Watch Bill Nye and Ken Ham Clash Over Creationism Live

New submitter Max McDaniel writes to point out this live stream of the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham concerning the viability of creationism in a scientific age taking place at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky (of which Ham is the founder). Note: the presentation is scheduled for 7 p.m. Eastern; the live feed is likely to remain less interesting until then.

Richard Dawkins has an opinion on this

[protest_boy]

Why I won't debate creationists:
http://old.richarddawkins.net/... [richarddawkins.net]

I couldn't agree more.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[mark-t]

The answer to that question, from a creationist statndpoint, is the same reason that God allegedly created the first human beings as fully formed adults. Merely minutes old in actuality, but by all outward appearances fully matured, as if they had really grown up from childhood. To a hypothetical visitor from the future who was accustomed only to what they understood as the normal passage of time, even mere weeks after creation, it would invariably appear that things had existed for much longer than they actually had... but that's only because that's all that person knows, because they weren't actually around at the beginning to see it all unfold... not out of any real sense on God's part to deceive anyone, as it were.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[cold fjord]

Why if the universe is ~6000 yr old ... Why would the Creator be so deceptive to create 6000 yr ago ....

You're mistaken. The Bible doesn't teach that the universe is 6,000 year old. [slashdot.org]

Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here

[tripleevenfall]

Ken Ham is well spoken and should provide a reasonable point-counterpoint.

I don't think that the idea that we should not wrestle with pigs is the attitude of a responsible scientist. Eventually, all conventional wisdom needs to be challenged. At one time, you'd have been laughed out of a room of distinguished scientists for rejecting geocentricity. An idea has nothing to fear from examination if it is sound.

Re:Can a creationist explain me?

[Voyager529]

A few answers here, starting with the foundational ones...

First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe. We have our fundies like everybody else, but the fact of the matter is that even the more rational creationists will disagree about creationism. From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine. Genesis 1:1 is primary doctrine: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". This is agreed upon by basically everyone in the creationist camp - that everything in the known universe was created by God.

Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers. This is an important distinction to make, because, if I may get on my soapbox for a quick moment, Slashdot seems to correlate "creationist" with "6000 years, fossils-meant-to-test-us, God gives 'Murica the right to bear arms" fundies, as opposed to "an individual who believes that there is a Supreme Deity in charge of causing the universe to exist". Simply because Biblical creationists don't have every single answer regarding God's implementation as to how He constructed the universe, and because we don't all 100% agree on the possible ways that God could have done it...doesn't mean that everyone who believes Genesis 1:1 is a completely irrational fundie...okay I'll get back off my soap box and actually get on with answering the question...

Biblical creationism based on Genesis 1 leaves a few avenues of possibility. First, the word "day" is frequently pointed to as being suspect in the first, second, and third "days" of the creation account...because the earth didn't exist until the fourth day. The argument that the term 'day' is not a literal 24 hour period is substantiated by the fact that the original Hebrew language used for the first day doesn't use the term "first day", but "day one", indicating that it was not compared to the other days in those terms. It's entirely possible that the first three days were entirely different units of time. Additional questions raised in this regard is the fact that the Bible repeatedly refers to God as an Entity that is not bound by time, and thus time itself being a creation...yet 'time' is not listed as one of the things that God created, nor gravity, magnetism, or the forces of Newtonian physics, or quantum physics. Since we understand that all of these laws manipulate time given sufficient amounts of these forces, there's plenty of reasons to believe that the notion of a 'day' was not a 24 hour period. Those on the 6-literal-day side of the debate point to the fact that the word 'day', even in the Hebrew, is used solely for the 24-hour time span, and never for an 'age' or any other indiscriminate span of time, so the authors of the Bible could have used the word 'age' if so directed by God, but did not. Whether human error, 'poetic license', or because God builds universes in a week...is amongst the points of secondary doctrine about which Ken Ham and Kent Hovind have gone back and forth about repeatedly.

With regards to the question about the ~6,000 light-year range of light we'd expect to see, the best answers I can personally give is two fold:
1. If we're assuming that 24 hour days are correct, then one could argue that it's no more difficult for God to make photons-in-transit from stars than it would be for Him to create the stars themselves. For bonus points, consider that 'light' was the very first thing created. To answer the question of "why would He do that", all I can say is "I'm trying to figure out the whole lice thing myself..."
2. If we're assuming 6 'ages' of significant time, then one could argue that there would be plenty of time between the formation of the stars and the creation of mankind, so the light-in-transit could easily have a few million year head start to work with.

The "why" is still my personal speculation

Ask for proof

[nobuddy]

Please point us at the Bible passage that says the Earth is 6000 years old.

hint: you are in for a rude shock. The bible never makes this claim anywhere. It is an entirely man-made claim.
http://www.oldearth.org/questi... [oldearth.org]

Re:Went over my head.

[Sique]

Actually, Galileo Galilei had the explicit permission from the Pope to explore and to research a heliocentric view of the sky, provided he didn't call his own results the absolute truth and any other view false. Also, Galileo Galileis works were never listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, thus the Catholic church never viewed his worldview as heretical. On the other hand, they had to be published with a comment regarding their validity, basicly a disclaimer that this book contains the view of the author, which is not necessarily the accepted doctrine of the Catholic church.

In the 17th century, the Catholic church was very interested in new astronomic research and results, because this was the Age of Discovery, and astronomy was important for the explorers to navigate and to cartograph the world. Everything that improved upon the results of the Ptolemaic view of the solar system was welcome. Recalculating of the Equinoxe lead to the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 in all Catholic states. The results of Copernicus, of Kepler and Tycho Brahe were considered pretty interesting, provided they allowed for a better way to calculate the stellar and planetary positions. When Ole Rømer in 1676 was able to show and calculate, that light has an finite speed using the Galilean Moons, he didn't get any ban from the Catholic church - this was three decades after Galilei's conviction.