assumptions based on previous experience they&#39;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&#39;s no record of it you know there are pyramids that are older than that there are there are human populations that are far older than that with traditions that go back farther than that and it&#39;s just not reasonable to me that every everything changed four thousand years ago by everything i mean the species the surface of the earth the stars in the sky and uh the relationship of all the other living things on earth to humans it&#39;s just not reasonable to me that everything changed like that and the 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&#39;t accept your point of view there are christians who don&#39;t accept that the earth could somehow be this extraordinarily young age because of all the evidence around them and so what is to become of them in your view and uh and by the way this thing started as i understand it ken ham&#39;s creation model is based on the old testament so when you bring in i&#39;m not a theologian when you bring in the new testament isn&#39;t that little uh out of the box i&#39;m looking for explanations of the creation of the world as we know it based on what i&#39;m going to call science not historical science not observational science science things that each of us can do akin to what we do we&#39;re trying to out-guess the characters on uh on murder mystery shows on on a crime scene investigation especially what is to become of all those people who don&#39;t see it your way for us in the scientific community i remind you that when we find an idea that&#39;s not tenable it doesn&#39;t work that doesn&#39;t fly doesn&#39;t hold water whatever idiom you&#39;d like to embrace we throw it away we&#39;re delighted that&#39;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 brick big bang come on write your paper tear it up so your view that we&#39;re supposed to take your word for this book written centuries ago translated into american english is somehow more important than 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 all right thank you both uh now we&#39;re going to get to the uh things moving a little bit faster and i think they may be quite interesting here it&#39;s 40 to 45 minutes maybe a little bit more actually we&#39;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 through them here it was to to get a pile for mr nine a pile for mr ham so we can alternate reasonably between them uh other than that the only reason i will skip over one is if i can&#39;t read it or if it&#39;s a question that i don&#39;t know how to read because it doesn&#39;t seem to make any sense which sometimes happens just because the way people write what&#39;s going to happen is we&#39;re going to 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&#39;ve been up first if you&#39;ll hop up first this time and mr and i 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 well when it comes to uh looking at the universe of course we believe that in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and i believe our uh creationist astronomers would say yeah you can observe the universe expanding uh why god is doing that in fact in the 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 that you can observe that that fits with what we call observational science exactly why god did it that way i can&#39;t answer that question of course uh because you know the bible says that uh god made uh the heavens for for his glory and that&#39;s why he made uh the stars that we see out there and it&#39;s to it&#39;s to tell us how great he is and how big he is and in fact i think that&#39;s the 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 uh how large the universe is and i think it shows us how great god is uh how big he is that he&#39;s an all-powerful god he&#39;s an infinite god uh an infinite all-knowing god who created the universe to show us his power i mean can you imagine that and the thing that&#39;s remarkable in the bible for instance says on the fourth day of creation and and oh he made the stars also it&#39;s almost like oh by the way i made the stars um and just to show us he&#39;s an all-powerful god he&#39;s an infinite god so i made the stars and he made them to show us how great he is and he is he&#39;s an infinite creator god and the more that you understand what that means that that god is all-powerful infinite you stand back in all you realize how small we are you realize wow that god would consider this planet is is so significant that he created human beings here knowing they would sin and yet stepped into history to die for us be raised from the dead offer us a free gift to salvation wow what a god and that&#39;s what i would say when i see the universe as it is mr nye one minute any response there&#39;s a question that troubles us all from the time 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&#39;ve invented the science of astronomy we&#39;ve invented life science we&#39;ve invented physics we&#39;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&#39;s satisfying you&#39;re done oh good okay to me when i look at the night sky i want to know what&#39;s out there i&#39;m driven i want to know if what&#39;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 and that&#39;s time uh mr nye the next question is for you how did the atoms that created the big bang get there this is the great mystery you&#39;ve hit the nail on the head no this is so uh where did what was before the big bang this is what drives us this is what we want to know let&#39;s keep looking let&#39;s keep searching uh when i was young it was presumed that the universe was slowing down it&#39;s a big bang except it&#39;s an outer space there&#39;s no air so it&#39;s goes out like that and so people presumed that it would slow down that uh the universe the gravity especially would hold everything together and maybe it&#39;s going to come back and explode again and people went out and the mathematical expression is is the universe flat this is a mathematical expression uh 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 we&#39;re gonna let&#39;s go out and measure it and we do 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&#39;t slowing down it&#39;s accelerating the universe is accelerating and it&#39;s expansion and do you know why nobody knows why nobody knows why and you&#39;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&#39;t it reasonable that whatever is out there causing the universe to expand is here also and we just haven&#39;t figured out how to detect it my friend 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 every day is to try to solve the mysteries of the universe that&#39;s time mr ham a response uh bill i i just want to let you know that there actually is a book out there that actually tells us where matter came from and the very first sentence in that book says in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and really that&#39;s the only thing that makes sense it&#39;s the only thing that makes sense of uh why not just matter is here where it came from but why uh mata when when you look at it we we have uh information and and language systems that build life not just matter and where did that come from because mata can never produce information matter can never produce a language system languages only come from intelligence uh 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 universe created matter uh the energy space mass time universe and created the information for life it&#39;s the only thing that makes logical sense all right 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 well first of all you know i often hear people talking about the majority uh i would agree that the majority of scientists uh would believe in millions of years the majority would believe in evolution but there&#39;s a a large group out there that certainly don&#39;t but first thing i want to say is that uh it&#39;s not it&#39;s not a the majority that&#39;s a judge of truth uh 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 wonder 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 you know organ from from our evolutionary ancestry so you know when it&#39;s okay rip it out when it&#39;s disease rip it out you know rip it out anyway uh but these days we know that it&#39;s it&#39;s for the immune system and it&#39;s very very important so you know first it&#39;s important to understand that just because a majority believes something doesn&#39;t mean uh that it&#39;s true and then i i&#39;m sorry i missed the last part of the question there and the what was the picture of the right question here is that comment so what evidence besides the literal word of the bible one of the things i was doing was i was making predictions i made some predictions there&#39;s a whole list of predictions and i was saying if the bible&#39;s right and we&#39;re always saying so adam and eve there&#39;s one race and i went through and talked about that uh if the bible is right and god made kinds i went through and talked about that and so you know it really that question comes down to the fact that we&#39;re again dealing with the fact there&#39;s aspects about the past that you can&#39;t scientifically prove because you weren&#39;t there but observational science in the present bill and i all have the same observational sites we&#39;re here in the present we can what see radioactivity but when it comes to them talking about the past you&#39;re not going to be scientifically able to prove that and that&#39;s what we need to admit but 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 uh the present uh understanding the past is a whole different matter mr nye one minute response uh thank you mr m uh 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 person&#39;s fantastic louis pasteur you made reference to germs no if you if you find uh something that changes that disagrees with the common thought that&#39;s the greatest thing going in science we 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 uh but just the idea that the majority has sway in science is true only up to 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&#39;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 life forms somewhat more complex a new question for you mr nye how did consciousness come from matter don&#39;t know this is a great mystery a dear friend of mine is a neurologist she studies uh the nature of consciousness now i will say i uh used to embrace a joke about dogs i loved i mean who doesn&#39;t uh and you can say uh this guy remarked i&#39;ve never seen a dog paralyzed by self-doubt actually i have furthermore uh the thing that we celebrate the there are three uh sundials on the planet mars that bear an inscription to the future to those who visit here we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery it&#39;s inherently optimistic about the future of humankind that we will one day walk on mars but the joy of discovery that&#39;s what drives us the joy of finding out what&#39;s going on so we don&#39;t know where consciousness comes from but we want to find out furthermore i&#39;ll tell you it&#39;s deep within us i claim that i have spent time with dogs that have had the joy of discovery it&#39;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 institut researchers supported by nasa your tax dollars that are looking for answer that very question is it possible that life could start another way is there some sort of life form akin to science fiction that&#39;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 i mean in the mainstream we will fall behind economically this is a point i can&#39;t say enough mr ham a one-minute response uh bill i do want to say that there is a book out there 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 uh so the bible does document that that&#39;s where that&#39;s where uh consciousness came from that uh god gave it to us and you know the other thing i want to say is i i&#39;m sort of a little i have a mystery and that is you talk about the joy of discovery but you also say that when you die it&#39;s over and that&#39;s the end of year and if when you die it&#39;s over and you don&#39;t even remember you were here what&#39;s the point of the joy of discovery anyway i mean in an ultimate sense i mean you know you won&#39;t ever know you were ever here and no one in new you will know they&#39;re ever here ultimately so what&#39;s the point anyway i love the joy of discovery because this is god&#39;s creation and i&#39;m finding more out about that to take dominion for for man&#39;s good and for god&#39;s glory mr ham a new question uh 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 well the answer to that question is i&#39;m a christian and as a christian i can&#39;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&#39;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 and i did a little bit of that tonight and i can&#39;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&#39;s what it claims then check it out and the bible says if you come to god believing that he is he&#39;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 and no one&#39;s ever going to convince me that uh that the word of god is not true but i do want to make a distinction here and for bill&#39;s sake we build models based upon the bible and those models are always subject to change the fact of noah&#39;s flood is not subject to change the model of how the fight occurred is subject to change uh because we we observe in in the in the current world and and we&#39;re able to uh come up with maybe different ways this could have happened or that could have happened and and that&#39;s part of that scientific discovery as part of what it&#39;s all about uh so uh the the bottom line is that as a christian i have the foundation but as a christian i would ask bill the question what would uh what would change your mind i mean you said even if you came to faith you&#39;d never give up uh believing in billions of years i i think i i quoted you correctly said something like that uh recently so that would be also my question to bill time mr knight uh 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 they&#39;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 uh if you would change me immediately the question i have for you though fundamentally and for everybody watching mr hamm what can you prove what you have done tonight is spent most of the all the time coming up with explanations about the past what can you really predict what can you really prove uh in a conventional scientific or in a conventional i have an idea that makes a prediction and it comes out the way i see it this uh is very troubling to me mr nye a new question outside of radiometric methods what scientific evidence supports your view of the age of the earth the age of the earth uh well the age of stars the let&#39;s see radiometric evidence is pretty compelling also the deposition rates it was um it was uh lyell a a a um geologist who realized he my recollection he came up with the first use of the term deep time when people realize that the earth was 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&#39;t be more than a hundred thousand or so years old but radioactivity was discovered radioactivity is why the earth is still as warm as it is it&#39;s why the earth has been able to sustain its internal heat all these millennia and this discovery it&#39;s something like this question if without radiometric dating how would you view the age of the earth to me it&#39;s akin to the expression well if things were any other way things would be different this is to say that&#39;s not how the world is radioactive radiometric dating does exist neutrons do become protons and that&#39;s our level of understanding today the universe is accelerating these are all provable facts that there was a flood four thousand years ago is not provable in fact the evidence for me at least as a reasonable man is overwhelming that it couldn&#39;t possibly have happened there&#39;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 with steps theory and that is time mr hamm your response by the way and just want people to understand too you know 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 uh they dated meteorites and because they assumed meteorites were same age as the earth left over from the formation of the solar system that&#39;s where it comes from people think they dated rocks on the earth yet the four and a half billion years that&#39;s just not true and the the other point that i was making and i just put this slide back up because i happen 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&#39;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&#39;s no absolute age dating method from scientific method because you can&#39;t prove scientifically young or old 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 six thousand years ago uh the right sorry i missed that can you reconcile the speed at which continents are now drifting today to the rate they would have had to have traveled 6 000 years ago to reach where we are now i think that&#39;s the question okay i i think i understand the question um actually this again illustrates exactly what i&#39;m talking about in regard to historical science and observational science we can look at uh continents today and we have uh scientists have written papers about this on on our website i&#39;m definitely not an expert in this area i don&#39;t claim to be but there are scientists even dr andrew snelling our phd geologist has done a lot of research here too as well and 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 at the way it&#39;s moving today the rate it&#39;s moving that&#39;s always been that way in the past see that&#39;s an assumption that&#39;s that&#39;s the problem when it comes to understanding these things you can observe movement but then to assume that it&#39;s always been like that in the past that&#39;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 uh there was catastrophic breakup uh of the earth&#39;s surface and what we&#39;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 uh 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&#39;s the same with the flood you can say well 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&#39;s this emphasis on historical science and observational science and i would encourage people to go to our website and answers in genesis because we do have a number of papers in fact very technical papers dr john baumgardner is one who&#39;s written some very extensive work dealing with this very issue on the basis of the bible of course we believe there&#39;s one continent to start with because the waters were gathered together into one place so we do believe uh that the continent has split up but uh particularly the flood had a lot to do with that time on that uh mr nye response uh 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&#39;s a bunch of clocks they&#39;re not all going to say exactly the same thing do you think that they&#39;re all wrong the reason that we acknowledge the rate at which continents are drifting apart one of the reasons is we see what&#39;s called sea floor spreading in the mid-atlantic the earth&#39;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 uh you can measure how fast the continents were spreading that&#39;s how we do it on the outside as i said i lived in washington state when mount st helens exploded that&#39;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&#39;s how we do it on the outside and this is a question for you mr nye but i guess i can put it to both of you one word answer please favorite color i will go along with most people and say green and it&#39;s an irony that green plants reflect green light most of the light i said one more day most of the light from the sun is green but they reflect it it&#39;s a mystery well can i can i have three words and you see had 300 you can have three okay observational science blue all right um we&#39;re back to you uh mr nye how do you balance the theory of evolution with the second law of thermodynamics and i&#39;d like to add a question here what is the second law of thermodynamics oh second law of thermodynamics is fantastic and i call the words of of eddington who said if you have a theory that disagrees with isaac newton that&#39;s a great theory if you have a theory disagrees with relativity wow you&#39;ve changed the world that&#39;s great but if your theory disagrees with the second law of thermodynamics i can offer you no hope i can&#39;t help you and the second law of thermodynamics basically is where you lose energy to heat this is why car engines are about 30 percent efficient that&#39;s it thermodynamically that&#39;s why you want the hottest uh 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 uh but the fundamental thing that this questioner has missed is the earth is not a closed system so there&#39;s energy pouring in here from the sun if i may day and night because the night it&#39;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&#39;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 uh the second law of thermodynamics is a wonderful thing it has allowed us to have everything you see in this room because our power generation our power generation depends on the robust and extremely precise uh computation of how much energy is in burning fuel whether it&#39;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 any response mr ham uh let me just say two things if i can if if a minute goes that fast along uh one is you know what here&#39;s the 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&#39;s how we have life matter by itself could never reduce life no matter what energy you have and you know even if you&#39;ve got a dead stick you can have all the energy in the world and that dead stick it&#39;s going to decay and it&#39;s not going to produce life from a creationist perspective we certainly agree i mean uh before man sinned you know there was digestion and so on but because of the fall now things are running down god doesn&#39;t hold everything together as he did uh back then so now we see uh in regard to the second law of thermodynamics we&#39;d say it&#39;s sort of in in a sense a bit out of control now compared to what it was originally which is why we have a running down universe and that&#39;s time a new uh question for you mr ham hypothetically if evidence existed that caused you to have to admit that the earth was older than ten thousand 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 well i&#39;ve been emphasizing all night you cannot ever prove using uh you know the scientific method in the present you can&#39;t prove the age of the earth so you can never prove it&#39;s old so there is no hypothetical because you can&#39;t do that now we can certainly use methods in the present and making assumptions i mean creationists use methods that that change over time as i said there&#39;s hundreds of physical processes uh that you can use but they set limits on the age of the universe but you can&#39;t ultimately prove the age of the earth not from not using the scientific method you can&#39;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 uh a young universe now i i&#39;ve said to you before and i i admit again that the reason i believe in a young universe is because of the bible&#39;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&#39;s nothing in observational science that contradicts that uh but the um as far as the age of the earth the age of the universe uh even when it comes to the fossil record that&#39;s why i really challenge christians if you&#39;re gonna believe in millions of years for the fossil record you&#39;ve got a problem with the bible and that is that then you&#39;ve got to have death and disease and suffering uh before sin so there is no hypothetical in regard to that you can&#39;t prove scientifically the age of the earth or the universe bottom line mr knight well uh 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 him 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 are i think are not going to see eye to eye you said you asserted that life cannot come from something that&#39;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&#39;s a waste you&#39;re sure enough to uh claim that uh 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 a new question mr nye is there room for god in science 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&#39;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 who doesn&#39;t use email is there anybody here who doesn&#39;t eat because we use information sent from satellites in space to plant seeds on our farms that&#39;s how we&#39;re able to feed 7.1 billion people where we used to barely be able to feed a billion so that&#39;s what i see that&#39;s what we have used science or the process the science for me is two things it&#39;s the body of knowledge the atomic number of rubidium and it&#39;s the process the means by which we make these discoveries so for me that&#39;s not really that connected with your belief in a spiritual being or a higher power if you uh reconcile those two uh scientists the head of the national institutes of health is uh a devout christian there are billions of people in the world who are devoutly religious they&#39;re ha they have to be compatible because those same people embrace science the exception is you mr ham that&#39;s the problem for me you want us to take your word for what&#39;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 uh 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 mr ham a response yeah i actually want to take a minute to address the question and uh 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 a lot of technology here at answers in genesis and i have email and probably had millions of them while i&#39;m been speaking up here and satellites and what you said about you know the information we get hey i agree with all that see they&#39;re the things that that that can be done in the present and that&#39;s just like i showed you dr stewart burgess who invented that gear set uh for uh the satellite creationists can be a great scientist 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 uh the the uniformity of nature and that was a question i had for you where does that come from if the universe is here by natural processes uh and you know christianity and science the bible and science go hand in hand we love science but again you&#39;ve got to understand inventing things that&#39;s very different than talking about our origins two very different things mr ham a new question do you believe the entire bible is to be taken literally for example should people who touch pigskin i think it says here be stoned can men marry multiple women do i believe the entire bible should be taken literally well remember in my uh 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&#39;s what you mean by literally i would say yes i take the bible naturally what do i mean by that well if it&#39;s history as genesis is it&#39;s written as typical historical narrative you take it as history if it&#39;s uh poetry uh as we find in the psalms then you take it as poetry doesn&#39;t mean it doesn&#39;t teach truth uh but it&#39;s not a cosmological account in the sense that that genesis is there&#39;s there&#39;s prophecy in in the bible um and there&#39;s literature in the bible you know concerning future events and so on so if you take it as written naturally according to type of literature and and you let it speak to you in that way that&#39;s uh how i take the bible it&#39;s god&#39;s revelation to man he used different people and the bible says that all scripture is inspired by god so god moved people by his spirit to write his words and and also there&#39;s a lot of misunderstanding in regard to scripture in regard to the israelites i mean we have laws in our civil government here in america that the government sets well there are 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&#39;s a misunderstanding of the old testament it&#39;s a misunderstanding of the new testament and you know again it&#39;s important to take the bible as a whole interpreting scripture scripture if it really is the word of god uh then there&#39;s not going to be any contradiction which says not and by the way when men were married to multiple women there were lots of problems and uh the bible condemns that for what it is and the bible is very clear uh you know the bible is a real book there were people who did things that were not in court with scripture and it records this for us it helps you understand it&#39;s a real book but marriage was one man for one woman jesus reiterated that in matthew 19 as i had uh in my talk and so those that did marry multiple women were wrong time there mr nye responds so it sounds to me just listening to you over the last two minutes that there&#39;s certain parts of this document of the bible that you embrace literally in other parts you consider poetry so it sounds to me in those last two minutes like you&#39;re going to take what you like interpret literally in other passages you&#39;re going to you&#39;re going to interpret as poetic or descriptions of human events all that aside i&#39;ll just say scientifically or as a reasonable man it doesn&#39;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 i&#39;m not a theologian but we started this debate is the ken ham&#39;s creation model viable does it hold water can it fly does it describe anything and i&#39;m still looking for an answer and time on that uh mr and i here&#39;s a new question i i believe this was uh miswritten here because they&#39;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 of a higher power i think that&#39;s what they&#39;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 okay i i think you may have changed the question just a little bit it&#39;s all good the word for word question is have you ever believed that evolution partook through way of evolution uh uh i think i thought let me introduce these ideas for mr ham to comment uh the idea uh that there&#39;s a higher power that has driven the course of the universe events in the universe and our own existence is one that you cannot prove or disprove and this gets into this expression agnostic you can&#39;t know i&#39;ll i&#39;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&#39;d pick it up you would realize that it was created by somebody who was thinking ahead somebody with an organization chart with somebody at the top and he&#39;d order screws from screw manufacturers and springs from spring manufacturers and glass crystals from crystal manufacturers but that&#39;s not how nature works this is the fundamental insight in the explanation for living things that&#39;s 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&#39;m sure mr ham here at the facility you have an organization chart i imagine you&#39;re at the top and it&#39;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&#39;t make it falls away and this is compelling and wonderful and fills me with joy and is inconsistent with a top-down view and that&#39;s time mr ham what uh bill nye needs to do for me is to show me 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&#39;s why i brought up the example in my presentation of valensky&#39;s experiments in regard to e coli and there were some that seemed to develop the ability to exist on citrate but as dr favich said from looking at his research he&#39;s found that that information was already there it&#39;s just a gene that switched on and off and so there is no example because you know information uh that&#39;s there in in the genetic information of different uh animals plants and so on there&#39;s no new function that can be added certainly great variation within a kind and that&#39;s what we look at but you&#39;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 a 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 uh any scientist out there christian or non-christian that is involved in inventing things involved in uh a scientific method is using creation they are because they&#39;re borrowing from a christian worldview they&#39;re using the laws of logic i keep emphasizing that i i want bill to to tell me in in in a view of the universe as a result of natural processes explain where the laws of logic came from why should we trust uh 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 clark maxwell michael faraday were creationists and as one of them said you know he&#39;s thinking god&#39;s thoughts after him and that that&#39;s really modern science really came out of that thinking that we can do experiments today and we can do the same tomorrow we can trust the laws of logic we can trust the laws of nature and if we don&#39;t teach our children correctly about this they&#39;re not going to be innovative and they&#39;re not going to be able to uh come up with inventions uh to to advance uh in our culture and so i i i think that the person was trying to get out that see you know there are lots of secularists out there doing work and they don&#39;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&#39;s lots of creationists out there who publish people might know that they&#39;re creationists because the topic doesn&#39;t specifically pertain to creation uh versus evolution but there&#39;s lots of them out there if i go to our website there&#39;s a whole list there of scientists who are creationists who are out there doing great work in this world uh and helping to advance technology mr knight uh there&#39;s a reason that i don&#39;t accept your the kenham model of creation is that it has no predictive quality as you would as you touched on and something that i&#39;ve always found troubling you it sounds as though and next time around you can correct me it sounds as though you believe your worldview 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&#39;t know how much time you spent talking to strangers but they they&#39;re not sanguine about that to have you tell them that they are inherently lost or misguided it&#39;s very troubling and you say there are no examples in nature there are countless examples of how the process of science makes predictions mr nye since evolution teaches that man is evolving and growing smarter over time how can you explain the numerous evidences of man&#39;s high intelligence in the past hang on uh there&#39;s no evidence that men or humans are getting smarter no uh especially if you ever met my old boss no it&#39;s that what happens in evolution and there&#39;s it&#39;s a british word that was used in the middle 1800s it&#39;s survival of the fittest and in this usage it doesn&#39;t mean that 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 hum the evidence of humans is everywhere james cameron just made another trip to the bottom of the ocean 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 a 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 one where more people were killed by the flu then were killed by the combatants in world war one that is a troubling and remarkable fact if the right germ shows up we&#39;ll be taken out we&#39;ll be eliminated being smarter is not a necessary consequence of evolution so far it seems to be the way things are going because the remarkable advantage it gives to us over we can control our environment and even change it as we&#39;re doing today apparently by accident so everybody just take a little while and grasp this fundamental idea it&#39;s how you fit in with nature around you so as the world change as it did for example the ancient dinosaurs they were taken out by a worldwide fireball apparently caused by an impactor that&#39;s the best area we have and we are the result of people of organisms that live through that catastrophe it&#39;s not necessarily smarter it&#39;s how you fit in with your environment mr ham a response i remember uh at university one of my professors was very excited to give us some evidence for evolution he said look at this here&#39;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 uh they&#39;re evolving because uh now the ones that are living there their ancestors had eyes and now these ones are blind and i i remember talking about first but wait a minute now they can&#39;t do something that they could do before yeah they might have an advantage in this sense in a in a situation that&#39;s dark like that those with eyes might have got diseases and died out those who had mutations for no eyes are the ones that survived it&#39;s not survival of the fittest it&#39;s survival of those who survive and it&#39;s survival of those that have the information in that circumstance to survive but it&#39;s not you&#39;re not getting new information you&#39;re not getting new function there&#39;s no example of that at all so we need to correctly understand uh these things all right um we&#39;re down to our final question here which i&#39;ll give to both of you and in the interest of fairness here because it is a question to both of you let&#39;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 have the first word mr and i will have the last word the question is what is the one thing more than anything else upon which you base your belief well it&#39;s the one thing upon anything else which i base my belief well again to summarize the things that i&#39;ve been saying and there is a book called the bibles very unique books very different any other book out there in fact i don&#39;t know of any other religion that has a book uh that starts off by telling you that there&#39;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 the origin of dry land and the origin of plants in 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&#39;s a very very specific book and it gives us an account of a global flood in the history and 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&#39;s son stepped in history tonight on a cross be raised from the dead and offers a free gift of salvation because the history is true that&#39;s why the message based in history is true i actually went through some predictions and listed others and there&#39;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 babel yeah different people groups different languages they have flood legends very similar to the bible creation legends similar to the bible there&#39;s so much you can look at and prophecy and so on and most of all as i said you the bible says if you come to god believing that he is he&#39;ll reveal himself to you you will know if you search after truth you really want god to show you as you search up the silver and gold he will show you he will reveal himself to you mr knight would you repeat the question the question is what is the one thing more than anything else upon which you base your belief as my old professor carl sagan said so often when you&#39;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 had never seen before it fills me to joy to 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&#39;s astonishing i admit i see your faces that we have come to be because of the universe&#39;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&#39;s at stake here if we abandon all that we&#39;ve learned our ancestors what they&#39;ve learned about the about nature and our place in it if we abandon the process by which we know it if we astute if we let go of all 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 out competed by other countries other economies now that would be okay i guess but i was born here i&#39;m a patriot and 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 one tiny bit of important housekeeping for everyone here the county is now under a level two snow emergency drive home carefully you&#39;ll have a lot to talk about but drive carefully this debate will be archived at debatelive.org that&#39;s debatelive.org one word it will be found at that site for several days so you can encourage friends and family to watch and take it over thanks so much to thanks so much to mr nye and to mr ham for an excellent discussion i&#39;m tom foreman thank you good night from petersburg kentucky and the creation museum [Music] you

let&amp;#39;s welcome our debaters mr bill nye and mr ken ham 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&amp;#39;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 the 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&amp;#39;s great big book of tiny germs bill nye is the host of three television series his program the 100 greatest discoveries heirs on the science channel the eyes of nye airs on pbs stations across the country he frequently appears on interview programs to discuss a variety of science topics mr nye serves as executive director of the planetary society the world&amp;#39;s largest space interest group he is a graduate of cornell with a bachelor&amp;#39;s 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&amp;#39;re holding this debate the museum has had two million visitors in six years and has attracted much of the world&amp;#39;s media the answers in genesis website is 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 hamm is a native of australia he earned a bachelor&amp;#39;s degree in applied science with an emphasis in environmental biology from the queensland institute of technology as well as a diploma of education at the university of queensland in brisbane 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&amp;#39;m an aussie and live over here in america and they tell me i have an accent and so it doesn&amp;#39;t matter what i say some people tell me we just like you hear saying it so i hope you enjoy me saying it anyway well the debate topic is this is creation a viable model of origins in today&amp;#39;s modern scientific era you know when this was first announced on the internet there are 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&amp;#39;s a gross misrepresentation in our culture uh we&amp;#39;re seeing people in in being indoctrinated to believe that creationists can&amp;#39;t be scientists i believe it&amp;#39;s all a part of secularists hijacking the word science i want you to meet a modern day scientist who is a biblical creationist my name is stuart burgess i&amp;#39;m a professor of engineering design at bristow university in the uk my name is stuart burgess i&amp;#39;m a professor of engineering design at bristol university in the uk 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&amp;#39;ve also designed major parts of spacecraft launched by issa and so here&amp;#39;s a biblical creationist who&amp;#39;s a scientist who&amp;#39;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 cientia which means to know and if you look up a dictionary it&amp;#39;ll say science means state of knowing knowledge but there&amp;#39;s different types of knowledge and i believe this is where the confusion lies there&amp;#39;s experimental observational science as we call it that&amp;#39;s using the scientific method observation measurement experiment testing that&amp;#39;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 doesn&amp;#39;t matter whether you&amp;#39;re a creationist or an evolutionist you can be a great scientist for instance here&amp;#39;s an atheist who is a great scientist craig vender one of the first researchers to sequence the human genome or dr raymond damadian he is a man who invented the mri scanner and revolutionized medicine he&amp;#39;s a biblical creationist but i want us to also understand molecules to man evolution believe has nothing to do with developing technology you see when we&amp;#39;re talking about origins we&amp;#39;re talking about the past we&amp;#39;re talking about our origins we weren&amp;#39;t there you can&amp;#39;t observe that whether it&amp;#39;s molecules to main evolution or whether it&amp;#39;s a creation account when you&amp;#39;re talking about the past we like to call that origins or 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 their origins or historical science is based upon man&amp;#39;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 thorn 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&amp;#39;s very hard to accept for many of us that when you die it&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s modern scientific era i say the creation evolution debate is a conflict between two philosophical world views 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&amp;#39;s modern scientific era and that is time i have the unenviable job of being the time keeper here so i&amp;#39;m like the referee in football that you don&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s mr nye&amp;#39;s turn for a five-minute opening statement mr nye thank you it&amp;#39;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 i&amp;#39;m telling you once you try oh there&amp;#39;s yes two that&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s a story associated with this which i find remarkable my grandfather was in the rotary and he uh 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&amp;#39;t know how to tie it so i wasn&amp;#39;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 we wanted to have the tie on wasn&amp;#39;t sure was getting into so he is said to have laying on the bed and the guy tied a perfect bow tie knot and quite reasonably my grandfather said thank you uh why&amp;#39;d i have to lie down on the bed you guys said i&amp;#39;m an undertaker that&amp;#39;s really the only way i know how to do it now that that 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&amp;#39;s certainly uh something to remember so here tonight we&amp;#39;re going to have two stories and uh we can compare mr ham&amp;#39;s story to the story from what i will call the outside from mainstream science the question tonight is does ken ham&amp;#39;s creation model hold up is it viable so let me ask you all what would you be doing if you weren&amp;#39;t here tonight that&amp;#39;s right you&amp;#39;d be home watching csi csi petersburg is that common i think it&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t normally have these anywhere in the world except here natural laws that applied in the past apply now that&amp;#39;s why they&amp;#39;re natural laws that&amp;#39;s why we embrace them that&amp;#39;s how we made all these discoveries that enabled all this remarkable technology so csi is a fictional show but it&amp;#39;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 zoo keepers for 14 000 individual animals every land plant in the world under water for a full year i ask us all is that really reasonable you&amp;#39;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 is 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 want to 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 enjoys other 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&amp;#39;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 astute science as chew the process and try to divide uh science into observational science and historic science we are not going to move forward we will not embrace natural laws we will not make discoveries we will not uh invent and innovate and stay ahead so if you ask me if ken ham&amp;#39;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 a very nice start by both of our debaters here and now each one will offer a 30-minute illustrated presentation to fully offer their case for us to consider mr hamm you&amp;#39;re up well the debate topic was this creation a viable model of origins in today&amp;#39;s modern scientific era and i made this statement at the end of my opening statement creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today&amp;#39;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 observational science briefly and that both creationists and evolutionists can be great scientists for instance i mentioned craig venter a biologist he&amp;#39;s an atheist and he&amp;#39;s a great scientist uh he was one of the first researchers to sequence a 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 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&amp;#39;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 as simply wrong well he&amp;#39;s most adamant about that and actually he revolutionized medicine he&amp;#39;s a biblical creationist and i encourage children to follow people like that and make them uh 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 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&amp;#39;m a stellar astronomer that means my primary interest is stars but i&amp;#39;m particularly interested in the study of eclipsing binary stars and i&amp;#39;ve published many articles in the astronomy literature places such as 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 design engineering design at bristol university in england now he invented uh 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 have been useless yet dr burgess is a biblical creationist who believes just as i believe now think about this for a moment are scientists like dr burgess who believe in creation just as i do a small minority in the scientific world but let&amp;#39;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 they are often afraid to speak out because of the criticisms they would get from the media and atheist lobby i agree that&amp;#39;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 creations christian non-christian scientists should say non-christian scientists are really borrowing from the christian worldview anyway to carry out their experimental or observational science think about it when they&amp;#39;re doing observational science using a 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 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&amp;#39;s a there&amp;#39;s a confusion here there&amp;#39;s a misunderstanding here people by and large have not been taught to look at you know what you believe about the past as different to what you&amp;#39;re observing in the present you don&amp;#39;t deserve them you don&amp;#39;t observe the past directly uh even you know when you think about uh the creation account i mean we can&amp;#39;t observe god creating we can&amp;#39;t observe the creation of adam and eve admit that we&amp;#39;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 well they sort of acknowledge the difference between historical and observational science here is an earth science textbook that&amp;#39;s used in public schools and we read this in contrast to physical geology the aim of historical geology is to understand earth&amp;#39;s long history and then they make the statement historical geology so we&amp;#39;re talking about 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&amp;#39;re assuming that that&amp;#39;s always uh happened in the past and we&amp;#39;re going to try and figure out how this happens see there is a difference between what you observe and what happened in the past uh let me illustrate it this way if bill nye and i went to the grand canyon we could agree that that&amp;#39;s a coconino sandstone in the hermit shale and there&amp;#39;s the boundary they&amp;#39;re sitting one on top of the other we could agree on that but do you know what we would disagree on i mean we could even analyze 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&amp;#39;s a supposed 10 million year gap there but i don&amp;#39;t see a gap but that might be different to what bill and i would see but but see there&amp;#39;s a difference between what you actually observe directly and then your interpretation in regards to 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 a hubble telescope you know what they disagreed on well they disagreed on how to interpret the data that telescope obtained in regard to the age of the universe and you know we could go and talk about lots of other uh similar sorts of things for instance i&amp;#39;ve heard bill nye talk about how a smoke detector works using the radioactive element amer 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&amp;#39;re then going to use radioactive elements and talk about the age of the earth you&amp;#39;ve got a problem because you weren&amp;#39;t there we&amp;#39;ve got to understand parent elements daughter elements and and so on we could agree with your creationist or evolutionist on the technology to put the rover on mars but we&amp;#39;re going to disagree on how to interpret uh the origin of mars i mean there are some people that believe there was even a global flight on mars and there&amp;#39;s no liquid water on mars but you know we&amp;#39;re going to disagree maybe on our interpretation of origins and you can&amp;#39;t prove either way because not from an observational science perspective because we&amp;#39;ve only got the present creationists and evolutionists both work on medicines and vaccines you see it doesn&amp;#39;t matter whether you&amp;#39;re creationist or an evolutionist all scientists have the same experimental or 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 a belief in molecules command evolution now here&amp;#39;s another important fact creationists and evolutionists all have the same evidence bill nye and i have the same grand canyon we don&amp;#39;t disagree on that we will have the same fish fossil this is one from the creation museum the same dinosaur skeletons 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&amp;#39;s not the evidences that are different it&amp;#39;s a battle over the same evidence in regard to how we interpret the past and you know why that is because it&amp;#39;s really a battle over world views and starting points it&amp;#39;s a battle over philosophical world views and starting points but the same evidence now i admit my starting point is that god is the ultimate authority but if someone doesn&amp;#39;t accept that then man has to be the ultimate authority and that&amp;#39;s really the difference when it comes down to it you see i&amp;#39;ve been emphasizing the difference between historical origin science knowledge about the past when you weren&amp;#39;t there and we need to understand that&amp;#39;s that we weren&amp;#39;t there or experimental or observational science using your five senses in the present the scientific method what you can directly observe test repeat there&amp;#39;s a big difference between those two and that&amp;#39;s not what&amp;#39;s been taught in our public schools and that&amp;#39;s why kids aren&amp;#39;t being taught to think critically and correctly about the origins issue but you know it&amp;#39;s also important to understand when talking about creation 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&amp;#39;s historical science based on one&amp;#39;s starting point now when you think about the debate topic and what i affirmed concerning creation if our origins or historical science based on the bible uh the bible&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;d expect to find evidence concerning an intelligence confirming an intelligence produced life we&amp;#39;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 its own not that one kind changes into another uh you&amp;#39;d expect behind evidence confirming a global flood of noah&amp;#39;s day evidence confirming one race of humans because we all go back to adam and eve biologically that would mean there&amp;#39;s one race evidence confirming the terror babel that god gave different languages evidence confirming a young universe now i can&amp;#39;t go through all of those but a couple of them we&amp;#39;ll look at briefly after their kind evidence confirming that in the creation museum we have a display featuring replicas actually of darwin&amp;#39;s finches they&amp;#39;re called darwin&amp;#39;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 that 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 maybe those species came from some common ancestor actually when it comes to finches we actually would agree as creationists that different finch species came from a common ancestor but a finch is what they would have to come from but you see darwin wasn&amp;#39;t just thinking about species darwin had a much bigger picture in mind when you look at the origin of species and and read that book you&amp;#39;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 classification system kingdom phylum class order family genus species we would say as creationists and we have many creation scientists who&amp;#39;ve researched this and for lots of reasons i would say the kind in genesis 1 really is more at the family level of classification for instance there&amp;#39;s one dog kind there&amp;#39;s one cat kind even though you have different generally different species that would mean by the way you didn&amp;#39;t need anywhere near the number of animals on the ark as people think you wouldn&amp;#39;t need all the species of dogs just two not all species of cats just two and you see based on the biblical account there in genesis 1 creationists have drawn up what they believe is a creation orchard in other words they&amp;#39;re saying look there&amp;#39;s great variation in the genetics of dogs and finches and so on and so over time particularly after noah&amp;#39;s flood you&amp;#39;d expect if there were two dogs for instance you could end up with different species of dogs has because there&amp;#39;s an incredible amount of variability in the genes of of any creature and so you&amp;#39;d expect these different species up here but there&amp;#39;s limits dogs will always be dogs finches will always be finches now as a 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&amp;#39;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 propose 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&amp;#39;s exactly what we&amp;#39;re saying here now in the creation museum we actually show the finches here and you see the finches with their different beaks beside dog skulls different species of dogs by the way there&amp;#39;s more variation in the dog skulls here than there are in these pictures yet the dogs well that&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s another problem that we&amp;#39;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 in public school textbooks and we often see it in documentaries and so on it&amp;#39;s used for observable changes that we would agree with and then use for unobservable changes such as molecules to man let me explain to you what&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;re taught see students are taught today look there&amp;#39;s all these different animals plants but they&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s what you don&amp;#39;t observe you don&amp;#39;t observe that that&amp;#39;s belief there that&amp;#39;s that&amp;#39;s their 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 and you don&amp;#39;t see one kind changing into another actually we&amp;#39;re told that if you teach creation in the public schools as teaching religion if you teach evolution that&amp;#39;s science and i&amp;#39;m going to say wait a minute actually the creation model here based upon the bible observational science confirms this this is what you observe you don&amp;#39;t observe this tree actually it&amp;#39;s the public school textbooks that are teaching i believe imposing it on students and they need to be teaching them observational science to understand the reality of what&amp;#39;s happening now what we found is that public school textbooks present the evolutionary tree a 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 michigan state university he&amp;#39;s a great scientist he&amp;#39;s known for culturing e coli in the lab and he found there were some e coli that actually seemed to develop the ability to grow on substrate on citrate in the substrate but richard lenski is here mentioned in this book and it&amp;#39;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 this is against the creationists for instance jerry coyne from university of chicago says lenski&amp;#39;s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists he says the thing i like most is that 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 uh is it really uh 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 is 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&amp;#39;ve published 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 the past year in the journal&amp;#39;s nature science translational medicine public library of science public library of science genetics i cited regularly in those journals and while i was taught nothing but evolution i don&amp;#39;t accept that position and i do my research from a creation perspective when i look at the evidence that people cite of e coli supposedly evolving over 30 years over 30 000 generations in the lab and people say that it is now able to grow in citrate i don&amp;#39;t deny that it grows on citrate but it&amp;#39;s not any kind of new information it&amp;#39;s the information&amp;#39;s already there it&amp;#39;s just a switch that gets turned on and off and it that&amp;#39;s what they reported in there there&amp;#39;s nothing new see students need to be told what&amp;#39;s really going on here certainly there&amp;#39;s change but it&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s ideas of human evolution as presented in the descent of man i mean darwin did teach in the descent of man there are 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 exist upon earth five races or varieties of men 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&amp;#39;s what was taught but it was based on darwin&amp;#39;s ideas that are wrong you you have a wrong foundation you&amp;#39;re going to have a wrong world view now had they started from the bible and from the creation account in the bible what does it teach well we&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;d expect we&amp;#39;d say you know what that means there&amp;#39;s biologically only one race of humans well i mentioned dr venter before and uh he was a researcher with the human genome project and you 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 signs confirming the creation account not confirming at all darwin&amp;#39;s ideas now there&amp;#39;s much more that could be said on each of these topics obviously you can&amp;#39;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 and genesis for a lot more information so the debate topic is creation a viable model of origins in today&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;re 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&amp;#39;t like me doing this because they don&amp;#39;t want to admit that there&amp;#39;s a brief aspect to what they&amp;#39;re saying and there is and they can&amp;#39;t get away from it let me illustrate this with a statement from bill nye that you can show the earth is not flat you can show the earth is not ten thousand years old by the way i agree you can show the earth is not flat there&amp;#39;s a video from the galileo spacecraft showing the earth and speed it up of course but spinning you can see it&amp;#39;s a sphere you can observe that you can&amp;#39;t observe the age of the earth you don&amp;#39;t see that you see again i emphasize there&amp;#39;s a big difference between historical science talking about the past and observational science talking about the present and i believe what&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s not a mystery when you understand the difference apparently 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&amp;#39;re able to hold these two world views and this is a mystery actually i suggest you it&amp;#39;s not a mystery you see when i&amp;#39;m talking about antibiotics aspirin smoke detectors jet planes that&amp;#39;s ken hem the observational science bloke i&amp;#39;m an australian we call guys blokes okay uh but when you&amp;#39;re talking about creation in thousands of years or the age of the earth that&amp;#39;s can hem the historical science break i&amp;#39;m willing to admit that now when bill nye is 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&amp;#39;s bill nye the observational science guy but when he&amp;#39;s talking about evolution of millions of years i&amp;#39;m i&amp;#39;m challenging him that that&amp;#39;s bill nye the historical science guy and i challenge the evolutionists to admit the belief aspects of their particular uh worldview now at the creation museum we&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;re teaching people to think critically and and to think uh in the right terms about science i believe it&amp;#39;s the creationists that should be educating uh the kids out there because we&amp;#39;re teaching them the right way to think you know i we admit our origins of historical science is based upon the bible but i&amp;#39;m just challenging evolutionists to admit the belief aspects of evolution and be up front about the difference here as i said i&amp;#39;m i&amp;#39;m only too willing to admit my historical science based on the bible and let me further go on and define the term creation as we use it by creation we mean here at answers in genesis in the in 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 a perfect creation a god made adam and eve land animal kinds sea creatures and so on and then sin and death entered the world so 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&amp;#39;s flood if there was a global flood you&amp;#39;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 laying 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&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;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 the present to the past but it&amp;#39;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 which made his beginning made them male and female and said for this course shall a man of his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they&amp;#39;ll be one flesh he quoted from genesis as literal history genesis 1 and 2 god invented marriage by the way that&amp;#39;s where marriage comes from and 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 a cross genesis it&amp;#39;s a very important book it&amp;#39;s foundational to all christian doctrine and you see when we look at that what i call the seven seas of history that we walk people through here at the museum think about how it all connects together a perfect creation it&amp;#39;ll be perfect again in the future sin and death ended the world that&amp;#39;s why god&amp;#39;s son died on the cross and to conquer death and offer a free gift to salvation the flood of noah&amp;#39;s day a reminder that the flood was a judgment because of man&amp;#39;s wickedness but at the same time a message of god&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;ll be saved and we make no apology about the fact that what we&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;ll be saved now as soon as i say that see people say see if you allow creation in schools for instance if you allow students to even hear about it ah this is religion you know let me illustrate this talking about uh a recent battle in texas over textbooks in the public school a newspaper report said this textbook and classroom curriculum battles have long ranged in texas pitting creationists those who see god&amp;#39;s hand in the creation of the universe against academics stop right there notice creationists academics creationists can&amp;#39;t be academics creationists can&amp;#39;t be scientists see it&amp;#39;s the way things are worded out there it&amp;#39;s an indoctrination that&amp;#39;s going on who worry about religious and political ideology trumping scientific fact wait a minute what do i mean by science you talking about what you observe or you&amp;#39;re talking about your beliefs about the past now kathy miller is the president of the texan texas freedom network and she&amp;#39;s uh vocally uh spoken out she&amp;#39;s spoken about this textbook battle there uh in and uh in texas and the mission statement of the organization she&amp;#39;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 and then she makes this statement science education what does she mean by science should be based on mainstream science education not on personal ideological 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 fact and they&amp;#39;re imposing the religion of naturalism on generations of students they&amp;#39;re imposing their ideology on the students that everything is explained by natural processes that is a religion what does she mean by religious liberty they tolerate their religion see the battle is really about authority it&amp;#39;s more than just science or evolution or creation it&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s subjective marriage well whatever you want it to be get rid of old people i mean why not i mean they&amp;#39;re just animals they&amp;#39;re costing us a lot of money abortion get rid of spare cats get rid of spare kids we&amp;#39;re all animals but if you start from god&amp;#39;s word there are moral absolutes god decides right and wrong marriage one man and one woman sanctity of life we care for all people they made an 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&amp;#39;t be trusted and so again i say creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today&amp;#39;s modern scientific era you know what i&amp;#39;m a science teacher i want to see kids taught science i love science i want to see more dr damadians in the world you know if we teach them the whole universe as a result of natural processes and not designed by a creator god they might be looking in the wrong places or have the wrong idea when they&amp;#39;re looking at the creation in regard to how you develop technology because if they look on it as just random processes that could totally influence the way they think if they understand it was a perfect world made by sin that could have a great effect on and how they then look for overcoming diseases and problems in the world i want children to be taught the right foundation that there&amp;#39;s a god who created them who loves them who died on the cross for them and that they&amp;#39;re special they&amp;#39;re made in the image of god there you go thank you mr ham we can applaud mr ham&amp;#39;s presentation [Applause] and you know it it did occur to me when you had uh my old friend larry king up there you could have just asked him he&amp;#39;s been around a long time and he&amp;#39;s a smart guy he could probably answer for all of us uh now uh let&amp;#39;s all be attentive to mr nye as he gives us his 30-minute presentation thank you very much and uh mr ham i i learned something thank you but let&amp;#39;s uh take it back around to uh the question at hand does ken ham&amp;#39;s creation model hold up is it viable so for me of course uh well take a look we&amp;#39;re here uh in kentucky on layer upon layer upon layer of limestone i stopped at the side of the road today and picked up uh this piece of limestone that has a fossil right there now in these many many layers uh in this vicinity of kentucky there are coral animals uh fossil zoaxanthelli and when you look at it closely you can see that they lived their entire lives they they lived typically 20 years sometimes more than that and the water conditions are correct and so we are standing on millions of of layers of ancient life how could those animals have lived their entire life and formed these layers in just 4 000 years there&amp;#39;s not there isn&amp;#39;t enough time since uh mr ham&amp;#39;s flood for this limestone that we&amp;#39;re standing on to have come into existence uh 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&amp;#39;s not that extraordinary many of you have probably done it yourselves at 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 by long tradition it&amp;#39;s called snow ice and snow ice forms over the winter as snowflakes fall and are crushed down by subsequent layers they&amp;#39;re crushed together and trapping the little bubbles and the little bubbles must needs be ancient atmosphere there&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s just run some numbers this is some scenes from lovely antarctic let&amp;#39;s say we have 680 000 layers of snow ice and 4 000 years since the great flood that would mean we&amp;#39;d need 170 summer winter summer cycles every year for the last 4 000 years i mean wouldn&amp;#39;t someone have noticed that well wouldn&amp;#39;t someone have noticed that there&amp;#39;s been winter summer winter summer 170 times one year if we go to uh california we find enormous stands of bristle cone pines some of them are over six thousand years old six thousand eight hundred years old there&amp;#39;s a famous tree in sweden old tico is nine thousand five hundred and fifty 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&amp;#39;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 it seeds they just they just won&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t there 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&amp;#39;s sand this is what geologists on the outside do study what 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&amp;#39;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 through the grand canyon wouldn&amp;#39;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 4 000 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&amp;#39;re remarkable because we are looking at the past you find down low you&amp;#39;ll find what you might consider as rudimentary sea animals up above you&amp;#39;ll find the famous trilobites 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 the higher one if it all happened in such an extraordinary short amount of time if this water drained away just like that wouldn&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;ve not found a single one now here&amp;#39;s an interesting thing these are fossil skulls that people have found all around the world it&amp;#39;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 uh 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 well 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 hamm&amp;#39;s world view is that this giant boat very large wooden ship went aground safely on a mountain in the middle of 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 four thousand 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 uh some fossils some bones in the last four thousand years somebody would have been hopping along there and died along the way and we&amp;#39;d find him and furthermore there is 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 four thousand years no navigator no diver no u.s navy submarine no one&amp;#39;s ever detected any evidence of this let alone any fossils of kangaroos so your expectation is not met it doesn&amp;#39;t seem to hold up so let&amp;#39;s see if there are 4 thousand years since ken ham&amp;#39;s flood and let&amp;#39;s say as he said many times there are 7 000 kinds today uh the very very lowest estimate is that there are about 8.7 million species but a much more reasonable estimate is it&amp;#39;s 50 million or even 100 million when you start counting the viruses and the bacteria and all the beetles that must be extent in the tropical rain forest that we haven&amp;#39;t found so we&amp;#39;ll take a number which uh i think is pretty reasonable 16 million species today okay if these came from seven thousand kinds that&amp;#39;s let&amp;#39;s say we have uh seven thousand subtracted from fifteen million that&amp;#39;s fifteen nine ninety three we have four thousand years we have 365 and a quarter days a year we would expect to find 11 new species every day so you&amp;#39;d go out into your yard you wouldn&amp;#39;t just find a different bird a new bird you&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;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 inquirer i imagine would carry a column right next to the weather report today&amp;#39;s new species and it would list these 11 every day but we see no evidence of that there&amp;#39;s no evidence of these species there just simply isn&amp;#39;t enough time now as you may know i uh 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&amp;#39;s fine there&amp;#39;s a tube in the 747 i kind of think of as my two but that aside i traveled 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 uh regular uh 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&amp;#39;s not there now but the evidence for it of course is 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 but 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 uh 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&amp;#39;d expect them to sink to the bottom but here are these enormous rocks right on the surface and there&amp;#39;s no shortage of them if you go driving in washington state or oregon they&amp;#39;re uh they&amp;#39;re readily available so how could those be there if the earth is just 4 000 years old how how could they be there if this one flood caused that another uh remarkable thing i&amp;#39;d like everybody to consider along inherent in this world view is that somehow noah and his family were able to build a wooden ship that would house 14 000 individuals there are 7 000 kinds and then and every there&amp;#39;s a boy and a girl for each one of those so it&amp;#39;s about 14 000 eight 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 uh 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 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 ship building and they couldn&amp;#39;t build a boat as big as the ark has claimed to have been is that reasonable is that possible that the best shipbuilders in the world couldn&amp;#39;t do what uh eight unskilled people uh men and their wives uh were able to do if you visit the uh national zoo in washington dc it&amp;#39;s 163 acres and they have 400 species by the way this picture that you&amp;#39;re seeing was taken by spacecraft in space orbiting the earth if you told my grandfather let alone my father that we were 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 these 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 fourteen thousand animals and themselves and feed them aboard a ship that was bigger than anyone&amp;#39;s ever been able to build now here&amp;#39;s the thing what we want in science science as practiced out 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 dc we can predict that if we provide this much room for an elephant it will live healthily for a certain amount of time so i i&amp;#39;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 uh 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&amp;#39;re looking at old records there&amp;#39;s some pieces seem to be missing a gap so scientists got to thinking about this they&amp;#39;re lung fish that jump from pond to pond in florida and end up in people&amp;#39;s swimming pools and they&amp;#39;re amphibians frogs and toads croaking and carrying on and so people wondered if there wasn&amp;#39;t a a fossil or wonder 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 had dried out and they found all kinds of happy swamp fossils there ferns so on and organisms animals fish that were recognized and people realized that if this with the age of the rocks there uh as as computed by traditional uh scientists with the age of the rockstar 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 there&amp;#39;s no this it wasn&amp;#39;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 world view the kenham creation model does not have this capability it cannot make predictions and uh show results here&amp;#39;s an extraordinary one that i find i find remarkable there are certain fish the top minnows that have the remarkable ability to have uh sex with other fish uh traditional fish sex and they can have sex with themselves now one of the old questions in life science everybody one of the old sort of chin strokers is why does any organism whether you&amp;#39;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 than there are humans on earth and bacteria they don&amp;#39;t bother with that man they just like split themselves in half they get new bacteria like let&amp;#39;s get her done let&amp;#39;s go but why does any think of all the trouble a rose bush goes to to make a flower and the thorns and and the bees would swim 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&amp;#39;s what&amp;#39;s going to get you germs and parasites my first cousin&amp;#39;s son died tragically from essentially the flu this is not some story i heard about 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 top minnows and they found that the ones who reproduced sexually had fewer parasites than the ones that reproduced on their own this black spot disease wait wait there&amp;#39;s more uh in these populations with flooding and so on with river ponds get isolated then they dry up and the river flows again in between some of the fish will have sex with other fish sometimes and they&amp;#39;ll have sex on their own what&amp;#39;s uh 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&amp;#39;s extraordinary and subtle but there it is how how else would you explain it uh and to mr ham and his followers i say this is something that we in science want we want the ability to predict and your assertion that there&amp;#39;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 a one of the world one of the us&amp;#39;s most livable cities it&amp;#39;s lovely and uh 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&amp;#39;t believe that the big bang was a real thing i just want to review briefly with everybody why we accept on in the outside world why we accept the big bang uh edwin hubble oh sorry there you go you got to 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&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s that close to civilization but even in the early 1900s the people who selected this site for astronomy picked an excellent site the the the clouds and smog are below you and edwin hubble sat there at his 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&amp;#39;t sure why but it was 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 uh well it was like there was a big bang there was an explosion this is to say since everything&amp;#39;s moving apart it&amp;#39;s very reasonable that at one time they were all together and there&amp;#39;s a place from whence or rather whence these things expanded and it was a remarkable insight but people went uh still questioning it for decades science and 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&amp;#39;s a whole nother 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 uh fm radio signal&amp;#39;s about like this uh am radio signals are kilometers there are a couple several soccer fields they went out uh listening and there was this hiss this all the time that wouldn&amp;#39;t go away and they thought oh doug on it there&amp;#39;s some loose connector they plugged in the connector they they re-screwed it they made it tight they turned it this way the hiss was still there they heard it that way this is still there they thought it was pigeon droppings that had affected the reception of this horn it&amp;#39;s called this thing is still there it&amp;#39;s in basking ridge new jersey it&amp;#39;s a national historic site and arno pinzias 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 this energy from the big bang that would be detectable and they detected it we built the cosmic observatory for background emissions the kobe spacecraft and it matched exactly exactly the astronomers predictions you got to respect that it&amp;#39;s a wonderful thing now along that line is some interest in the age of the earth right now it&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t know are uh were created when stars explode and i look like nobody but i attended a lecture by hans beta who won a nobel prize for discovering the process by which stars create all these elements the one that uh interests me especially is our good friends rubidium and strontium rubidium becomes strontium spontaneously it&amp;#39;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 crystallizes it locks the rubidium and strontium in place and so by careful assay by careful by being diligent you can tell how 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 were buried catastrophically by a volcano in what is now idaho is now yellowstone national park what&amp;#39;s called the hot spot people call it the super volcano and it&amp;#39;s a remarkable thing apparently as i can tell you as a northwesterner around for mount st helens i&amp;#39;m a full disclosure i&amp;#39;m on the mount st helens board uh when it when it goes off it gives out a great deal of gas that&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s an extraordinary place now if uh 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&amp;#39;re concerned about that you want scientifically literate students in your commonwealth for a better tomorrow for everybody you can you can&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s the same way carpenters built this building it&amp;#39;s the same way surveyors surveyed the land that we&amp;#39;re standing on and so by measuring the distance to a star you can figure out how far away it is uh that star and then the stars beyond it and stars beyond that there are billions of stars billions of stars more than 6 000 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&amp;#39;s only six thousand years old it&amp;#39;s an extraordinary claim there&amp;#39;s another astronomer adolf cattell 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 that 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&amp;#39;re asking me and i got the impression you were is ken ham&amp;#39;s creation model viable i i say no absolutely not now one last thing you may not know that in the u.s 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&amp;#39;t want to raise a generation of science students who don&amp;#39;t understand how we know our place in the cosmos our place and space who don&amp;#39;t understand natural law we need to innovate to keep the united states where it is in the world thank you very much [Applause] that&amp;#39;s a lot to take in i hope everybody&amp;#39;s holding up well it&amp;#39;s a lot of information what we&amp;#39;re going to have now is a five-minute rebuttal time for each gentleman to address the other one&amp;#39;s comments and then there will be a five minute counter rebuttal after that uh things are going to start moving a little more quickly now so at this point in particular i want to make sure we don&amp;#39;t have applauding or anything else going on that slows it down so mr ham if you&amp;#39;d like to begin with your five minute rebuttal first well first of all uh bill if i was to answer all the points that you brought up the moderator would think i was going on for millions of years uh so i can only deal with some of them and uh you mentioned the age of the earth a couple of times so let me let me deal with that as i said in my uh presentation you can&amp;#39;t observe the age of the earth and i would say that comes under what we call historical origin science now just to understand where i&amp;#39;m coming from yes we admit we build our origins of historical science on the bible uh the bible says god created in six days the hebrew word yom as it&amp;#39;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 genealogies specifically given in the bible yeah from adam to uh to abraham you&amp;#39;ve got um two thousand years from abraham to christ two thousand from christ to the present two thousand years that&amp;#39;s how we get six thousand years uh so that&amp;#39;s where it comes from just so you know now a lot of people say now by the way uh the earth&amp;#39;s age is 4.5 billion years old and we have radioactive decay dating methods that that found that but you see we certainly observe radioactive decay whether it&amp;#39;s rubidium strontium whether it&amp;#39;s uranium lead potassium argon but when you&amp;#39;re talking about the past we have a problem 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 lava flow that had woody material in it branches and twigs and so on and when uh dr andrew snelling our phd geologist sent that to a lab in massachusetts in 1994 they used potassium argon dating it dated to 45 million years old well he also sent the wood to the radiocarbon section of the same lab and that data to 45 000 years old 45 000 year old wood and 45 million year old rock the point is there&amp;#39;s a problem uh let me give you another example of a problem there was a lava dome that started to form in the 80s after mounts and helens erupted and in 1994 dr steve austin another phd geologist actually sampled uh the rock there uh he took whole rock crushed it uh sent it to the same lab actually i believe and got a data point point three five million years when he separated out the minerals amphibole and pyroxene and used potassium argon dating you get 0.9 million 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 uh show give all sorts of different dates see there&amp;#39;s lots of assumptions in regard to radioactive dating number one for instance the amounts of the parent and daughter isotopes of the beginning when the rock formed you have to know them but you weren&amp;#39;t there see that&amp;#39;s historical science assumption two that all daughter atoms measured today must have only been derived in situ uh radioactive decay of parent atoms in other words this closed system but you don&amp;#39;t know that and there&amp;#39;s a lot of evidence that that&amp;#39;s not so assumption number three that the decay rates have remained a constant and they&amp;#39;re just some of them there&amp;#39;s others as well the point is there&amp;#39;s lots of assumptions in regard to the dating method so there&amp;#39;s no dating method you can use that you can absolutely age date a rock there&amp;#39;s all sorts of uh differences out there and i do want to address the bit we brought up about uh christians believing in millions of years yeah there&amp;#39;s a lot of christians out there that believe in millions of years but i&amp;#39;d say they have a problem i&amp;#39;m not saying they&amp;#39;re not christians but because salvation is conditioned upon faith in christ not the age of the earth but there&amp;#39;s an inconsistency with what the bible teaches if you believe in millions of years you&amp;#39;ve got death and bloodshed suffering disease over millions of years leading to man because that&amp;#39;s what you see in the fossil record the bible makes it very clear death is a result of man&amp;#39;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 who would be the one who would be a die once and for all now if you believe in millions of years as a christian in the fossil record there&amp;#39;s evidence of animals eating each other the bible says originally all the animals and men were vegetarian we weren&amp;#39;t told we could eat meat until after the flood there&amp;#39;s diseases representing the fossil record like brain tumors but the bible says when god made everything was very good god doesn&amp;#39;t call brain tumors very good there&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t be true at the same time you know what there&amp;#39;s hundreds of dating methods out there hundreds of them actually 90 percent of them contradict billions of years and the point is all such dating methods are fallible and i claim there&amp;#39;s only one infallible dating method it&amp;#39;s a witness who was there who knows everything who told us and that&amp;#39;s from the word of god and that&amp;#39;s why i would say that the earth is only six thousand years and as dr faulkner said there&amp;#39;s nothing in astronomy and certainly dr snellingwood says nothing in geology to contradict a belief in a young age for uh the earth and the universe thank you mr ham mr nye your five-minute rebuttal please uh thank you very much uh let me start with the beginning if you find 45 million year old rock on top of 45 thousand year old trees maybe maybe the rock slid on top maybe that&amp;#39;s it that seems much more reasonable explanation than it&amp;#39;s impossible uh then uh as far as dating goes uh the 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 it&amp;#39;s a in an age 4.5 4.6 billion years it&amp;#39;s a remarkable thing you people at first expected a little more of a spread so i i understand that you take the bible as written in english translated countless not countless but many many times over the last three millennia 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 uh the are the fish sinners have they done something wrong to get diseases uh that&amp;#39;s a sort of an extraordinary claim that um takes me uh just a little past what i&amp;#39;m comfortable with and then as far as you can&amp;#39;t observe the past i just i have to stop you right there that&amp;#39;s what we do in astronomy all we can do is in astronomy in astronomy is look at the past by the way you&amp;#39;re looking at the past right now because the speed of light bounces off of me and then gets to your eyes and i&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t i don&amp;#39;t see how we&amp;#39;re ever going to agree with that if you insist that natural laws have changed it&amp;#39;s for lack of a better word it&amp;#39;s magical and i i have appreciated magic since i was a kid but it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s not really what we want in in conventional mainstream science so uh your assertion that all the animals were vegetarians before they got on the ark that&amp;#39;s really remarkable i i have not uh been spent a lot of time with lions but i can tell they&amp;#39;ve got teeth that really aren&amp;#39;t set up for broccoli uh that these animals were vegetarians till till this flood is something that i i would ask you to provide a little more proof for uh i i give you the lion&amp;#39;s teeth uh you give me uh verses as translated into english over what 30 centuries so i that is not enough evidence for me if you&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s very reasonable to me that instead of lions being vegetarians on the ark lions are lions and the information that you use to create your world view is is not consistent with i as what i as a reasonable man would expect so i want everybody to consider uh the implications of this if we accept mr hamm&amp;#39;s point of view that by the mr ham&amp;#39;s point of view that the bible is translated into american english is 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 hamm&amp;#39;s word or his interpretation of these other words is somehow to be more respected than your what you can observe in nature what you can find literally in your backyard in kentucky it&amp;#39;s a troubling and unsettling point of view and it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s one i&amp;#39;d very much like you to address uh when you come back as far as uh the five races that you mentioned it&amp;#39;s kind of the same thing the five races were claimed by people who were of european descent and they said hey we&amp;#39;re the best check us out and that turns out to be if you&amp;#39;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 very good and mr hamm would you like to offer your five-minute counter rebuttal uh first of all bill just so i i just don&amp;#39;t want a misunderstanding here and that is the 45 000 year old would or supposedly 45 000 was inside the basalt um so it was it was encased in the basalt uh and that&amp;#39;s why i was making that particular point and i would also say that natural law hasn&amp;#39;t changed as i talked about you know we i said we have 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&amp;#39;s why we can do good experimental science because we assume those laws are true and they&amp;#39;ll be they&amp;#39;ll be true uh tomorrow um i i do want to say this that you you said a few times you know ken ham&amp;#39;s you or ken ham&amp;#39;s model it&amp;#39;s not just ken ham&amp;#39;s model we have a number of phd scientists on our own staff i quoted i had video quotes from some scientists it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s dr damadian&amp;#39;s model it&amp;#39;s dr fabish&amp;#39;s model it&amp;#39;s dr faulkner&amp;#39;s model it&amp;#39;s dr uh snelling&amp;#39;s model it&amp;#39;s uh dr perdum&amp;#39;s model and so it goes on in other words and you go on our website and there are a lot of creation scientists who agree uh with exactly what we&amp;#39;re saying concerning the bibles and concerning the bible&amp;#39;s account of creation so it&amp;#39;s not just my model in in that sense uh i there&amp;#39;s so much that i could say but as i listen to you i i believe you&amp;#39;re confusing terms in regard to species and kinds because we&amp;#39;re not saying god created all those species we&amp;#39;re saying create god created kind and we&amp;#39;re not saying species god on the ark we&amp;#39;re saying kinds in fact we&amp;#39;ve had researchers working on what is a kind for instance there&amp;#39;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 there&amp;#39;s this one 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&amp;#39;ve been doing that research they have predicted probably less than actually a thousand kinds uh we&amp;#39;re on noah&amp;#39;s ark uh which means just over two thousand animals and the average size of a land animal is not that big so you know there was plenty of room uh 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 uh just talking about kangaroos getting to australia and all sorts of things like that but see we&amp;#39;re talking about the past when we weren&amp;#39;t there we didn&amp;#39;t see those tree rings actually forming we didn&amp;#39;t see those layers being laid down you know in 1942 for instance there were some planes that were landed on the ice in greenland and 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&amp;#39;s like the dating methods you&amp;#39;re assuming things in regard to the past that aren&amp;#39;t necessarily true in regard to uh lions and teeth that 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&amp;#39;d say maybe it should be a savage carnivore it&amp;#39;s mainly mainly bamboo a little fruit back in australia has really sharp teeth looks like a savage little creature and it rips into fruit so just because an animal has sharp teeth doesn&amp;#39;t mean it&amp;#39;s a meat eater it means it has sharp teeth uh and so again it it 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&amp;#39;s been post-blood catastrophism uh noah&amp;#39;s flood certainly uh was a catastrophic event but then there&amp;#39;s been post-flight catastrophism uh since that time as well and again in regard to historical science why would you say noah was unskilled i mean i didn&amp;#39;t meet noah and neither did you and you know really it&amp;#39;s an evolutionary view of origins i believe because because you&amp;#39;re thinking in terms people before us aren&amp;#39;t as good as us hey there are civilizations that existed in the past and we look at that technology and we can&amp;#39;t even understand today how they did some of the things that they did who says noah couldn&amp;#39;t build a big boat by the way the chinese and the egyptians built boats in fact some of our research uh indicates that some of the wooden boats that were built had three layers interlocking so they wouldn&amp;#39;t twist like that in the league which is why here at the creation museum we have an exhibit on the arc where we&amp;#39;ve rebuilt one percent of the arc uh to scale and show uh three interlocking layers like that and one last thing concerning the speed of light and that is i&amp;#39;m sure you&amp;#39;re aware of the horizon problem and that is from a big bang perspective even the secularists have a problem of getting light uh and and radiation out 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 so they can only get it about half way and that&amp;#39;s why they have inflation theories which means everyone has a problem concerning the light issue there&amp;#39;s things people don&amp;#39;t understand and we have some models on our website by some of our scientists to help explain those sorts of things your counter rebuttal thank you mr ham but i&amp;#39;m completely unsatisfied you did not in my view address just fundamental questions 680 000 years of snow ice layers which require winter summer cycle let&amp;#39;s say you have 2 000 kinds instead of seven that makes the problem even more extraordinary multiplying 11 by what&amp;#39;s uh by three and a half we we get to 35 40 species every day that we don&amp;#39;t see they&amp;#39;re not extinct in fact you probably know we&amp;#39;re losing species due to mostly human activity and and the loss of habitat then as far as noaa being an extraordinary shipwright i&amp;#39;m very skeptical the shipwrights my ancestors the knight family in new england to spent their whole life learning to make ships i mean it&amp;#39;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 this just not reasonable then 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&amp;#39;re making assumptions based on previous experience they&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s no record of it you know there are pyramids that are older than that there are there are human populations that are far older than that with traditions that go back farther than that and it&amp;#39;s just not reasonable to me that every everything changed four thousand years ago by everything i mean the species the surface of the earth the stars in the sky and uh the relationship of all the other living things on earth to humans it&amp;#39;s just not reasonable to me that everything changed like that and the 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&amp;#39;t accept your point of view there are christians who don&amp;#39;t accept that the earth could somehow be this extraordinarily young age because of all the evidence around them and so what is to become of them in your view and uh and by the way this thing started as i understand it ken ham&amp;#39;s creation model is based on the old testament so when you bring in i&amp;#39;m not a theologian when you bring in the new testament isn&amp;#39;t that little uh out of the box i&amp;#39;m looking for explanations of the creation of the world as we know it based on what i&amp;#39;m going to call science not historical science not observational science science things that each of us can do akin to what we do we&amp;#39;re trying to out-guess the characters on uh on murder mystery shows on on a crime scene investigation especially what is to become of all those people who don&amp;#39;t see it your way for us in the scientific community i remind you that when we find an idea that&amp;#39;s not tenable it doesn&amp;#39;t work that doesn&amp;#39;t fly doesn&amp;#39;t hold water whatever idiom you&amp;#39;d like to embrace we throw it away we&amp;#39;re delighted that&amp;#39;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 brick big bang come on write your paper tear it up so your view that we&amp;#39;re supposed to take your word for this book written centuries ago translated into american english is somehow more important than 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 all right thank you both uh now we&amp;#39;re going to get to the uh things moving a little bit faster and i think they may be quite interesting here it&amp;#39;s 40 to 45 minutes maybe a little bit more actually we&amp;#39;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 through them here it was to to get a pile for mr nine a pile for mr ham so we can alternate reasonably between them uh other than that the only reason i will skip over one is if i can&amp;#39;t read it or if it&amp;#39;s a question that i don&amp;#39;t know how to read because it doesn&amp;#39;t seem to make any sense which sometimes happens just because the way people write what&amp;#39;s going to happen is we&amp;#39;re going to 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&amp;#39;ve been up first if you&amp;#39;ll hop up first this time and mr and i 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 well when it comes to uh looking at the universe of course we believe that in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and i believe our uh creationist astronomers would say yeah you can observe the universe expanding uh why god is doing that in fact in the 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 that you can observe that that fits with what we call observational science exactly why god did it that way i can&amp;#39;t answer that question of course uh because you know the bible says that uh god made uh the heavens for for his glory and that&amp;#39;s why he made uh the stars that we see out there and it&amp;#39;s to it&amp;#39;s to tell us how great he is and how big he is and in fact i think that&amp;#39;s the 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 uh how large the universe is and i think it shows us how great god is uh how big he is that he&amp;#39;s an all-powerful god he&amp;#39;s an infinite god uh an infinite all-knowing god who created the universe to show us his power i mean can you imagine that and the thing that&amp;#39;s remarkable in the bible for instance says on the fourth day of creation and and oh he made the stars also it&amp;#39;s almost like oh by the way i made the stars um and just to show us he&amp;#39;s an all-powerful god he&amp;#39;s an infinite god so i made the stars and he made them to show us how great he is and he is he&amp;#39;s an infinite creator god and the more that you understand what that means that that god is all-powerful infinite you stand back in all you realize how small we are you realize wow that god would consider this planet is is so significant that he created human beings here knowing they would sin and yet stepped into history to die for us be raised from the dead offer us a free gift to salvation wow what a god and that&amp;#39;s what i would say when i see the universe as it is mr nye one minute any response there&amp;#39;s a question that troubles us all from the time 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&amp;#39;ve invented the science of astronomy we&amp;#39;ve invented life science we&amp;#39;ve invented physics we&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s satisfying you&amp;#39;re done oh good okay to me when i look at the night sky i want to know what&amp;#39;s out there i&amp;#39;m driven i want to know if what&amp;#39;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 and that&amp;#39;s time uh mr nye the next question is for you how did the atoms that created the big bang get there this is the great mystery you&amp;#39;ve hit the nail on the head no this is so uh where did what was before the big bang this is what drives us this is what we want to know let&amp;#39;s keep looking let&amp;#39;s keep searching uh when i was young it was presumed that the universe was slowing down it&amp;#39;s a big bang except it&amp;#39;s an outer space there&amp;#39;s no air so it&amp;#39;s goes out like that and so people presumed that it would slow down that uh the universe the gravity especially would hold everything together and maybe it&amp;#39;s going to come back and explode again and people went out and the mathematical expression is is the universe flat this is a mathematical expression uh 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 we&amp;#39;re gonna let&amp;#39;s go out and measure it and we do 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&amp;#39;t slowing down it&amp;#39;s accelerating the universe is accelerating and it&amp;#39;s expansion and do you know why nobody knows why nobody knows why and you&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t it reasonable that whatever is out there causing the universe to expand is here also and we just haven&amp;#39;t figured out how to detect it my friend 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 every day is to try to solve the mysteries of the universe that&amp;#39;s time mr ham a response uh bill i i just want to let you know that there actually is a book out there that actually tells us where matter came from and the very first sentence in that book says in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and really that&amp;#39;s the only thing that makes sense it&amp;#39;s the only thing that makes sense of uh why not just matter is here where it came from but why uh mata when when you look at it we we have uh information and and language systems that build life not just matter and where did that come from because mata can never produce information matter can never produce a language system languages only come from intelligence uh 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 universe created matter uh the energy space mass time universe and created the information for life it&amp;#39;s the only thing that makes logical sense all right 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 well first of all you know i often hear people talking about the majority uh i would agree that the majority of scientists uh would believe in millions of years the majority would believe in evolution but there&amp;#39;s a a large group out there that certainly don&amp;#39;t but first thing i want to say is that uh it&amp;#39;s not it&amp;#39;s not a the majority that&amp;#39;s a judge of truth uh 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 wonder 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 you know organ from from our evolutionary ancestry so you know when it&amp;#39;s okay rip it out when it&amp;#39;s disease rip it out you know rip it out anyway uh but these days we know that it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s for the immune system and it&amp;#39;s very very important so you know first it&amp;#39;s important to understand that just because a majority believes something doesn&amp;#39;t mean uh that it&amp;#39;s true and then i i&amp;#39;m sorry i missed the last part of the question there and the what was the picture of the right question here is that comment so what evidence besides the literal word of the bible one of the things i was doing was i was making predictions i made some predictions there&amp;#39;s a whole list of predictions and i was saying if the bible&amp;#39;s right and we&amp;#39;re always saying so adam and eve there&amp;#39;s one race and i went through and talked about that uh if the bible is right and god made kinds i went through and talked about that and so you know it really that question comes down to the fact that we&amp;#39;re again dealing with the fact there&amp;#39;s aspects about the past that you can&amp;#39;t scientifically prove because you weren&amp;#39;t there but observational science in the present bill and i all have the same observational sites we&amp;#39;re here in the present we can what see radioactivity but when it comes to them talking about the past you&amp;#39;re not going to be scientifically able to prove that and that&amp;#39;s what we need to admit but 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 uh the present uh understanding the past is a whole different matter mr nye one minute response uh thank you mr m uh 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 person&amp;#39;s fantastic louis pasteur you made reference to germs no if you if you find uh something that changes that disagrees with the common thought that&amp;#39;s the greatest thing going in science we 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 uh but just the idea that the majority has sway in science is true only up to 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&amp;#39;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 life forms somewhat more complex a new question for you mr nye how did consciousness come from matter don&amp;#39;t know this is a great mystery a dear friend of mine is a neurologist she studies uh the nature of consciousness now i will say i uh used to embrace a joke about dogs i loved i mean who doesn&amp;#39;t uh and you can say uh this guy remarked i&amp;#39;ve never seen a dog paralyzed by self-doubt actually i have furthermore uh the thing that we celebrate the there are three uh sundials on the planet mars that bear an inscription to the future to those who visit here we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery it&amp;#39;s inherently optimistic about the future of humankind that we will one day walk on mars but the joy of discovery that&amp;#39;s what drives us the joy of finding out what&amp;#39;s going on so we don&amp;#39;t know where consciousness comes from but we want to find out furthermore i&amp;#39;ll tell you it&amp;#39;s deep within us i claim that i have spent time with dogs that have had the joy of discovery it&amp;#39;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 institut researchers supported by nasa your tax dollars that are looking for answer that very question is it possible that life could start another way is there some sort of life form akin to science fiction that&amp;#39;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 i mean in the mainstream we will fall behind economically this is a point i can&amp;#39;t say enough mr ham a one-minute response uh bill i do want to say that there is a book out there 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 uh so the bible does document that that&amp;#39;s where that&amp;#39;s where uh consciousness came from that uh god gave it to us and you know the other thing i want to say is i i&amp;#39;m sort of a little i have a mystery and that is you talk about the joy of discovery but you also say that when you die it&amp;#39;s over and that&amp;#39;s the end of year and if when you die it&amp;#39;s over and you don&amp;#39;t even remember you were here what&amp;#39;s the point of the joy of discovery anyway i mean in an ultimate sense i mean you know you won&amp;#39;t ever know you were ever here and no one in new you will know they&amp;#39;re ever here ultimately so what&amp;#39;s the point anyway i love the joy of discovery because this is god&amp;#39;s creation and i&amp;#39;m finding more out about that to take dominion for for man&amp;#39;s good and for god&amp;#39;s glory mr ham a new question uh 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 well the answer to that question is i&amp;#39;m a christian and as a christian i can&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;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 and i did a little bit of that tonight and i can&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s what it claims then check it out and the bible says if you come to god believing that he is he&amp;#39;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 and no one&amp;#39;s ever going to convince me that uh that the word of god is not true but i do want to make a distinction here and for bill&amp;#39;s sake we build models based upon the bible and those models are always subject to change the fact of noah&amp;#39;s flood is not subject to change the model of how the fight occurred is subject to change uh because we we observe in in the in the current world and and we&amp;#39;re able to uh come up with maybe different ways this could have happened or that could have happened and and that&amp;#39;s part of that scientific discovery as part of what it&amp;#39;s all about uh so uh the the bottom line is that as a christian i have the foundation but as a christian i would ask bill the question what would uh what would change your mind i mean you said even if you came to faith you&amp;#39;d never give up uh believing in billions of years i i think i i quoted you correctly said something like that uh recently so that would be also my question to bill time mr knight uh 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 they&amp;#39;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 uh if you would change me immediately the question i have for you though fundamentally and for everybody watching mr hamm what can you prove what you have done tonight is spent most of the all the time coming up with explanations about the past what can you really predict what can you really prove uh in a conventional scientific or in a conventional i have an idea that makes a prediction and it comes out the way i see it this uh is very troubling to me mr nye a new question outside of radiometric methods what scientific evidence supports your view of the age of the earth the age of the earth uh well the age of stars the let&amp;#39;s see radiometric evidence is pretty compelling also the deposition rates it was um it was uh lyell a a a um geologist who realized he my recollection he came up with the first use of the term deep time when people realize that the earth was 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&amp;#39;t be more than a hundred thousand or so years old but radioactivity was discovered radioactivity is why the earth is still as warm as it is it&amp;#39;s why the earth has been able to sustain its internal heat all these millennia and this discovery it&amp;#39;s something like this question if without radiometric dating how would you view the age of the earth to me it&amp;#39;s akin to the expression well if things were any other way things would be different this is to say that&amp;#39;s not how the world is radioactive radiometric dating does exist neutrons do become protons and that&amp;#39;s our level of understanding today the universe is accelerating these are all provable facts that there was a flood four thousand years ago is not provable in fact the evidence for me at least as a reasonable man is overwhelming that it couldn&amp;#39;t possibly have happened there&amp;#39;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 with steps theory and that is time mr hamm your response by the way and just want people to understand too you know 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 uh they dated meteorites and because they assumed meteorites were same age as the earth left over from the formation of the solar system that&amp;#39;s where it comes from people think they dated rocks on the earth yet the four and a half billion years that&amp;#39;s just not true and the the other point that i was making and i just put this slide back up because i happen 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&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s no absolute age dating method from scientific method because you can&amp;#39;t prove scientifically young or old 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 six thousand years ago uh the right sorry i missed that can you reconcile the speed at which continents are now drifting today to the rate they would have had to have traveled 6 000 years ago to reach where we are now i think that&amp;#39;s the question okay i i think i understand the question um actually this again illustrates exactly what i&amp;#39;m talking about in regard to historical science and observational science we can look at uh continents today and we have uh scientists have written papers about this on on our website i&amp;#39;m definitely not an expert in this area i don&amp;#39;t claim to be but there are scientists even dr andrew snelling our phd geologist has done a lot of research here too as well and 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 at the way it&amp;#39;s moving today the rate it&amp;#39;s moving that&amp;#39;s always been that way in the past see that&amp;#39;s an assumption that&amp;#39;s that&amp;#39;s the problem when it comes to understanding these things you can observe movement but then to assume that it&amp;#39;s always been like that in the past that&amp;#39;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 uh there was catastrophic breakup uh of the earth&amp;#39;s surface and what we&amp;#39;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 uh 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&amp;#39;s the same with the flood you can say well 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&amp;#39;s this emphasis on historical science and observational science and i would encourage people to go to our website and answers in genesis because we do have a number of papers in fact very technical papers dr john baumgardner is one who&amp;#39;s written some very extensive work dealing with this very issue on the basis of the bible of course we believe there&amp;#39;s one continent to start with because the waters were gathered together into one place so we do believe uh that the continent has split up but uh particularly the flood had a lot to do with that time on that uh mr nye response uh 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&amp;#39;s a bunch of clocks they&amp;#39;re not all going to say exactly the same thing do you think that they&amp;#39;re all wrong the reason that we acknowledge the rate at which continents are drifting apart one of the reasons is we see what&amp;#39;s called sea floor spreading in the mid-atlantic the earth&amp;#39;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 uh you can measure how fast the continents were spreading that&amp;#39;s how we do it on the outside as i said i lived in washington state when mount st helens exploded that&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s how we do it on the outside and this is a question for you mr nye but i guess i can put it to both of you one word answer please favorite color i will go along with most people and say green and it&amp;#39;s an irony that green plants reflect green light most of the light i said one more day most of the light from the sun is green but they reflect it it&amp;#39;s a mystery well can i can i have three words and you see had 300 you can have three okay observational science blue all right um we&amp;#39;re back to you uh mr nye how do you balance the theory of evolution with the second law of thermodynamics and i&amp;#39;d like to add a question here what is the second law of thermodynamics oh second law of thermodynamics is fantastic and i call the words of of eddington who said if you have a theory that disagrees with isaac newton that&amp;#39;s a great theory if you have a theory disagrees with relativity wow you&amp;#39;ve changed the world that&amp;#39;s great but if your theory disagrees with the second law of thermodynamics i can offer you no hope i can&amp;#39;t help you and the second law of thermodynamics basically is where you lose energy to heat this is why car engines are about 30 percent efficient that&amp;#39;s it thermodynamically that&amp;#39;s why you want the hottest uh 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 uh but the fundamental thing that this questioner has missed is the earth is not a closed system so there&amp;#39;s energy pouring in here from the sun if i may day and night because the night it&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;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 uh the second law of thermodynamics is a wonderful thing it has allowed us to have everything you see in this room because our power generation our power generation depends on the robust and extremely precise uh computation of how much energy is in burning fuel whether it&amp;#39;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 any response mr ham uh let me just say two things if i can if if a minute goes that fast along uh one is you know what here&amp;#39;s the 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&amp;#39;s how we have life matter by itself could never reduce life no matter what energy you have and you know even if you&amp;#39;ve got a dead stick you can have all the energy in the world and that dead stick it&amp;#39;s going to decay and it&amp;#39;s not going to produce life from a creationist perspective we certainly agree i mean uh before man sinned you know there was digestion and so on but because of the fall now things are running down god doesn&amp;#39;t hold everything together as he did uh back then so now we see uh in regard to the second law of thermodynamics we&amp;#39;d say it&amp;#39;s sort of in in a sense a bit out of control now compared to what it was originally which is why we have a running down universe and that&amp;#39;s time a new uh question for you mr ham hypothetically if evidence existed that caused you to have to admit that the earth was older than ten thousand 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 well i&amp;#39;ve been emphasizing all night you cannot ever prove using uh you know the scientific method in the present you can&amp;#39;t prove the age of the earth so you can never prove it&amp;#39;s old so there is no hypothetical because you can&amp;#39;t do that now we can certainly use methods in the present and making assumptions i mean creationists use methods that that change over time as i said there&amp;#39;s hundreds of physical processes uh that you can use but they set limits on the age of the universe but you can&amp;#39;t ultimately prove the age of the earth not from not using the scientific method you can&amp;#39;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 uh a young universe now i i&amp;#39;ve said to you before and i i admit again that the reason i believe in a young universe is because of the bible&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s nothing in observational science that contradicts that uh but the um as far as the age of the earth the age of the universe uh even when it comes to the fossil record that&amp;#39;s why i really challenge christians if you&amp;#39;re gonna believe in millions of years for the fossil record you&amp;#39;ve got a problem with the bible and that is that then you&amp;#39;ve got to have death and disease and suffering uh before sin so there is no hypothetical in regard to that you can&amp;#39;t prove scientifically the age of the earth or the universe bottom line mr knight well uh 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 him 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 are i think are not going to see eye to eye you said you asserted that life cannot come from something that&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s a waste you&amp;#39;re sure enough to uh claim that uh 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 a new question mr nye is there room for god in science 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&amp;#39;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 who doesn&amp;#39;t use email is there anybody here who doesn&amp;#39;t eat because we use information sent from satellites in space to plant seeds on our farms that&amp;#39;s how we&amp;#39;re able to feed 7.1 billion people where we used to barely be able to feed a billion so that&amp;#39;s what i see that&amp;#39;s what we have used science or the process the science for me is two things it&amp;#39;s the body of knowledge the atomic number of rubidium and it&amp;#39;s the process the means by which we make these discoveries so for me that&amp;#39;s not really that connected with your belief in a spiritual being or a higher power if you uh reconcile those two uh scientists the head of the national institutes of health is uh a devout christian there are billions of people in the world who are devoutly religious they&amp;#39;re ha they have to be compatible because those same people embrace science the exception is you mr ham that&amp;#39;s the problem for me you want us to take your word for what&amp;#39;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 uh 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 mr ham a response yeah i actually want to take a minute to address the question and uh 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 a lot of technology here at answers in genesis and i have email and probably had millions of them while i&amp;#39;m been speaking up here and satellites and what you said about you know the information we get hey i agree with all that see they&amp;#39;re the things that that that can be done in the present and that&amp;#39;s just like i showed you dr stewart burgess who invented that gear set uh for uh the satellite creationists can be a great scientist 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 uh the the uniformity of nature and that was a question i had for you where does that come from if the universe is here by natural processes uh and you know christianity and science the bible and science go hand in hand we love science but again you&amp;#39;ve got to understand inventing things that&amp;#39;s very different than talking about our origins two very different things mr ham a new question do you believe the entire bible is to be taken literally for example should people who touch pigskin i think it says here be stoned can men marry multiple women do i believe the entire bible should be taken literally well remember in my uh 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&amp;#39;s what you mean by literally i would say yes i take the bible naturally what do i mean by that well if it&amp;#39;s history as genesis is it&amp;#39;s written as typical historical narrative you take it as history if it&amp;#39;s uh poetry uh as we find in the psalms then you take it as poetry doesn&amp;#39;t mean it doesn&amp;#39;t teach truth uh but it&amp;#39;s not a cosmological account in the sense that that genesis is there&amp;#39;s there&amp;#39;s prophecy in in the bible um and there&amp;#39;s literature in the bible you know concerning future events and so on so if you take it as written naturally according to type of literature and and you let it speak to you in that way that&amp;#39;s uh how i take the bible it&amp;#39;s god&amp;#39;s revelation to man he used different people and the bible says that all scripture is inspired by god so god moved people by his spirit to write his words and and also there&amp;#39;s a lot of misunderstanding in regard to scripture in regard to the israelites i mean we have laws in our civil government here in america that the government sets well there are 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&amp;#39;s a misunderstanding of the old testament it&amp;#39;s a misunderstanding of the new testament and you know again it&amp;#39;s important to take the bible as a whole interpreting scripture scripture if it really is the word of god uh then there&amp;#39;s not going to be any contradiction which says not and by the way when men were married to multiple women there were lots of problems and uh the bible condemns that for what it is and the bible is very clear uh you know the bible is a real book there were people who did things that were not in court with scripture and it records this for us it helps you understand it&amp;#39;s a real book but marriage was one man for one woman jesus reiterated that in matthew 19 as i had uh in my talk and so those that did marry multiple women were wrong time there mr nye responds so it sounds to me just listening to you over the last two minutes that there&amp;#39;s certain parts of this document of the bible that you embrace literally in other parts you consider poetry so it sounds to me in those last two minutes like you&amp;#39;re going to take what you like interpret literally in other passages you&amp;#39;re going to you&amp;#39;re going to interpret as poetic or descriptions of human events all that aside i&amp;#39;ll just say scientifically or as a reasonable man it doesn&amp;#39;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 i&amp;#39;m not a theologian but we started this debate is the ken ham&amp;#39;s creation model viable does it hold water can it fly does it describe anything and i&amp;#39;m still looking for an answer and time on that uh mr and i here&amp;#39;s a new question i i believe this was uh miswritten here because they&amp;#39;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 of a higher power i think that&amp;#39;s what they&amp;#39;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 okay i i think you may have changed the question just a little bit it&amp;#39;s all good the word for word question is have you ever believed that evolution partook through way of evolution uh uh i think i thought let me introduce these ideas for mr ham to comment uh the idea uh that there&amp;#39;s a higher power that has driven the course of the universe events in the universe and our own existence is one that you cannot prove or disprove and this gets into this expression agnostic you can&amp;#39;t know i&amp;#39;ll i&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;d pick it up you would realize that it was created by somebody who was thinking ahead somebody with an organization chart with somebody at the top and he&amp;#39;d order screws from screw manufacturers and springs from spring manufacturers and glass crystals from crystal manufacturers but that&amp;#39;s not how nature works this is the fundamental insight in the explanation for living things that&amp;#39;s 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&amp;#39;m sure mr ham here at the facility you have an organization chart i imagine you&amp;#39;re at the top and it&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t make it falls away and this is compelling and wonderful and fills me with joy and is inconsistent with a top-down view and that&amp;#39;s time mr ham what uh bill nye needs to do for me is to show me 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&amp;#39;s why i brought up the example in my presentation of valensky&amp;#39;s experiments in regard to e coli and there were some that seemed to develop the ability to exist on citrate but as dr favich said from looking at his research he&amp;#39;s found that that information was already there it&amp;#39;s just a gene that switched on and off and so there is no example because you know information uh that&amp;#39;s there in in the genetic information of different uh animals plants and so on there&amp;#39;s no new function that can be added certainly great variation within a kind and that&amp;#39;s what we look at but you&amp;#39;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 a 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 uh any scientist out there christian or non-christian that is involved in inventing things involved in uh a scientific method is using creation they are because they&amp;#39;re borrowing from a christian worldview they&amp;#39;re using the laws of logic i keep emphasizing that i i want bill to to tell me in in in a view of the universe as a result of natural processes explain where the laws of logic came from why should we trust uh 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 clark maxwell michael faraday were creationists and as one of them said you know he&amp;#39;s thinking god&amp;#39;s thoughts after him and that that&amp;#39;s really modern science really came out of that thinking that we can do experiments today and we can do the same tomorrow we can trust the laws of logic we can trust the laws of nature and if we don&amp;#39;t teach our children correctly about this they&amp;#39;re not going to be innovative and they&amp;#39;re not going to be able to uh come up with inventions uh to to advance uh in our culture and so i i i think that the person was trying to get out that see you know there are lots of secularists out there doing work and they don&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s lots of creationists out there who publish people might know that they&amp;#39;re creationists because the topic doesn&amp;#39;t specifically pertain to creation uh versus evolution but there&amp;#39;s lots of them out there if i go to our website there&amp;#39;s a whole list there of scientists who are creationists who are out there doing great work in this world uh and helping to advance technology mr knight uh there&amp;#39;s a reason that i don&amp;#39;t accept your the kenham model of creation is that it has no predictive quality as you would as you touched on and something that i&amp;#39;ve always found troubling you it sounds as though and next time around you can correct me it sounds as though you believe your worldview 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&amp;#39;t know how much time you spent talking to strangers but they they&amp;#39;re not sanguine about that to have you tell them that they are inherently lost or misguided it&amp;#39;s very troubling and you say there are no examples in nature there are countless examples of how the process of science makes predictions mr nye since evolution teaches that man is evolving and growing smarter over time how can you explain the numerous evidences of man&amp;#39;s high intelligence in the past hang on uh there&amp;#39;s no evidence that men or humans are getting smarter no uh especially if you ever met my old boss no it&amp;#39;s that what happens in evolution and there&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s a british word that was used in the middle 1800s it&amp;#39;s survival of the fittest and in this usage it doesn&amp;#39;t mean that 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 hum the evidence of humans is everywhere james cameron just made another trip to the bottom of the ocean 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 a 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 one where more people were killed by the flu then were killed by the combatants in world war one that is a troubling and remarkable fact if the right germ shows up we&amp;#39;ll be taken out we&amp;#39;ll be eliminated being smarter is not a necessary consequence of evolution so far it seems to be the way things are going because the remarkable advantage it gives to us over we can control our environment and even change it as we&amp;#39;re doing today apparently by accident so everybody just take a little while and grasp this fundamental idea it&amp;#39;s how you fit in with nature around you so as the world change as it did for example the ancient dinosaurs they were taken out by a worldwide fireball apparently caused by an impactor that&amp;#39;s the best area we have and we are the result of people of organisms that live through that catastrophe it&amp;#39;s not necessarily smarter it&amp;#39;s how you fit in with your environment mr ham a response i remember uh at university one of my professors was very excited to give us some evidence for evolution he said look at this here&amp;#39;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 uh they&amp;#39;re evolving because uh now the ones that are living there their ancestors had eyes and now these ones are blind and i i remember talking about first but wait a minute now they can&amp;#39;t do something that they could do before yeah they might have an advantage in this sense in a in a situation that&amp;#39;s dark like that those with eyes might have got diseases and died out those who had mutations for no eyes are the ones that survived it&amp;#39;s not survival of the fittest it&amp;#39;s survival of those who survive and it&amp;#39;s survival of those that have the information in that circumstance to survive but it&amp;#39;s not you&amp;#39;re not getting new information you&amp;#39;re not getting new function there&amp;#39;s no example of that at all so we need to correctly understand uh these things all right um we&amp;#39;re down to our final question here which i&amp;#39;ll give to both of you and in the interest of fairness here because it is a question to both of you let&amp;#39;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 have the first word mr and i will have the last word the question is what is the one thing more than anything else upon which you base your belief well it&amp;#39;s the one thing upon anything else which i base my belief well again to summarize the things that i&amp;#39;ve been saying and there is a book called the bibles very unique books very different any other book out there in fact i don&amp;#39;t know of any other religion that has a book uh that starts off by telling you that there&amp;#39;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 the origin of dry land and the origin of plants in 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&amp;#39;s a very very specific book and it gives us an account of a global flood in the history and 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&amp;#39;s son stepped in history tonight on a cross be raised from the dead and offers a free gift of salvation because the history is true that&amp;#39;s why the message based in history is true i actually went through some predictions and listed others and there&amp;#39;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 babel yeah different people groups different languages they have flood legends very similar to the bible creation legends similar to the bible there&amp;#39;s so much you can look at and prophecy and so on and most of all as i said you the bible says if you come to god believing that he is he&amp;#39;ll reveal himself to you you will know if you search after truth you really want god to show you as you search up the silver and gold he will show you he will reveal himself to you mr knight would you repeat the question the question is what is the one thing more than anything else upon which you base your belief as my old professor carl sagan said so often when you&amp;#39;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 had never seen before it fills me to joy to 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&amp;#39;s astonishing i admit i see your faces that we have come to be because of the universe&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;s at stake here if we abandon all that we&amp;#39;ve learned our ancestors what they&amp;#39;ve learned about the about nature and our place in it if we abandon the process by which we know it if we astute if we let go of all 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 out competed by other countries other economies now that would be okay i guess but i was born here i&amp;#39;m a patriot and 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 one tiny bit of important housekeeping for everyone here the county is now under a level two snow emergency drive home carefully you&amp;#39;ll have a lot to talk about but drive carefully this debate will be archived at debatelive.org that&amp;#39;s debatelive.org one word it will be found at that site for several days so you can encourage friends and family to watch and take it over thanks so much to thanks so much to mr nye and to mr ham for an excellent discussion i&amp;#39;m tom foreman thank you good night from petersburg kentucky and the creation museum [Music] you

Transcript for:Debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on Creationism and Evolution

Transcript for:
Debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on Creationism and Evolution