Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham (Full Transcript)

Mr. Ham is the man behind the popular high-tech Creation Museum where we’re holding this debate. The museum has had two million visitors in six years and has attracted much of the world’s media.

The Answers in Genesis website is well trafficked with two million visitors alone last month. Mr. Ham is also a best-selling author, a much in-demand speaker, and the host of a daily radio feature carried on 700-plus stations. This is his second public debate on evolution and creation. The first was at Harvard in the 1990s. Mr. Ham is a native of Australia. He earned a bachelor’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.

KEN HAM: Well, good evening. I know that not everyone watching this debate will necessarily agree with what I have to say, but I’m an Aussie and live over here in America and they tell me I have an accent, and so it doesn’t matter what I say. Some people tell me we just like to hear you saying it. So I hope you enjoy me saying it anyway.

Well, the debate topic is this: Is Creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?

You know, when this was first announced on the internet, there were lots of statements like this one from the Richard Dawkins Foundation: Scientists should not debate creationists, period.

And this one from one of the discovery.com websites: Should scientists debate creationists?

You know, right here I believe there’s a gross misrepresentation in our culture. We’re seeing people being indoctrinated to believe that creationists can’t be scientists. I believe it’s all a part of secularists hijacking the word science.

I want you to meet a modern-day scientist who is a biblical creationist.

(Video Clip: My name is Stuart Burgess. I’m a professor of engineering design at Bristol University in the UK. I have published over a hundred and thirty scientific papers on the science of design in engineering and biological systems. From my research work, I have found that the scientific evidence fully supports creationism as the best explanation to origins. I’ve also designed major parts of spacecraft launched by ESA and NASA.)

So here is a biblical creationist, he is a scientist, he is also an inventor. And I want young people to understand that.

You know, the problem I believe is this. We need to define terms correctly. We need to define creation, evolution in regard to origins and we need to define science. And in this opening statement, I want to concentrate on dealing with the word science.

I believe the word science has been hijacked by secularists. Now, what is science? Well, the origin of the word comes from the classical Latin scientia which means to know. And if you look up a dictionary, it’ll say science means state of knowing, knowledge. But there’s different types of knowledge and I believe this is where the confusion lies.

There’s experimental or observational science as we call it. That’s using the scientific method: observation, measurement, experiment, testing. That’s what produces our technology: computers, spacecraft, jet planes, smoke detectors, looking at DNA, antibiotics, medicines and vaccines.

You see, all scientists whether creationists or evolutionists actually have the same observational or experimental science. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a creationist or an evolutionist. You can be a great scientist. For instance, he’s an atheist who is a great scientist, Craig Venter, one of the first researchers to sequence the human genome.

Or Dr Raymond Damadian. He is a man who invented the MRI scanner and revolutionized medicine. He’s a biblical creationist.

But I want us to also understand molecules to man evolution I believe has nothing to do with developing technology. You see, when we’re talking about origins, we’re talking about the past. We’re talking about our origin. We weren’t there. You can’t observe that, whether it’s molecules to man evolution or whether it’s a creation account.

When you’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, the origins or historical science is based upon man’s ideas about the past, for instance, the ideas of Darwin. And our research has found that public school textbooks are using the same word science for observational science and historical science. They arbitrarily define science as naturalism and outlaws 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 revolutionists teach that all life developed by natural processes from some primordial form, that man is just an evolved animal which has great bearing on how we view life and death.

For instance, as Bill states…It’s very hard to accept for many of us that when you die it’s over.

But you see, the Bible gives a totally different account of origins, of who we are, where we came from, the meaning of life and our future. That through one man sin entered the world and death through sin (Romans 5:12), 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. (John 3:16)

So, is creation a Bible model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?

I say the creation evolution debate is a conflict between two philosophical worldviews based on two different accounts of origins or science beliefs, and creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today’s modern scientific era.

MODERATOR: And that is time. I have the unenviable job of being the timekeeper here. I’m like the referee in football that you don’t like, but I will periodically, if either one of our debaters runs over on anything, I will stop them in the name of keeping it fair for all. Mr. Ham, thank you for your comments.

Now it’s Mr. Nye’s turn for a five-minute opening statement. Mr. Nye.

BILL NYE: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. I very much appreciate you including me in your facility here.

Now, looking around the room, I think I see just one bow tie. Is that right? Just one. I’m telling you, once you try it. Oh, there’s, yes, two. That’s great.

I started wearing bow ties when I was young in high school. My father showed me — his father showed him. And there’s a story associated with this, which I find remarkable.

My grandfather was in the rotary, and he attended a convention in Philadelphia. And even in those days, at the turn of the last century, people rented tuxedos. And the tuxedo came with a bow tie, untied bow tie. So he didn’t know how to tie it, so wasn’t sure what to do. 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, when he wanted to have the tie on, wasn’t sure who he was getting into, so he is said to have lain on the bed, and the guy tied a perfect bow tie knot. And quite easily, my grandfather said, Thank you. Why’d I have to lie down on the bed?

The guy said, I’m an undertaker.

That’s really the only way I know how to do it.

Now, that story was presented to me as a true story. It may or may not be, but it gives you something to think about, and it’s certainly something to remember.

So here tonight, we’re going to have two stories, and we can compare Mr. Ham’s story to the story from what I will call the outside, from mainstream science.

The question tonight is, Does Ken Ham’s creation model hold up? Is it viable?

So let me ask you all, what would you be doing if you weren’t here tonight? That’s right, you’d be home watching CSI, CSI Petersburg. Is it coming? I think it’s coming. And on CSI, there is no distinction made between historical science and observational science. These are constructs unique to Mr. Ham. We don’t normally have these anywhere in the world except here.

Natural laws that applied in the past apply now. That’s why they’re natural laws. That’s why we embrace them. That’s how we made all these discoveries that enabled all this remarkable technology.

So CSI is a fictional show, but it’s based absolutely on real people doing real work. When you go to a crime scene and find evidence, you have clues about the past, and you trust those clues, and you embrace them, and you move forward to convict somebody.

Mr. Ham and his followers have this remarkable view of a worldwide flood that somehow influenced everything that we observe in nature, a 500-foot wooden boat, eight zookeepers for 14,000 individual animals, every land plant in the world underwater for a full year. I ask us all, is that really reasonable?

You’ll hear a lot about the Grand Canyon, I imagine, also, which is a remarkable place, and it has fossils. And the fossils in the Grand Canyon are found in layers. There 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’s my concern. What keeps the United States ahead, what makes the United States a world leader is our technology, our new ideas, our innovations. If we continue to eschew science, eschew the process and try to divide science into observational science and historic science, we are not going to move forward. We will not embrace natural laws. We will not make discoveries. We will not invent and innovate and stay ahead.

So if you ask me if Ken Ham’s creation model is viable, I say no. It is absolutely not viable.

So stay with us over the next period and you can compare my evidence to his. Thank you all very much.

MODERATOR: 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. Ham, you’re up.

KEN HAM: Well, the debate topic was, is creation a viable model of origins in today’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’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 or observational science briefly and that both creationists and evolutionists can be great scientists, for instance. I mentioned Craig Venter, a biologist. He’s an atheist and he’s a great scientist. He was one of the first researchers to sequence 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.

(Video Clip: Hi, my name is Dr. Raymond Damadian. I am a young earth creation scientist and believe that God created the world in six 24-hour days just as recorded in the book of Genesis. By God’s grace and the devoted prayers of my godly mother-in-law, I invented the MRI scanner in 1969. The idea that scientists who believe the earth is 6,000 years old cannot do real science is simply wrong.)

He’s most adamant about that and actually he revolutionized medicine. He’s a biblical creationist and I encourage children to follow people like that and make them their heroes.

Let me introduce you to another biblical creation scientist.

(Video Clip: My name is Danny Faulkner. I received my Ph.D. 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’m a stellar astronomer. That means my primary interest is stars, but I’m particularly interested in the study of eclipsing binary stars. And I’ve published many articles in the astronomy literature, places such as the Astrophysical Journal, the Astronomical Journal, and the Observatory. There is nothing in observational astronomy that contradicts a recent creation.)

I also mentioned Dr. Stuart Burgess, professor of engineering design at Bristol University in England. Now he invented, 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, the 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’s see what he says about scientists believing in creation.

(Video Clip: 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’s a real problem today. We need to have freedom to be able to speak on these topics. I just want to say by the way that non-Christian scientists are really borrowing from the Christian worldview anyway to carry out their experimental observational science. Think about it.

When they’re doing observational science using the scientific method, they have to assume the laws of logic, they have to assume the laws of nature, they have to assume the uniformity of nature. I mean think about it. If the universe came about by natural processes, where did 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. But again, there’s a confusion here, there’s a misunderstanding here. People by and large have not been taught to look at what you believe about the past as different to what you’re observing in the present. You don’t observe the past directly, even when you think about the creation account. I mean we can’t observe God creating, we can’t observe the creation of Adam. We admit that. We’re willing to admit our beliefs about the past.

But see, what you see in the present is very different. Even some public school textbooks actually, well they sort of acknowledge the difference between historical and observational science. Here is an earth science textbook that’s used in public schools and we read this: In contrast to physical geology, the aim of historical geology is to understand earth’s long history.

And then they make the statement: historical geology, so we’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’re assuming that that’s always happened in the past and we’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.

Let me illustrate it this way. If Bill Nye and I went to the Grand Canyon, we could agree that that’s a Coconino Sandstone in the Hermit Shale and there’s the boundary. They’re sitting one on top of the other. We could agree on that.

Do you know what we would disagree on? I mean, we could even analyse the minerals and agree on that. But we would disagree on how long it took to get there. But see, none of us saw the sandstone or the shale being laid down. There’s a supposed 10 million year gap there. But I don’t see a gap, but that might be different to what Bill Nye would see.

But see, there’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 Centre a number of years ago, I met creationists and evolutionists who were both working on the Hubble telescope. They agreed on how to build the Hubble telescope. Do you know what they disagreed on? Well, they disagreed on how to interpret the data the telescope obtained in regard to the age of the universe.

And we could go on and talk about lots of other similar sorts of things. For instance, I’ve heard Bill Nye talk about how a smoke detector works using the radioactive element americium. And you know what? I totally agree with him on that. We agree how it works. We agree how radioactivity enables that to work.

But if you’re then going to use radioactive elements and talk about the age of the earth, you’ve got a problem. Because you weren’t there. We’ve got to understand parent elements, daughter elements and so on. We could agree whether you’re a creationist or an evolutionist on the technology to put the rover on Mars. But we’re going to disagree on how to interpret the origin of Mars. I mean, there are some people that believe there was even a global flood on Mars and there’s no liquid water on Mars.

But, you know, we’re going to disagree maybe on our interpretation of origins. And you can’t prove either way because, not from an observational science perspective, because we’ve only got the present. Creationists and evolutionists both work on medicines and vaccines. You see, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a creationist or an evolutionist. All scientists have the same experimental 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-to-man evolution?

Now, here’s another important fact. Creationists and evolutionists all have the same evidence. Bill Nye and I have the same Grand Canyon. We don’t disagree on that. We have the same fish fossils. 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’s not the evidences that are different. It’s a battle over the same evidence in regard to how we interpret the past. And you know why that is? Because it’s really a battle over worldviews and starting points. It’s a battle over philosophical worldviews and starting points but the same evidence.

Now, I admit my starting point is that God is the ultimate authority. But if someone doesn’t accept that, then man has to be the ultimate authority. And that’s really the difference when it comes down to it.

You see, I’ve been emphasising the difference between historical origin science, knowledge about the past when you weren’t there, and we need to understand that we weren’t there. So experimental or observational science, using your five senses in the present, the scientific method, what you can directly observe, test, repeat. There’s a big difference between those two. And that’s not what’s being taught in our public schools and that’s why kids aren’t being taught to think critically and correctly about the origins issue.

But you know, it’s also important to understand when talking about creation and evolution, both involve historical science and observational science. You see, the role of observational science is this, it can be used to confirm or otherwise one’s historical science based on one’s starting point.

Now, when you think about the debate topic and what I affirmed concerning creation, if our origins or historical science based on the Bible, the Bible’s account of origins is true, then there should be predictions from this that we can test using observational science, and there are.

For instance, based on the Bible, we’d expect to find evidence confirming an intelligence produce life. We’d expect to find evidence confirming after their kind. The Bible says God made kinds of animals and plants after their kind, implying each kind produces its own, not that one kind changes into another.

You’d expect to find evidence confirming a global flood of Noah’s day, evidence confirming one race of humans, because we all go back to Adam and Eve, biologically that would mean there’s one race. Evidence confirming the Tower of Babel, that God gave different languages. Evidence confirming a young universe. Now, I can’t go through all of those, but a couple of them we’ll look at briefly.

After their kind, evidence confirming that. In the Creation Museum, we have a display featuring replicas actually of Darwin’s finches, they’re called Darwin’s finches. Darwin collected finches from the Galápagos 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 Galápagos, he actually pondered these things, and how do you explain this? And in his notes actually, he came up with this diagram here, a tree, and he actually said, ‘I think.’ So he was talking about different species and maybe those species came from some common ancestor.

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 that would have to come from.

See, Darwin wasn’t just thinking about species. Darwin had a much bigger picture in mind. When you look at the Origin of Species and read that book, you’ll find he made this statement: From such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may have been developed, and if we admit this, we must likewise admit that all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form. So he had in mind what we today know as an evolutionary tree of life, that all life has arisen from some primordial form.

Now, when you consider the classification system: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, we would say as creationists, and we have many creation scientists who have 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’s one dog kind, there’s one cat kind, even though you have different genera, different species. That would mean, by the way, you didn’t need anywhere near the number of animals on the ark as people think. You wouldn’t need all the species of dogs, just two, not all species of cats, just two.

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’re saying, look, there’s great variation in the genetics of dogs and finches and so on, and so over time, particularly after Noah’s flood, you’d expect if there were two dogs, for instance, you could end up with different species of dogs because there’s an incredible amount of variability in the genes of any creature.

And so you’d expect these different species up here, but there’s limits. Dogs will always be dogs, finches will always be finches.

Now, as a creationist, I maintain that observational science actually confirms this model based on the Bible. For instance, take dogs. In a scientific paper dated January 2014, that’s this year, scientists working at the University of California stated this: ‘We provide several lines of evidence supporting a single origin for dogs and disfavouring alternative models in which dog lineages arise separately from geographically distinct wolf populations.’

And they put this diagram in the paper. By the way, that diagram is very, very similar to this diagram that creationists proposed based upon the creation account in Genesis. In other words, you have a common dog ancestor that gives rise to the different species of dogs, and that’s exactly what we’re saying here.

Now, in the Creation Museum, we actually show the finches here, and you see the finches with their different beaks beside dog skulls, different species of dogs. By the way, there’s more variation in the dog skulls here than there are in these finches. Yet the dogs, well, that’s never used as an example of evolution, but the finches are. Particularly in the public school textbooks, students are taught, ah, see the changes that are occurring here?

And here’s another problem that we’ve got. Not only has the word science been hijacked by secularists, I believe the word evolution has been hijacked by secularists. The word evolution has been hijacked using what I call a bait and switch. Let me explain to you.

The word evolution is being used in public school textbooks, and we often see it in documentaries and so on. It’s used for observable changes that we would agree with, and then used for unobservable changes such as molecules to man.

Let me explain to you what’s really going on, because I was a science teacher in the public schools, and I know what the students were taught, and I checked the public school textbooks anyway to know what they’re taught. See, students are taught today, look, there’s all these different animals, plants, but they’re all part of this great big tree of life that goes back to some primordial form. And look, we see changes, changes in finches, changes in dogs, and so on.

Now, we don’t deny the changes, you see that. You see different species of finches, different species of dogs, but then they put it all together in this evolutionary tree, but that’s what you don’t observe. You don’t observe that. That’s belief there. That’s their historical science. I would say it was wrong.

But what you do observe, you do observe different species of dogs, different species of finches, but then there are limits, and you don’t see one kind changing into another. Actually, we’re told that if you teach creation in the public schools as teaching religion, if you teach evolution as science, and I’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’t observe this tree. Actually, it’s the public school textbooks that are teaching a belief and posing it on students, and they need to be teaching them observational science to understand the reality of what’s happening.

Now, what we found is that public school textbooks present the evolutionary tree as science, but reject the creation orchard as religion. But observational science confirms the creation orchard. So public school textbooks are rejecting observational science and imposing a naturalistic religion on students. The word evolution has been hijacked using a bait-and-switch to indoctrinate students to accept evolutionary belief as observational science.

Let me introduce you to another scientist, Richard Lenski, Michigan State University. He’s a great scientist. He’s known for culturing E. coli in the lab. And he found there was some E. coli that actually seemed to develop the ability to grow on citrate substrate. But Richard Lenski is here mentioned in this book, and it’s called evolution in the lab. So the ability to grow on citrate is said to be evolution. And there are those that say, hey, this is against the creationists.

For instance, Jerry Coyne from University of Chicago says, Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists. He says the thing I like most is 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? Is it really seeing complex traits evolving? What does it mean that some of these bacteria are able to grow on citrate?

Let me introduce you to another biblical creationist who is a scientist.

(Video Clip: Hi, my name is Dr. Andrew Fabich. I got my Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in microbiology. I teach at Liberty University, and I do research on E. coli in the intestine. I’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 in the past year in the journals Nature, Science Translational Medicine, Public Library of Science, Public Library of Science Genetics, cited regularly in those journals. And while I was taught nothing but evolution, I don’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 on citrate, I don’t deny that it grows on citrate, but it’s not any kind of new information. The information is already there, and it’s just a switch that gets turned on and off. That’s what they reported, and there’s nothing new.)

These students need to be told what’s really going on here. Certainly there’s change, but it’s not change necessary for molecules to man.

Now, we could look at other predictions. What about evidence confirming one race?

Well, when we look at the human population, we see lots of differences. But based on Darwin’s ideas of human evolution as presented in The Descent of Man, I mean Darwin did teach in The Descent of Man, there were lower races and higher races. Would you believe that back in the 1900s, one of the most popular biology textbooks used in the public schools in America taught this: ‘At the present time, there exist upon earth five races or varieties of man, and finally the highest type of all the Caucasians represented by the civilised white inhabitants of Europe and America.’

Can you imagine if that was in the public schools today? And yet, that’s what was taught, but it was based on Darwin’s ideas that are wrong. You have a wrong foundation, you’re going to have a wrong worldview.

Now, had they started from the Bible and from the creation account in the Bible, what does it teach? Well, we’re all descendants of Adam and Eve. We go through the Tower of Babel, different languages, so different people groups formed, distinct characteristics, but we’d expect, we’d say, you know what, that means there’s biologically only one race of humans.

Well, I mentioned Dr. Venter before, and he was a researcher with the Human Genome Project, and you’ll remember in the year 2000, this was headline news, and what we read was this: They had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome and unanimously declared there is only one race: the human race. Wow, who would have guessed?

But you see, there we have observational science confirming the creation account, not confirming at all Darwin’s ideas.

Now, there’s much more that could be said on each of these topics. Obviously, you can’t do that in a short time like this, and you could do a lot more research. I suggest you visit our website at Answers in Genesis for a lot more information.

So, the debate topic, is creation a viable model of origins in today’s scientific era? I said we need to define the terms, and particularly the term science and the term evolution, and I believe we need to understand how they’re being used to impose an anti-God religion on generations of unsuspecting students.

You see, I keep emphasising we do need to understand the difference between experimental or observational science and historical science. And you know what? The secularists don’t like me doing this because they don’t want to admit that there’s a belief aspect to what they’re saying, and there is, and they can’t get away from it.

Let me illustrate this with a statement from Bill Nye: ‘But you can show the Earth is not flat. You can show the Earth is not 10,000 years old.’

By the way, I agree. You can show the Earth is not flat. There’s a video from the Galileo spacecraft showing the Earth, and speed it up of course, but spinning, you can see it’s a sphere. You can observe that. You can’t observe the age of the Earth. You don’t see that.

You see, again, I emphasise there’s a big difference between historical science talking about the past and observational science talking about the present. And I believe what’s happening is this, that students are being indoctrinated by the confusion of terms, the hijacking of the word science and the hijacking of the word evolution in a bait and switch.

Let me illustrate further with this video clip, because here I assert that Bill Nye is equating observational science with historical science, and I also say it’s not a mystery when you understand the difference.

“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’re able to hold these two worldviews, and this is a mystery.”

Actually, I suggest to you it’s not a mystery. You see, when I’m talking about antibiotics, aspirin, smoke detectors, jet planes, that’s Ken Ham, the observational science bloke. I’m an Australian. We call guys blokes, okay?

But when you’re talking about creation and thousands of years of the age of the Earth, that’s Ken Ham, the historical science bloke. I’m willing to admit that.

Now, when Bill Nye 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’s Bill Nye, the observational science guy, but when he’s talking about evolution and millions of years, I’m challenging him that that’s Bill Nye, the historical science guy, and I challenge the evolutionists to admit the belief aspects of their particular worldview.

Now, at the Creation Museum, we’re only too willing to admit our beliefs based upon the Bible, but we also teach people the difference between beliefs and what one can actually observe and experiment with in the present. I believe we’re teaching people to think critically and to think in the right terms about science. I believe it’s the creationists that should be educating the kids out there because we’re teaching them the right way to think.

You know, we admit our origins of historical science is based upon the Bible, but I’m just challenging evolutionists to admit the belief aspects of evolution and be upfront about the difference here. As I said, I’m only too willing to admit my historical science based on the Bible.

And let me further go on and define the term creation as we use it. By creation, we mean, here at Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, we mean the account based on the Bible. Yes, I take Genesis as literal history, as Jesus did. And here at the Creation Museum, we walk people through that history. We walk them through creation, a perfect creation, that 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 you happen to have billions of dead things before man sinned.

And then the catastrophe of Noah’s flood. If there was a global flood, you’d expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. I had to say that because a lot of our supporters would want me to. And what do you find? Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.

Confusion, the Tower of Babel, God gave different languages, so you get different people groups. So this is the geological, astronomical, anthropological, biological history as recorded in the Bible. So this is concerning what happened in the past that explains the present.

And then of course, that God’s Son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the God-Man, to die on the cross, be raised from the dead, and one day there’s going to be a new heavens and a new earth to come.

And you know, not only is this an understanding of history to explain the geology, biology, astronomy, and so on to connect the present to the past, but it’s also a foundation for our whole worldview. For instance, in Matthew 19 when Jesus was asked about marriage, He said, ‘Have you not read? He who made them at the beginning made them male and female?’ and said, ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they will be one flesh.’ He quoted from Genesis as literal history, Genesis 1 and 2. God invented marriage, by the way, that’s where marriage comes from, and it’s to be a man and a woman.

And not only marriage, ultimately every single biblical doctrine of theology, directly or indirectly, is founded in Genesis.

Why is there sin in the world? Genesis. Why is there death? Genesis. Why do we wear clothes? Genesis. Why did Jesus die on the cross? Genesis. It’s a very important book. It’s foundational to all Christian doctrine.

And you see, when we look at that, what I call the Seven C’s of history that we walk people through here at the museum, think about how it all connects together. A perfect creation, it’ll be perfect again in the future. Sin and death enter the world, that’s why God’s Son died on the cross, and to conquer death and offer a free gift to salvation.

The flood of Noah’s day, a reminder that the flood was a judgement because of man’s wickedness, but at the same time a message of God’s grace and salvation, as Noah and his family had to go through a door to be saved, so we need to go through a door to be saved. Jesus Christ said, I am the door, by Me if any man enter in, he’ll be saved.

And we make no apology about the fact that what we’re on about is this: If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart God has raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved. (Romans 10:9)

Now, as soon as I say that, 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 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’s hand in the creation of the universe, against academics, stop right there. Notice, creationists, academics, creationists can’t be academics, creationists can’t be scientists. See, it’s a way things are worded out there. It’s an indoctrination that’s going on.

If you worry about religious and political ideology trumping scientific fact, wait a minute, what do I mean by science? Are you talking about what you observe or are you talking about your beliefs about the past?

Now, Kathy Miller is the president of the Texas Freedom Network and she’s vocally spoken out. She’s spoken out about this textbook battle there in Texas and the mission statement of the organisation she’s president of says, The Texas Freedom Network advances a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the religious right.

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’re imposing the religion of naturalism on generations of students. They’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’s more than just science or evolution or creation. It’s about who is the authority in this world, man or God. If you start with naturalism, then what about morals? Who decides right and wrong? Well, it’s subjective.

Marriage, well, whatever you want it to be. Get rid of old people, I mean, why not? I mean, they’re just animals, they’re costing us a lot of money. Abortion, get rid of spare cats, get rid of spare kids, we’re all animals.

But if you start from God’s Word, there are moral absolutes, God decides right and wrong. Marriage, one man and one woman, sanctity of life, we care for old people, they’re made in the image of God. Life begins at fertilisation, so abortion is killing a human being.

We do see the collapse of Christian morality in our culture and increasing moral relativism because generations of kids are being taught the religion of naturalism and that the Bible can’t be trusted. And so again I say, creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today’s modern scientific era.

You know what, I’m a science teacher. I want to see kids taught science. I love science. I want to see more Dr. Damadians in the world. You know, if we teach them the whole universe is 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’re looking at the creation in regard to how you develop technology because if they look at it as just random processes, that could totally influence the way they think.

If they understand it was a perfect world marred by sin, that could have a great 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’s a God who created them, who loves them, who died on the cross for them and that they’re special. They’re made in the image of God.

MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Ham. We applaud Mr. Ham’s presentation. And, you know, it did occur to me when you had my old friend Larry King up there, you could have just asked him. He’s been around a long time. He’s a smart guy. He could probably answer for all of us.

Now, let’s all be attentive to Mr. Nye as he gives us his 30-minute presentation.

BILL NYE: Thank you very much. And, Mr. Ham, I learned something. Thank you.

Well, let’s take it back around to the question at hand. Does Ken Ham’s creation model hold up? Is it viable? So, for me, of course, well, take a look.

We are here in Kentucky on layer upon layer upon layer of limestone. I stopped at the side of the road today and picked up this piece of limestone that has a fossil right there. Now, in these many, many layers in this vicinity of Kentucky, there are coral animals, fossil, zooxanthellae. And when you look at it closely, you can see that they live their entire lives. They lived typically 20 years, sometimes more than that, if the water conditions are correct.

And so we are standing on millions of layers of ancient life. How could those animals have lived their entire life and formed these layers in just 4,000 years? There isn’t enough time since Mr. Ham’s flood for this limestone that we’re standing on to have come into existence.

My scientific colleagues go to places like Greenland, the Arctic. They go to Antarctica, and they drill into the ice with hollow drill bits. It’s not that extraordinary. Many of you have probably done it yourselves, drilling other things, hole saws to put locks and 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’s called snow ice.

And snow ice forms over the winter as snowflakes fall and are crushed down by subsequent layers. They’re crushed together and trapping the little bubbles. And the little bubbles must needs be ancient atmosphere. There’s nobody running around with a hypodermic needle squirting ancient atmosphere into the bubbles.

And we find certain of these cylinders to have 680,000 layers — 680,000 snow winter-summer cycles. How could it be that just 4,000 years ago, all of this ice formed? Let’s just run some numbers. This is some scenes from lovely Antarctic. Let’s say we have 680,000 layers of snow ice and 4,000 years since the Great Flood. That would mean we’d need 170 winter-summer cycles every year for the last 4,000 years. I mean, wouldn’t someone have noticed that?

Wow. Wouldn’t someone have noticed that there’s been winter-summer, winter-summer 170 times one year? If we go to California, we find enormous stands of bristlecone pines. Some of them are over 6,000 years old, 6,800 years old. There’s a famous tree in Sweden, Old Tjikko, is 9,550 years old. How could these trees be there if there was an enormous flood just 4,000 years ago? You can try this yourself, everybody.

I mean, I don’t mean to be mean to trees, but get a sapling and put it under water for a year. It will not survive in general, nor will its seeds. They just won’t make it. So how could these trees be that old if the earth is only 4,000 years old?

Now, when we go to the Grand Canyon, which is an astonishing place, and I recommend to everybody in the world to someday visit the Grand Canyon, you find layer upon layer of ancient rocks. And if there was this enormous flood that you speak of, wouldn’t there have been churning and bubbling and roiling? How would these things have settled out?

Your claim that they settled out in an extraordinary short amount of time is, for me, not satisfactory. You can look at these rocks, you can look at rocks that are younger, you can go to seashores where there’s sand. This is what geologists on the outside do, study the rate at which soil is deposited at the end of rivers and deltas, and we can see that it takes a long, long time for sediments to turn to stone. Also, in this picture, you can see where one type of sediment has intruded on another type.

Now, if that was uniform, wouldn’t we expect it all to be even without intrusion? Furthermore, you can find places in the Grand Canyon where you see an ancient riverbed on that side, going to an ancient riverbed on that side, and the Colorado River has cut through it. And by the way, if this Great Flood drained through the Grand Canyon, wouldn’t there have been a Grand Canyon on every continent? How could we not have Grand Canyons everywhere if this water drained away in this extraordinary short amount of time, 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’re remarkable because we are looking at the past. You find down low, you’ll find what you might consider as rudimentary sea animals. Up above, you’ll find the famous trilobites. Above that, you might find some clams, some oysters. And above that, you’ll 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’t we expect to see some turbulence? And by the way, anyone here, really, if you can find one example of that, one example of that anywhere in the world, the scientists of the world challenge you. They would embrace you. You would be a hero. You would change the world if you could find one example of that anywhere. People have looked and looked and looked. They have not found a single one.

Now, here’s an interesting thing. These are fossil skulls that people have found all around the world. It’s by no means representative of all the fossil skulls that have been found. But these are all over the place.

Now, if you were to look at these, I can assure you not any of them is a gorilla. Right? If, as Mr. Ham and his associates claim, there was just man and then everybody else, there were just humans and all other species, where would you put modern humans among these skulls? How did all these skulls get all over the earth in these extraordinary fashion? Where would you put us?

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. Ham’s worldview is that this giant boat, a very large wooden ship, went aground safely on a mountain in the Middle East, what we now call the Middle East. And so places like Australia are populated then by animals who somehow managed to get from the Middle East all the way to Australia in the last 4,000 years. Now, that to me is an extraordinary claim.

We would expect then somewhere between the Middle East and Australia, we would expect to find evidence of kangaroos. We would expect to find some fossils, some bones in the last 4,000 years. Somebody would have been hopping along there and died along the way, and we’d find them.

And furthermore, there 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 4,000 years. No navigator, no diver, no U.S. Navy submarine, no one’s ever detected any evidence of this, let alone any fossils of kangaroos. So your expectation is not met. It doesn’t seem to hold up.

So let’s see, if there are 4,000 years since Ken Ham’s flood, and let’s say, as he said many times, there are 7,000 kinds, today the very, very lowest estimate is that there are about 8.7 million species, but a much more reasonable estimate is it’s 50 million or even 100 million when you start counting the viruses and the bacteria and all the beetles that must be extant in the tropical rain forest that we haven’t found.

So we’ll take a number which I think is pretty reasonable, 16 million species today, okay? If these came from 7,000 kinds, let’s say we have 7,000 subtracted from 15 million, that’s 15,993. We have 4,000 years. We have 365 and a quarter days a year. We would expect to find 11 new species every day. So you’d go out into your yard. You wouldn’t just find a different bird, a new bird. You’d find a different kind of bird, a whole new species, a bird every day, a new species of fish, a new species of organisms you can’t see and so on. This would be enormous news.

The last 4,000 years people would have seen these changes among us. So The Cincinnati Enquirer, I imagine, would carry a column right next to the weather report, today’s new species and it would list these 11 every day, but we see no evidence of that. There’s no evidence of these species. There just simply isn’t enough time.

Now, as you may know, I graduated from engineering school and I got a job at Boeing. I worked on 747s. Okay, everybody, relax. I was very well supervised. Everything’s fine. There’s a tube in the 747 I kind of think of as my tube. 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 regular academic pursuits, regular geology, people have discovered that there used to be a lake in what is now Montana, which we charmingly refer to as Lake Missoula. It’s not there now, but the evidence for it, of course, 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.

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 facility, that the heavier rocks would sink to the bottom during a flood event, the big rocks, and especially their shape, instead of aerodynamic, the hydrodynamic, the water changing shape as water flows past, you’d expect them to sink to the bottom.

But here are these enormous rocks right on the surface, and there’s no shortage of them. If you go driving in Washington State or Oregon, they’re readily available. So how could those be there if the Earth is just 4,000 years old? How could they be there if this one flood caused that?

Another remarkable thing I’d like everybody to consider, inherent in this worldview, is that somehow Noah and his family were able to build a wooden ship that would house 14,000 individuals. There were 7,000 kinds, and there’s a boy and a girl for each one of those. So it was about 14,000, eight people. And these people were unskilled. As far as anybody knows, they never built a wooden ship before.

Furthermore, they had to get all these animals on there, and they had to feed them. And I understand that Mr. Ham has some explanations for that, which I frankly find extraordinary. But this is the premise of the bit. And we can then run a test, a scientific test. People in the early 1900s built an extraordinary large wooden ship, the Wyoming. It was a six-masted schooner, the largest one ever built. It had a motor on it for winching cables and stuff. But this boat had a great difficulty. It was not as big as the Titanic, but it was a very long ship. It would twist in the sea. It would twist this way, this way, and this way.

And in all that twisting, it leaked. It leaked like crazy. The crew could not keep the ship dry, and indeed it eventually foundered and sank a loss of all 14 hands. So there were 14 crewmen aboard a ship built by very, very skilled shipwrights in New England. These guys were the best in the world at wooden shipbuilding. And they couldn’t build a boat as big as the ark is claimed to have been. Is that reasonable? Is that possible? That the best shipbuilders in the world couldn’t do what eight unskilled people, men and their wives, were able to do?

If you visit the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., it’s 163 acres, and they have 400 species. By the way, this picture that you’re seeing was taken by spacecraft in space orbiting the Earth. If you told my grandfather, let alone my father, that we had that capability, they would have been amazed. That capability comes from our fundamental understanding of gravity, of material science, of physics, and life science, where you go looking.

This place is often, as any zoo, is often deeply concerned and criticized for how it treats its animals. They have 400 species on 163 acres, 66 hectares. Is it reasonable that Noah and his colleagues, his family, were able to maintain 14,000 animals and themselves and feed them aboard a ship that was bigger than anyone’s ever been able to build?

Now, here’s the thing. What we want in science, science as practiced on the outside, is an ability to predict. We want to have a natural law that is so obvious and clear, so well understood, that we can make predictions about what will happen. We can predict that we can put a spacecraft in orbit and take a picture of Washington, D.C. We can predict that if we provide this much room for an elephant, it will live healthily for a certain amount of time.

So I’ll give you an example. In the explanation provided by traditional science of how we came to be, we find, as Mr. Ham alluded to many times in his recent remarks, we find a sequence of animals in what generally is called the fossil record. This would be to say when we look at the layers that you find in Kentucky, you look at them carefully, you find a sequence of animals, a succession.

And as one might expect, when you’re looking at old records, there’s some pieces seem to be missing, a gap. So scientists got to thinking about this. There are lungfish that jump from pond to pond in Florida and end up in people’s swimming pools, and there are amphibians, frogs and toads croaking and carrying on. And so people wondered if there wasn’t a fossil or an organism, an animal, that had lived that had characteristics of both.

People over the years had found that in Canada, there was clearly a fossil marsh, a place that used to be a swamp that 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, as computed by traditional scientists, with the age of the rocks there, this would be a reasonable place to look for an animal, a fossil of an animal that lived there. And indeed, scientists found it, Tiktaalik, this fish lizard guy. And they found several specimens. This wasn’t one individual.

In other words, they made a prediction that this animal would be found, and it was found. So far, Mr. Ham and his worldview, the Ken Ham creation model, does not have this capability. It cannot make predictions and show results.

Here’s an extraordinary one that I find remarkable. There are certain fish, the top minnows, that have the remarkable ability to have sex with other fish, traditional fish sex, and they can have sex with themselves. Now, one of the old questions in life science, everybody, one of the old sort of chinstrokers, is why does any organism, whether you’re an ash tree, a sea jelly, a squid, a marmot, why does anybody have sex?

I mean, there are more bacteria in your tummy right now than there are humans on earth. And bacteria, they don’t bother with that, man. They just like split themselves in half, they get new bacteria, like let’s get her done, let’s go. But why does any, think of all the trouble a rose bush goes through to make a flower and the thorns and the bees and swimming, flying around, interacting. Why does anybody bother with all that?

And the answer seems to be your enemies. And your enemies are not lions and tigers and bears. Oh my, no. Your enemies are germs and parasites. That’s what’s going to get you. Germs and parasites.

My first cousin’s son died tragically from essentially the flu. This is not some story I heard about. It’s 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’s more. In these populations with flooding and so on, with river ponds get isolated and they dry up and the river flows again. In between, some of the fish will have sex with other fish sometimes and they’ll have sex on their own, what’s called asexually. And those fish, the ones that are in between, sometimes this, sometimes that, they have an intermediate number of infections.

In other words, the explanation provided by evolution made a prediction. And the prediction’s extraordinary and subtle, but there it is. How else would you explain it? And to Mr. Ham and his followers, I say this is something that we in science want. We want the ability to predict.

And your assertion that there’s some difference between the natural laws that I use to observe the world today and the natural laws that existed 4,000 years ago is extraordinary and unsettling. I travel around. I have a great many family members in Danville, Virginia. One of the world — one of the U.S.’s most livable cities, it’s lovely.

And I was driving along and there was a sign in front of a church, ‘Big Bang Theory, you got to be kidding me, God.’

Now, everybody, why would someone at the church, a pastor, for example, put that sign up unless he or she didn’t believe that the Big Bang was a real thing?

I just want to review briefly with everybody why we accept, in the outside world, why we accept the Big Bang. Edwin Hubble, 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’s that close to civilization. But even in the early 1900s, the people who selected this site for astronomy picked an excellent site. The clouds and smog are below you.

And Edwin Hubble sat there at this very big telescope, night after night, studying the heavens. And he found that the stars are moving apart. The stars are moving apart. And he wasn’t sure why, but it was clear that the stars are moving farther and farther apart all the time. So people talked about it for a couple decades.

And then eventually another astronomer, almost a couple decades, another astronomer, Fred Hoyle, just remarked, well, it was like there was a Big Bang. There was an explosion. This is to say, since everything is moving apart, it’s very reasonable that at one time they were all together. And there’s a place from whence, or rather whence, these things expanded. And it was a remarkable insight.

But people went still questioning it for decades, 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’s a whole other bunch of waves of light that are much longer. The microwaves in your oven are about that long. The radar at the airport is about that long. Your FM radio signal is about like this. AM radio signals are a kilometer. There are a couple, several soccer fields.

They went out listening. And there was this hiss, this ssssss. All the time that wouldn’t go away. And they thought, oh, doggone it, there’s some loose connector. They plugged in the connector. They re-screwed it. They made it tight. They turned it this way. The hiss was still there. They heard it that way. The hiss was still there.

They thought it was pigeon droppings that had affected the reception of this horn, it’s called. This thing is still there. It’s in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. It’s a National Historic Site. And Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson had found this cosmic background sound that was predicted by astronomers. Astronomers running the numbers, doing math, predicted that in the cosmos would be left over this echo, this energy from the Big Bang that would be detectable. And they detected it.

We built the cosmic observatory for background emissions, the COBE spacecraft, and it matched exactly, exactly the astronomers’ predictions. You’ve got to respect that. It’s a wonderful thing.

Now, along that line is some interest in the age of the Earth. Right now, it’s generally agreed that the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago. What we can do on Earth, these elements that we all know on the periodic table of chemicals, even ones we don’t know, are created when stars explode. And I look like nobody, but I attended a lecture by Hans Bethe, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the process by which stars create all these elements.

The one that interests me especially is our good friends rubidium and strontium. Rubidium becomes strontium spontaneously. It’s an interesting thing to me. A neutron becomes a proton, and it goes up the periodic table. When lava comes out of the ground, molten lava, and it freezes, turns to rock, when the melt solidifies or 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. It’s now Yellowstone National Park, what’s called the hot spot, people call it the supervolcano.

And it’s a remarkable thing. Apparently, as I can tell you, as a Northwesterner around for Mount St. Helens, full disclosure, I’m on the Mount St. Helens board. When it goes off, it gives out a great deal of gas that’s toxic and knocks these animals out. Looking for relief, they go to a watering hole, and then when the ash comes, they were all buried. It’s an extraordinary place.

Now, if in the bad old days you had heart problems, they would right away cut you open. Now, we use a drug based on rubidium to look at the inside of your heart without cutting you open. Now, my Kentucky friends, I want you to consider this. Right now, there is no place in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to get a degree in this kind of nuclear medicine, this kind of drugs associated with that. I hope you find that troubling. I hope you’re concerned about that.

You want scientifically literate students in your Commonwealth for a better tomorrow for everybody. You can’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. It’s February. We look at a star in February. We measure an angle to it. We wait six months. We look at that same star again, and we measure that angle. It’s the same way carpenters built this building. It’s the same way surveyors surveyed the land that we’re standing on.

And so by measuring the distance to a star, you can figure out how far away it is, that star, and 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 6,000 years if the world’s only 6,000 years old? It’s an extraordinary claim.

There’s another astronomer, Adolphe Quetelet, who remarked first about the reasonable man. Is it reasonable that we have ice older by a factor of 100 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 better than any ark anybody was able to build on the Earth? So if you’re asking me, and I got the impression you were, is Ken Ham’s creation model viable? I say no, absolutely not.

But 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’t want to raise a generation of science students who don’t understand how we know our place in the cosmos, our place in space, who don’t understand natural law. We need to innovate to keep the United States where it is in the world.

Thank you very much.

MODERATOR: That’s a lot to take in. I hope everybody’s holding up well. That’s a lot of information.

So what we’re going to have now is a five-minute rebuttal time for each gentleman to address the other one’s comments, and then there will be a five-minute counter-rebuttal after that. Things are going to start moving a little more quickly now.

So at this point in particular, I want to make sure we don’t have applauding or anything else going on that slows it down. So Mr Ham, if you’d like to begin with your five-minute rebuttal first.

KEN HAM: Well, first of all, 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.

So I can only deal with some of them. And you mentioned the age of the earth a couple of times, so let me deal with that.

As I said in my presentation, you can’t observe the age of the earth, and I would say that comes under what we call historical origin science. Now, just so you understand where I’m coming from, yes, we build our origins of historical science on the Bible. The Bible says God created in six days. The Hebrew word yom as it’s used in Genesis 1 with evening, morning, number means an ordinary day. Adam was made on day six.

But when you add up all those genealogies specifically given in the Bible, from Adam to Abraham, you’ve got 2,000 years from Abraham to Christ, 2,000 years from Christ to the present 2,000 years. That’s how we get 6,000 years. So that’s where it comes from, just so you know.

Now, a lot of people say, now, by the way, the earth’s age is 4.5 billion years old, and we have radioactive decay dating methods that found that.

You see, we certainly observe radioactive decay, whether it’s rubidium, strontium, whether it’s uranium, lead, potassium, argon, but when you’re talking about the past, we have a problem.

I’ll give you a practical example. In Australia, there were engineers that were trying to search out about a coal mine, and so they drilled down and they found a basalt layer, a lava flow that had woody material in it, branches and twigs and so on. And when Dr. Andrew Snelling, our PhD geologist, sent that to a lab in Massachusetts in 1994, they used potassium-argon dating. It dated to 45 million years old.

Well, he also sent the wood to the radiocarbon section of the same lab, and that dated to 45,000 years old, 45,000-year-old wood and 45 million-year-old rock. The point is, there’s a problem.

Let me give you another example of a problem. There was a lava dome that started to form in the 80s after Mount St. Helens erupted. And in 1994, Dr. Steve Austin, another PhD geologist, actually sampled the rock there. He took a whole rock, crushed it, sent it to the same lab, actually, I believe, and got a date of 0.35 million years when he separated out the minerals, amprobol and pyroxene and used potassium-argon dating, he got 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 show give all sorts of different dates.

See, there’s lots of assumptions in regard to radioactive dating. Number one, for instance, the amounts of the parent and daughter isotopes at the beginning when the rock formed, you have to know them, but you weren’t there. See, that’s historical science.

Assumption two, that all daughter atoms measured today must have only been derived in situ radioactive decay of parent atoms. In other words, it’s closed system, but you don’t know that and there’s a lot of evidence that that’s not so.

Assumption number three, that the decay rates have remained a constant. There’s just some of them. There’s others as well. The point is, there’s lots of assumptions in regard to the dating methods. So there’s no dating method you can use that you can absolutely age date a rock. There’s all sorts of differences out there.

And I do want to address the bit you brought up about Christians believing in millions of years. Yeah, there’s a lot of Christians out there that believe in millions of years, but I’d say they have a problem. I’m not saying they’re not Christians, but because salvation is conditioned upon faith in Christ, not the age of the earth, but there’s an inconsistency with what the Bible teaches.

If you believe in millions of years, you’ve got death and bloodshed, suffering, disease, over millions of years leading to man because that’s what you see in the fossil record. The Bible makes it very clear death is a result of man’s sin. In fact, the first death was in the garden when God killed an animal, clothed Adam and Eve, first blood sacrifice pointing towards what would happen with Jesus Christ, who would be the one who would die once and for all.

Now if you believe in millions of years as a Christian in the fossil record, there’s evidence of animals eating each other. The Bible says originally all the animals and man were vegetarian. We weren’t told we could eat meat until after the flood. There’s diseases represented in the fossil record like brain tumours, but the Bible says when God made everything, it was very good. God doesn’t call brain tumours very good.

There’s fossilised thorns in the fossil record. It’s said to be hundreds of millions of years old. The Bible says thorns came after the curse. So these two things can’t be true at the same time.

And you know what? There’s hundreds of dating methods out there, hundreds of them. Actually 90% of them contradict billions of years. And the point is all such dating methods are fallible. And I claim there’s only one infallible dating method. It’s a witness who was there who knows everything who told us. And that’s from the Word of God. And that’s why I would say that the Earth is only 6,000 years.

And as Dr. Faulkner said, there’s nothing in astronomy, and certainly Dr. Snelling would say there’s nothing in geology to contradict a belief in a young age for the Earth and the universe.

MODERATOR: Thank you, Mr. Ham. Mr. Nye, your five minute rebuttal, please.

BILL NYE: Thank you very much. Let me start with the beginning.

If you find 45 million year old rock on top of 45,000 year old trees, maybe the rock slid on top. Maybe that’s it. That seems a much more reasonable explanation than it’s impossible.

Then as far as dating goes, actually the methods are very reliable. One of the mysteries or interesting things that people in my business, especially at the Planetary Society, are interested in is why all the asteroids seem to be so close to the same date in age, 4.5, 4.6 billion years. It’s a remarkable thing. And people at first expected a little more of a spread.

So I understand that you take the Bible as written in English, translated countless, not countless, but many, many times over the last three 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, are the fish sinners? Have they done something wrong to get diseases? That’s sort of an extraordinary claim that takes me just a little past what I’m comfortable with.

And then as far as you can’t observe the past, I have to stop you right there. That’s what we do in astronomy. All we can do in astronomy is look at the past. By the way, you’re looking at the past right now, because the speed of light bounces off of me and then gets to your eyes. And I’m delighted to see that the people in the back of the room appear just that much younger than the people in the front.

So this idea that you can separate the natural laws of the past from the natural laws that we have now I think is at the heart of our disagreement. I don’t see how we’re ever going to agree with that if you insist that natural laws have changed. It’s, for lack of a better word, it’s magical. And I have appreciated magic since I was a kid, but it’s not really what we want in conventional mainstream science.

Your assertion that all the animals were vegetarians before they got on the ark, that’s really remarkable. I have not spent a lot of time with lions, but I can tell they’ve got teeth that really aren’t set up for broccoli. That these animals were vegetarians till this flood is something that I would ask you to provide a little more proof for. I give you the lion’s teeth. You give me verses as translated into English over 30 centuries. So that is not enough evidence for me.

If you’ve ever played telephone, I did I remember very well in kindergarten where you have a secret and you whisper it to the next person, to the next person, to the next person. Things often go wrong. So it’s very reasonable to me that instead of lions being vegetarians on the ark, lions are lions and the information that you use to create your worldview is not consistent with what I as a reasonable man would expect.

So I want everybody to consider the implications of this. If we accept Mr. Ham’s point of view that the Bible is translated into American English serves as a science text and that he and his followers will interpret that for you, I want you to consider what that means. It means that Mr. Ham’s word or his interpretation of these other words is somehow to be more respected than what you can observe in nature, what you can find literally in your backyard in Kentucky.

It’s a troubling and unsettling point of view and it’s one I very much like you to address when you come back.

As far as the five races that you mentioned, it’s kind of the same thing. The five races were claimed by people who were of European descent and they said, hey, we’re the best, check us out. And that turns out to be if you’ve ever traveled anywhere or done anything not to be that way. People are much more alike than they are different.

So are we supposed to take your word for English words translated over the last 30 centuries instead of what we can observe in the universe around us?

MODERATOR: Very good. And Mr. Ham, would you like to offer your five minute counter rebuttal?

KEN HAM: First of all, Bill, I just don’t want a misunderstanding here. And that is the 45,000 year old wood or supposedly 45,000 was inside the basalt. So it was encased in the basalt and that’s why I was making that particular point.

And I would also say that natural law hasn’t changed. As I talked about, 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’s why we can do good experimental science because we assume those laws are true and they’ll be true tomorrow.

I do want to say this, that you said a few times, Ken Ham’s view or Ken Ham’s model, it’s not just Ken Ham’s model. We have a number of PhD scientists on our own staff. I had video quotes from some scientists. It’s Dr. Damadian’s model, it’s Dr. Fabish’s model, it’s Dr. Faulkner’s model, it’s Dr. Snelling’s model, it’s Dr. Purdon’s model. That’s how it goes on. In other words, you go on our website and there are lots of creation scientists who agree with exactly what we’re saying concerning the Bible’s account of creation. So it’s not just my model in that sense.

There’s so much that I could say but as I listen to you, I believe you’re confusing terms in regard to species and kinds because we’re not saying God created all those species, we’re saying God created kinds. And we’re not saying species got on the ark, we’re saying kinds. In fact, we’ve had researchers working on what is a kind.

For instance, there’s a number of papers published on our website where, for instance, they look at dogs and they say well this one breeds with this one with this one with this one with this one with this one and you can look at all the papers around the world and you can connect them all together and say that obviously represents one kind.

In fact, as they’ve been doing that research, they have predicted probably less than actually a thousand kinds were on Noah’s ark which means just over 2,000 animals and the average size of a land animal is not that big. So there was plenty of room on the ark.

I also believe that a lot of what you were saying was really illustrating my point. You were talking about tree rings and ice layers and talking about kangaroos getting to Australia and all sorts of things like that. But see, we’re talking about the past when we weren’t there. We didn’t see those tree rings actually forming. We didn’t see those layers being laid down.

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’s like the dating methods. You’re assuming things in regard to the past that aren’t necessarily true.

In regard to lions and teeth, most bears have teeth very much like a lion or tiger and yet most bears are primarily vegetarian. The panda, if you look at its teeth, you’d say maybe it should be a savage carnivore. It eats mainly bamboo. The little fruit back in Australia has really sharp teeth. It looks like a savage little creature and it rips into fruit.

So just because an animal has sharp teeth doesn’t mean it’s a meat eater. It means it has sharp teeth. So again, it really comes down to our interpretation of these things.

I think too, in regard to the Missoula example that you gave, creationists do believe there’s been post-flood catastrophism. Noah’s flood certainly was a catastrophic event but then there’s been post-flood catastrophism since that time as well.

And again, in regard to historical science, why would you say Noah was unskilled? I mean, I didn’t meet Noah and neither did you. Really, it’s an evolutionary view of origins I believe because you’re thinking in terms people before us aren’t as good as us.

Hey, there are civilisations that existed in the past and we look at their technology and we can’t even understand today how they did some of the things that they did. Who says Noah couldn’t build a big boat? By the way, the Chinese and the Egyptians built boats. In fact, some of our research indicates that some of the wooden boats that were built had three layers interlocking so they wouldn’t twist like that and leak which is why here at the Creation Museum we have an exhibit on the Ark where we’ve rebuilt 1% of the Ark to scale and show three interlocking layers like that.

And one last thing concerning the speed of light and that is, I’m sure you’re aware of the horizon problem and that is from a Big Bang perspective, even the secularists have a problem of getting light and radiation out to universe to be able to exchange with the rest of the universe to get that even microwave background radiation.

On their model, 15 billion years or so, they can only get it about half way and that’s why they have inflation theories which means everyone has a problem concerning the light issues, things people don’t understand and we have some models on our website by some of our scientists to help explain those sorts of things.

MODERATOR: Mr. Nye, your counter rebuttal.

BILL NYE: Thank you, Mr. Ham, but I’m completely unsatisfied. You did not, in my view, address fundamental questions.

680,000 years of snow ice layers which require winter summer cycle. Let’s say you have 2,000 kinds instead of seven. That makes the problem even more extraordinary. Multiplying 11 by 3.5, we get to 35, 40 species every day that we don’t see. They’re not extant. In fact, you probably know we’re losing species due to mostly human activity and the loss of habitat.

Then as far as Noah being an extraordinary shipwright, I’m very skeptical. The shipwrights, my ancestors, the Nye family in New England, spent their whole life learning to make ships. I mean, it’s very reasonable perhaps to you that Noah had superpowers and was able to build this extraordinary craft with seven family members, but to me it’s just not reasonable.

By the way, the fundamental thing we disagree on, Mr. Ham, is this nature of what you can prove to yourself. This is to say when people make assumptions based on radiometric data, when they make assumptions about the expanding universe, when they make assumptions about the rate at which genes change in populations of bacteria in laboratory growth media, they are making assumptions based on previous experience. They’re not coming out of whole cloth.

So next time you have a chance to speak, I encourage you to explain to us why we should accept your word for it, that natural law changed just 4,000 years ago completely and there’s no record of it. There are pyramids that are older than that. There are human populations that are far older than that, but traditions that go back farther than that. And it’s just not reasonable to me that everything changed 4,000 years ago.

By everything, I mean the species, the surface of the Earth, the stars in the sky, and the relationship of all the other living things on Earth to humans. It’s just not reasonable to me that everything changed like that.

And another thing I would very much appreciate you addressing, there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious, and I respect that. People get tremendous community and comfort and nurture and support from their religious fellows in their communities, in their faiths, in their churches, and yet they don’t accept your point of view.

There are Christians who don’t accept that the Earth could somehow be this extraordinarily young age because of all the evidence around them. And so what is to become of them in your view? And by the way, this thing started, as I understand it, Ken Ham’s creation model is based on the Old Testament.

So when you bring in, I’m not a theologian, when you bring in the New Testament, isn’t that a little out of the box? I’m looking for explanations of the creation of the world as we know it based on what I’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’re trying to outguess the characters on murder mystery shows, on crime scene investigation especially.

What is to become of all those people who don’t see it your way? For us in the scientific community, I remind you that when we find an idea that’s not tenable, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t fly, doesn’t hold water, whatever idiom you’d like to embrace, we throw it away. We’re delighted. That’s why I say if you can find a fossil that has swum between the layers, bring it on. You would change the world. If you could show that somehow the microwave background radiation is not a result of the Big Bang, come on, write your paper, tear it up.

So your view that we’re supposed to take your word for this book written centuries ago, translated into American English, is somehow more important 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.

MODERATOR: All right. Thank you both. Now we’re going to get to the things moving a little bit faster. I think they may be quite interesting here. It’s 40 to 45 minutes, maybe a little bit more actually. We’ll have a little more for questions and answers submitted by our audience here in the Creation Museum.

Beforehand, we handed out these cards to everyone. I shuffled them here in the back and in fact I dropped a lot of them and then I scooped them up again. And if you saw me sorting through them here, it was to get a pile for Mr. Nye and a pile for Mr. Ham so that we can alternate reasonably between them.

Other than that, the only reason I will skip over one is if I can’t read it or if it’s a question that I don’t know how to read because it doesn’t seem to make any sense, which sometimes happens just because of the way people write.

What’s going to happen is we’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’ve been up first. You’ll hop up first this time and Mr. Nye, you can stand by for your responses. Two minutes.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

QUESTION: How does Creationism account for the celestial bodies, planets, stars, moons moving further and further apart and what function does that serve in the grand design?

KEN HAM: Well, when it comes to looking at the universe, of course we believe that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and I believe our creationist astronomers would say, yeah, you can observe the universe expanding. Why God is doing that, in fact in 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, you can observe that. That fits with what we call observational science. Exactly why God did it that way, I can’t answer that question of course because the Bible says that God made the heavens for His glory, and that’s why He made the stars that we see out there and it’s to tell us how great He is and how big He is.

And in fact, I think that’s the thing about the universe. The universe is so large, so big out there. One of the planetarium programs looked at this and we go in and show you how large the universe is, and I think it shows us how great God is, how big He is, that He’s an all-powerful God. He’s an infinite God, an infinite all-knowing God who created the universe to show us His power.

I mean, can you imagine that? And the thing that’s remarkable in the Bible, for instance, says on the fourth day of creation, and oh, He made the stars also. It’s almost like, oh, by the way, I made the stars. And just to show us, He’s an all-powerful God, He’s an infinite God, so I made the stars and He made them to show us how great He is and He is — He’s an infinite creator God. And the more that you understand what that means, that God is all-powerful, infinite, you stand back in awe, you realize how small we are, you realize, wow, that God would consider this planet. It’s so significant that He created human beings here, knowing they would sin and yet stepped into history to die for us and be raised from the dead, offer us a free gift of salvation, wow, what a God! And that’s what I would say when I see the universe as it is.

MODERATOR: Mr. Nye, one minute. Any response?

BILL NYE: There’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’ve invented the science of astronomy, we’ve invented life science, we’ve invented physics, we’ve discovered these natural laws so that we can learn more about our origin and where we came from.

To you, when it says He invented the stars also, that’s satisfying. You’re done. Oh, good. Okay. To me, when I look at the night sky, I want to know what’s out there. I’m driven. I want to know if what’s out there is any part of me, and indeed it is. The oh, by the way, I find compelling you are satisfied. And the big thing I want from you, Mr. Ham, is can you come up with something that you can predict? Do you have a creation model that predicts something that will happen in nature?

MODERATOR: And that’s time. Mr. Nye, the next question is for you. How did the atoms that created the Big Bang get there?

BILL NYE: This is a great mystery. You’ve hit the nail on the head. No, this is so where did — what was before the Big Bang? This is what drives us. This is what we want to know. Let’s keep looking. Let’s keep searching.

When I was young, it was presumed that the universe was slowing down. It’s a Big Bang, except it’s in outer space. There’s no air, so it goes out like that. And so people presumed that it would slow down, that the universe, the gravity especially, would hold everything together and maybe it’s going to come back and explode again. And people went out and the mathematical expression is, is the universe flat? This is a mathematical expression.

Will the universe slow down, slow down, slow down asymptotically without ever stopping? Well, in 2004, Saul Perlmutter and his colleagues went looking for the rate at which the universe was slowing down. We’re going to, let’s go out and measure it. And we’re doing it with this extraordinary system of telescopes around the world, looking at the night sky, looking for supernovae. These are standard brightness that you can infer distances with. And the universe isn’t slowing down. It’s accelerating.

The universe is accelerating in its expansion. And do you know why? Nobody knows why. Nobody knows why. And you’ll hear the expression nowadays, dark energy, dark matter, which are mathematical ideas that seem to reckon well with what seems to be the gravitational attraction of clusters of stars, galaxies, and their expansion.

And then isn’t it reasonable that whatever is out there causing the universe to expand is here also? And we just haven’t figured out how to detect it. My friends, suppose a science student from the Commonwealth of Kentucky pursues a career in science and finds out the answer to that deep question. Where did we come from? What was before the Big Bang? To us, this is wonderful and charming and compelling. This is what makes us get up and go to work every day, is to try to solve the mysteries of the universe.

MODERATOR: And that’s time. Mr. Ham, a response?

KEN HAM: Well, 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’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only thing that makes sense of why not just matter is here, where it came from, but why matter, when you look at it, we have information and language systems that build life, not just matter.

And where did that come from? Because matter can never produce information. Matter can never produce a language system. Languages only come from intelligence. Information only comes from information. The Bible tells us that the things we see, like in the book of Hebrews, are made from things that are unseen. An infinite creator God who created universe, created matter, the energy, space, mass, time, universe, and created the information for life. It’s the only thing that makes logical sense.

MODERATOR: 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?

KEN HAM: Well, first of all, I often hear people talking about the majority. I would agree that the majority of scientists would believe in millions of years, the majority would believe in evolution, but there’s a large group out there that certainly don’t.

But the first thing I want to say is that it’s not the majority that’s a judge of truth. There have been many times in the past when the majority have got it wrong. The majority of doctors in England once thought after you cut up bodies you could go and deliver babies. I wonder why the death rate was high in hospitals until they found out about diseases caused by bacteria and so on. The majority once thought the appendix was a leftover organ from evolutionary ancestry. So when it’s okay, rip it out. When it’s disease, rip it out. Rip it out anyway. But these days we know that it’s for the immune system and it’s very, very important.

It’s important to understand that just because the majority believes something doesn’t mean that it’s true. And then, I’m sorry, I missed the last part of the question there.

MODERATOR: What was the… I think I have the right question here. So what evidence besides the literal word of the Bible supports creationism?

KEN HAM: One of the things I was doing was I was making predictions. I made some predictions. And I was saying, if the Bible is right and we’re always saying it’s Adam and Eve, there’s one race. And I went through and talked about that. If the Bible is right and God made kinds, I went through and talked about that.

And so really that question comes down to the fact that we’re again dealing with the fact there’s aspects about the past that you can’t scientifically prove because you weren’t there, but observational science in the present. Bill and I all have the same observational science. We’re here in the present. We can see radioactivity.

But when it comes to then talking about the past, you’re not going to be scientifically able to prove that. And that’s what we need to admit. 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 the present. Understanding the past is a whole different matter.

MODERATOR: Mr. Nye, one-minute response.

BILL NYE: Thank you, Mr. Ham. I have to disabuse you of a fundamental idea. If a scientist, if anybody makes a discovery that changes the way people view natural law, scientists embrace him or her. This person’s fantastic. Louis Pasteur. You made reference to germs. No, if you find something that changes, that disagrees with common thought, that’s the greatest thing going in science. We look forward to that change. We challenge you. Tell us why the universe is accelerating. Tell us why these mothers were getting sick. And we found an explanation for it.

And 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’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.

MODERATOR: And that’s time. A new question for you, Mr. Nye. How did consciousness come from matter?

BILL NYE: Don’t know. This is a great mystery. A dear friend of mine is a neurologist. She studies the nature of consciousness. Now, I will say I used to embrace a joke about dogs. I mean, who doesn’t? And you can say, this guy remarked, I’ve never seen a dog paralyzed by self-doubt. Actually, I have.

Furthermore, the thing that we celebrate, there are three sundials on the planet Mars that bear an inscription to the future: To those who visit here, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery. It’s inherently optimistic about the future of humankind that we will one day walk on Mars. But the joy of discovery, that’s what drives us, the joy of finding out what’s going on.

So we don’t know where consciousness comes from, but we want to find out. Furthermore, I’ll tell you it’s deep within us. I claim that I have spent time with dogs that have had the joy of discovery. It’s way inside us. We have one ancestor as near as we can figure. And by the way, if you can find what we in science call a second genesis, this is to say, did life start another way on the Earth? There are researchers at Astrobiology Institute, researchers supported by NASA, your tax dollars, that are looking for answers to that very question. Is it possible that life could start another way? Is there some sort of life form akin to science fiction that’s crystal instead of membranous?

This would be a fantastic discovery that would change the world. The nature of consciousness is a mystery. I challenge the young people here to investigate that very question. And I remind you, taxpayers and voters that might be watching, if we do not embrace the process of science, I mean in the mainstream, we will fall behind economically. And this is a point I can’t say enough.

MODERATOR: Mr. Ham, a one minute response.

KEN HAM: Bill, I do want to say that there is a book out there that does document where consciousness came from. And in that book, the one who created this said that He made man in His image and He breathed into man and He became a living being. And so the Bible does document that. That’s where consciousness came from, that God gave it to us.

And the other thing I want to say is, I’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’s over and that’s the end of you. And if when you die it’s over and you don’t even remember you were here, what’s the point of the joy of discovery anyway? I mean in an ultimate sense.

I mean you won’t ever know you were ever here and no one in you will know they were ever here ultimately, so what’s the point anyway? I love the joy of discovery because this is God’s creation and I’m finding more out about that to take dominion for man’s good and for God’s glory.

MODERATOR: Mr. Ham, a new question. This is a simple question I suppose, but one that actually is fairly profound for all of us in our lives. What, if anything, would ever change your mind?

KEN HAM: Well, the answer to that question is, I’m a Christian. And as a Christian I can’t prove it to you. But God has definitely shown me very clearly through His Word and shown Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, the Bible is the Word of God. I admit that that’s where I start from. I can challenge people that you can go and test that. You can make predictions based on that. You can check the prophecies in the Bible. You can check the statements in Genesis. You can check that.

And I did a little bit of that tonight. And I can’t ultimately prove that to you. All I can do is to say to someone, look, if the Bible really is what it claims to be, if it really is the Word of God and that’s what it claims, then check it out. And the Bible says if you come to God believing that He is, He will 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’s ever going to convince me that the Word of God is not true. But I do want to make a distinction here and for Bill’s sake. We build models based upon the Bible and those models are always subject to change. The fact of Noah’s flood is not subject to change. The model of how the flood occurred is subject to change because we observe in the current world and we’re able to come up with maybe different ways this could have happened or that could have happened. And that’s part of that scientific discovery. That’s part of what it’s all about.

So the bottom line is that as a Christian I have the foundation but as a Christian I would ask Bill the question, what would change your mind? I mean you said even if you came to faith you’d never give up believing in billions of years. I think I quoted you correctly. You said something like that recently. So that would be also my question to Bill.

BILL NYE: We would just need one piece of evidence. We would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another. We would need evidence that the universe is not expanding. We would need evidence that the stars appear to be far away but they’re not. We would need evidence that rock layers can somehow form in just 4,000 years instead of the extraordinary amount. We would need evidence that somehow you can reset atomic clocks and keep neutrons from becoming protons. You can bring on any of those things and you would change me immediately.

The question I have for you though fundamentally and for everybody watching, Mr. Ham what can you prove? What you have done tonight is spent most of all the time coming up with explanations about the past. What can you really predict? What can you really prove 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 is very troubling to me.

MODERATOR: Mr. Nye, a new question. Outside of radiometric methods, what scientific evidence supports your view of the age of the Earth?

BILL NYE: The age of the Earth. Well, the age of stars. Let’s see. Radiometric evidence is pretty compelling. Also, the deposition rates. It was Lyle, a geologist, who realized he, my recollection, he came up with the first use of the term deep time. When people realized that the Earth had to be much, much older.

In a related story, there was a mystery as to how the Earth could be old enough to allow evolution to have taken place. How could the Earth possibly be 3 billion years old? Lord Kelvin did a calculation if the sun were made of coal and burning. It couldn’t be more than 100,000 or so years old. But radioactivity was discovered.

Radioactivity is why the Earth is still as warm as it is. It’s why the Earth has been able to sustain its internal heat all these millennia. In this discovery, it’s something like this question, without radiometric dating, how would you view the age of the Earth? To me, it’s akin to the expression, well, if things were any other way, things would be different. This is to say, that’s not how the world is. Radiometric dating does exist. Neutrons do become protons, and that’s our level of understanding today. The universe is accelerating. These are all provable facts.

That there was a flood 4,000 years ago is not provable. In fact, the evidence for me at least, as a reasonable man, is overwhelming that it couldn’t possibly have happened. There’s no evidence for it.

Furthermore, Mr. Ham, you never quite addressed this issue of the skulls. There are many, many steps in what appears to be the creation or the coming into being of you and me. And those steps are consistent with evolutionary theory.

MODERATOR: And that is time. Mr. Ham, your response?

KEN HAM: By the way, I just want people to understand too. In regard to the age of the Earth being about 4.5 billion years, no Earth rock was dated to get that date. They dated meteorites, and because they assumed meteorites were the same age as the Earth left out from the formation of the solar system, that’s where that comes from. People think they dated rocks on the Earth to get the 4.5 billion years. That’s just not true.

And 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’s the point. Every dating method involves a change with time, and there are hundreds of them. And if you assume what was there to start with and you assume something about the rate and you know about the rate, you make lots of those assumptions. Every dating method has those assumptions. Most of the dating methods, 90% of them, contradict the billions of years. There’s no absolute age dating method from scientific method because you can’t prove scientifically young or old.

MODERATOR: And here is a new question. It starts with you, Mr. Ham. Can you reconcile the change in the rate continents are now drifting versus how quickly they must have traveled at creation 6,000 years ago?

KEN HAM: The rate, sorry I missed that word.

MODERATOR: Can you reconcile the speed at which continents are now drifting today to the rate they would have had to have traveled 6,000 years ago to reach where we are now? I think that’s the question.

KEN HAM: I think I understand the question. Actually, this again illustrates exactly what I’m talking about in regard to historical science and observational science. We can look at continents today and we have scientists who have written papers about this on our website. I’m definitely not an expert in this area. I don’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 that the way it’s moving today, the rate it’s moving, that it’s always been that way in the past, see that’s an assumption. That’s the problem when it comes to understanding these things.

You can observe movement but then to assume that it’s always been like that in the past, that’s historical science. And in fact, we would believe basically in catastrophic plate tectonics that as a result of the flood, the time of the flood, there was catastrophic breakup of the Earth’s surface. And what we’re seeing now is sort of, if you like, a remnant of that movement. And so we do not deny the movement. We do not deny the plates.

What we would deny is that you can use what you see today as a basis for just extrapolating into the past. It’s the same with the flood. You can say, 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’s this emphasis on historical science and observational science. I would encourage people to go to our website at Answers in Genesis because we do have a number of papers, in fact, very technical papers. Dr. John Baumgartner is one who’s written some very extensive work dealing with this very issue.

On the basis of the Bible, of course, we believe there’s one continent to start with because the waters were gathered together into one place. So we do believe that the continent has split up but particularly the flood had a lot to do with that.

MODERATOR: Time on that. Mr. Nye, a response.

BILL NYE: It must have been easier for you to explain this a century ago before the existence of tectonic plates was proven. If you go into a clock store and there’s a bunch of clocks, they’re not all going to say exactly the same thing. Do you think that they’re all wrong? The reason that we acknowledge the rate at which continents are drifting apart, one of the reasons as we see what’s called sea floor spreading in the mid-Atlantic, the Earth’s magnetic field has reversed over the millennia.

And as it does, it leaves a signature in the rocks as the continental plates drift apart. So you can measure how fast the continents were spreading. That’s how we do it on the outside. As I said, I lived in Washington State when Mount St. Helens exploded. That’s a result of a continental plate going under another continental plate and cracking, and this water-laden rock led to a steam explosion. That’s how we do it on the outside.

MODERATOR: 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.

BILL NYE: I will go along with most people and say green, and it’s an irony that green plants reflect green light.

MODERATOR: Could I not have one word answer? I said one word answer.

BILL NYE: Most of the light from the sun is green, yet they reflect it. It’s a mystery.

KEN HAM: Well, can I have three words, seeing as he had 300?

MODERATOR: You can have three.

KEN HAM: Okay. Observational science, please. All right.

MODERATOR: We’re back to you, Mr. Nye. How do you balance the theory of evolution with the second law of thermodynamics? And I’d like to add a question here. What is the second law of thermodynamics?

BILL NYE: Oh, the second law of thermodynamics is fantastic, and I call the words of Eddington, who said, if you have a theory that disagrees with Isaac Newton, that’s a great theory. If you have a theory that disagrees with relativity, wow, you’ve changed the world. That’s great. But if your theory disagrees with the second law of thermodynamics, I can offer you no hope. I can’t help you.

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’s it, thermodynamically. That’s why you want the hottest explosion you can get in the coldest outside environment. You have to have a difference between hot and cold, and that difference can be assessed scientifically or mathematically with this word entropy, this disorder of molecules.

But the fundamental thing that this questioner has missed is the earth is not a closed system. So there’s energy pouring in here from the sun, if I may, day and night, because the night is pouring in on the other side. And so that energy is what drives living things on earth, especially for, in our case, plants.

By the way, if you’re here in Kentucky, about a third and maybe a half of the oxygen you breathe is made in the ocean by phytoplankton, and they get their energy from the sun. So the second law of thermodynamics is a wonderful thing. It has allowed us to have everything you see in this room, because our power generation depends on the robust and extremely precise computation of how much energy is in burning fuel, whether it’s nuclear fuel or fossil fuel or some extraordinary fuel to be discovered in the future. The second law of thermodynamics will govern any turbine that makes electricity that we all depend on and allowed all these shapes to exist.

MODERATOR: Any response, Mr. Ham?

KEN HAM: Let me just say two things if I can – if a minute goes that fast or long. One is, you know what, here’s a point we need to understand. You can have all the energy that you want, but energy or matter will never produce life. God imposed information, language system, and that’s how we have life. Matter by itself could never produce life, no matter what energy you have.

And even if you’ve got a dead stick, you can have all the energy in the world in dead stick, it’s going to decay. And it’s not going to produce life.

From a creationist perspective, we certainly agree. I mean, before man sinned, there was digestion and so on, but because of the fall, now things are running down. God doesn’t hold everything together as He did back then. So now we see, in regard to the second law of thermodynamics, we would say it’s sort of, in a sense, a bit out of control now compared to what it was originally, which is why we have a running down universe.

MODERATOR: And that’s time. A new question for you, Mr. Ham. Hypothetically, if evidence existed that caused you to have to admit that the earth was older than 10,000 years and creation did not occur over six days, would you still believe in God and the historical Jesus of Nazareth and that Jesus was the Son of God?

KEN HAM: Well, I’ve been emphasizing all night, you cannot ever prove using the scientific method in the present, you can’t prove the age of the earth. So you can never prove it’s old. So there is no hypothetical because you can’t do that.

Now, we can certainly use methods in the present and making assumptions. I mean, creationists use methods that change over time. As I said, there’s hundreds of physical processes that you can use, but they set limits on the age of the universe, but you can’t ultimately prove the age of the earth, not using the scientific method. You can’t ultimately prove the age of the universe.

Now, you can look at methods and you can see that there are many methods that contradict billions of years, many methods that seem to support thousands of years. As Dr. Faulkner said in the little video clip I showed, there is nothing in observational astronomy that contradicts a young universe.

Now, I’ve said to you before and I admit again that the reason I believe in a young universe is because of the Bible’s account of origins. I believe that God, who has always been there, the infinite creator God, revealed in His Word what He did for us. And when we add up those dates, we get thousands of years. But there’s nothing in observational science that contradicts that.

But as far as the age of the earth, the age of the universe, even when it comes to the fossil record, that’s why I really challenge Christians. If you’re going to believe in millions of years for the fossil record, you’ve got a problem with the Bible, and that is that then you’ve got to have death and disease and suffering before sin. So, there is no hypothetical in regard to that. You can’t prove scientifically the age of the earth or the universe. Bottom line.

MODERATOR: Mr. Nye.

BILL NYE: Well, of course, this is where we disagree. You can prove the age of the earth with great robustness by observing the universe around us. And I get the feeling, Mr. Ham, that you want us to take your word for it. This is to say, your interpretation of a book written thousands of years ago as translated into American English is more compelling for you than everything that I can observe in the world around me. This is where you and I, I think, are not going to see eye to eye.

You asserted that life cannot come from something that’s not alive. Are you sure? Are you sure enough to say that we should not continue to look for signs of water and life on Mars? That that’s a waste. You’re sure enough to claim that. That is an extraordinary claim that we want to investigate.

Once again, what is it you can predict? What do you provide us that can tell us something about the future, not just about your vision of the past?

MODERATOR: A new question, Mr. Nye. Is there room for God in science?

BILL NYE: Well, we remind us, there are billions of people around the world who are religious and who accept science and embrace it, and especially all the technology that it brings us. Is there anyone here who doesn’t have a mobile phone that has a camera? Is there anyone here whose family members have not benefited from modern medicine? Is there anyone here who doesn’t use email? Is there anybody here who doesn’t eat? Because we use information sent from satellites in space to plant seeds on our farms. That’s how we’re able to feed 7.1 billion people, or we used to barely be able to feed a billion. So that’s what I see.

That’s what we have used science or the process. Science for me is two things. It’s the body of knowledge, the atomic number of rubidium, and it’s the process, the means by which we make these discoveries. So for me, that’s not really that connected with your belief in a spiritual being or a higher power. If you reconcile those two, scientists, the head of the National Institutes of Health is a devout Christian. There are billions of people in the world who are devoutly religious. They have to be compatible because those same people embrace science. The exception is you, Mr. Ham. That’s the problem for me.

You want us to take your word for what’s written in this ancient text to be more compelling than what we see around us. The evidence for a higher power and spirituality is for me separate. I encourage you to take the next minute and address this problem of the fossils, this problem of the ice layers, this problem of the ancient trees, this problem of the ark. I mean really address it. And so then we could move forward, but right now I see no incompatibility between religions and science.

MODERATOR: Mr. Ham, response?

KEN HAM: Yeah. I actually want to take a minute to address the question. And let me just say this. My answer would be God is necessary for science. In fact, you know, you talked about cell phones. Yeah, I have a cell phone. I love technology. We love technology here at Answers in Genesis. And I have email and probably had millions of them while I’ve been speaking up here. And satellites and what you said about, you know, the information we get, I agree with all that.

See, they’re the things that can be done in the present. And that’s just like I showed you, Dr. Stuart Burgess, who invented that gear set for the satellite. Creationists can be great scientists. But see, I say God is necessary because you have to assume the laws of logic, you have to assume the laws of nature, you have to assume the uniformity of nature. And that was a question I had for you. Where does that come from if the universe is here by natural processes?

And you know, Christianity and science, the Bible and science go hand in hand. We love science. But again, you’ve got to understand, inventing things, that’s very different than talking about our origins. Two very different things.

MODERATOR: Mr. Ham, a new question. Do you believe the entire Bible is to be taken literally? For example, should people who touch pigs’ skin, I think it says here, be stoned? Can men marry multiple women?

KEN HAM: Do I believe the entire Bible should be taken literally? Well, remember in my opening address, I said we have to define our terms. So when people ask that question and say literally, I have to know what that person meant by literally.

Now, I would say this. If you say naturally, and that’s what you mean by literally, I would say, yes, I take the Bible naturally. What do I mean by that? Well, if it’s history, as Genesis is, it’s written as typical historical narrative, you take it as history. If it’s poetry, as we find in the Psalms, then you take it as poetry. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t teach truth, but it’s not a cosmological account in the sense that Genesis is. There’s prophecy in the Bible, and there’s literature in the Bible, you know, concerning future events and so on.

So if you take it as written naturally, according to a type of literature, and you let it speak to you in that way, that’s how I take the Bible. It’s God’s revelation to man. He used different people. The Bible says that all scripture is inspired by God, so God moved people by His Spirit to write His words.

And also there’s a lot of misunderstanding in regard to scripture, in regard to the Israelites. I mean, we have laws in our civil government here in America that the government says, well, there were certain laws for Israel. And you know, some people take all that out of context, and then they try to impose it on us today as Christians and say, you should be obeying those laws. It’s a misunderstanding of the Old Testament. It’s a misunderstanding of the New Testament.

And you know, again, it’s important to take the Bible as a whole, interpreting scripture as scripture. If it really is the Word of God, then there’s not going to be any contradiction, which there’s not. And by the way, when men were married to multiple women, there were lots of problems, and the Bible condemns that for what it is, and the Bible is very clear.

You know, the Bible is a real book. There were people who did things that were not in accord with scripture, and it records this for us. It’s a real book. But marriage was one man for one woman. Jesus reiterated that in Matthew 19, as I had in my talk. And so those that did marry multiple women were wrong.

MODERATOR: Time there, Mr. Nye, a response.

BILL NYE: So it sounds to me, just listening to your last two minutes, that there’s certain parts of this document of the Bible that you embrace literally and other parts you consider poetry. So it sounds to me in those last two minutes like you’re going to take what you like in interpret literally in other passages you’re going to interpret as poetic or descriptions of human events.

All that aside, I’ll just say scientifically, or as a reasonable man, it doesn’t seem possible that all these things that contradict your literal interpretation of those first few passages, all those things that contradict that I find unsettling when you want me to embrace the rest of it as literal.

Now, as I say, I’m not a theologian, but we started this debate, is the Ken Ham’s creation model viable? Does it hold water? Can it fly? Does it describe anything? And I’m still looking for an answer.

MODERATOR: And time on that. Mr. Nye, here’s a new question. I believe this was miswritten here because they’ve repeated a word, but I think I know what they were trying to ask. Have you ever believed that evolution was accomplished through way of a higher power? I think that’s what they’re trying to ask here. This is the intelligent design question, I think. If so, why or why not? Why could not the evolutionary process be accomplished in this way?

BILL NYE: I think you may have changed the question just a little, but no, it’s all good.

MODERATOR: The word-for-word question is, have you ever believed that evolution partook through way of evolution?

BILL NYE: I think I followed. Let me introduce these ideas for Mr. Ham to comment. The idea that there’s a higher power that has driven the course of 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’t know. I’ll grant you that.

When it comes to intelligent design, which is, if I understand your interpretation of the question, intelligent design has a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of nature. This is to say, the old expression is if you were to find a watch in the field and you pick it up, you would realize that it was created by somebody who was thinking ahead, somebody with an organization chart with somebody at the top, and he’d order screws from screw manufacturers and springs from spring manufacturers and glass crystals from crystal manufacturers. But that’s not how nature works.

This is the fundamental insight in the explanation for living things that’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’s a designer that created all this is not necessarily true because we have an explanation that is far more compelling and provides predictions and things are repeatable.

I’m sure, Mr. Ham, here at the facility, you have an organization chart. I imagine you’re at the top and it’s a top down structure. Nature is not that way. Nature is bottom up. This is the discovery. Things merge up, whatever makes it keeps going, whatever doesn’t make it falls away. And this is compelling and wonderful and fills me with joy and is inconsistent with a top down view.

MODERATOR: And that’s time. Mr. Ham.

KEN HAM: What Bill Nye needs to do for me is to show me an example of something, some new function that arose that was not previously possible from the genetic information that was there. And I would claim and challenge you that there is no such example that you can give. That’s why I brought up the example in my presentation of Lenski’s experiments in regard to E. coli and there were some that seemed to develop the ability to exist on citrate but as Dr. Fabich said from looking at his research, he’s found that that information was already there. It’s just a gene that switched on and off.

And so there is no example because information that’s there in the genetic information of different animals, plants and so on, there’s no new function that can be added. Certainly great variation within a kind and that’s what we look at but you’d have to show an example of brand new function that never previously was possible. There is no such example that you can give anywhere in the world.

MODERATOR: Fresh question here. Mr. Ham. Name one institution, business or organization other than a church, amusement park or the Creation Museum that is using any aspect of creationism to produce its product.

KEN HAM: Any scientist out there, Christian or non-Christian that is involved in inventing things, involved in a scientific method, is using creation? They are because they’re borrowing from a Christian worldview, they’re using the laws of logic. I keep emphasizing that. I want Bill to tell me in a view of the universe as a result of natural processes explain where the laws of logic came from. Why should we trust the laws of nature? I mean are they going to be the same tomorrow as they were yesterday?

In fact some of the greatest scientists that ever lived, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, were creationists and as one of them said, you know, he’s thinking God’s thoughts after Him and that’s really, modern science 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’t teach our children correctly about this they’re not going to be innovative and they’re not going to be able to come up with inventions to advance in our culture.

And so I think the person was trying to get out there, see, you know, there are lots of secularists out there doing work and they don’t believe in creation and they come up with great inventions. Yeah, but my point is they are borrowing from the Christian worldview to do so and as you saw from the video quotes I gave, people like Andrew Fabich and also Dr. Faulkner have published in the secular journals. There’s lots of creationists out there who publish, people might know that they’re creationists because the topic doesn’t specifically pertain to creation versus evolution but there’s lots of them out there.

If I go to our website there’s a whole list there of scientists who are creationists who are out there doing great work in this world and helping to advance technology.

MODERATOR: Mr. Nye.

BILL NYE: There’s a reason that I don’t accept the Ken Ham model of creation is that it has no predictive quality as you touched on and something that I’ve always found troubling, it sounds as though, and next time around you can correct me, it sounds as though you believe your worldview, which is a literal interpretation of most parts of the Bible, is correct.

What became of all those people who never heard of it, never heard of you, what became of all those people in Asia, what became of all those First Nations people in North America, were they condemned and doomed? I mean I don’t know how much time you spent talking to strangers but they’re not sanguine about that, to have you tell them that they are inherently lost or misguided.

It’s very troubling and you say there are no examples in nature, there are countless examples of how the process of science makes predictions.

MODERATOR: Mr. Nye, since evolution teaches that man is evolving and growing smarter over time, how can you explain the numerous evidences of man’s high intelligence in the past?

BILL NYE: Hang on. There’s no evidence that men or humans are getting smarter, especially if you ever met my old boss.

No. It’s that what happens in evolution, and it’s a British word that was used in the middle 1800s, it’s survival of the fittest. In this usage it doesn’t mean that most push-ups are the highest scores on standardized tests, it means those that fit in the best. Our intellect, such as it is, has enabled us to dominate the world. I mean the evidence of humans is everywhere.

James Cameron just made another trip to the bottom of the ocean, the deepest part of the ocean the first time since 1960, and when they made the first trip they found a beer can. Humans are everywhere. And so it is our capacity to reason that has taken us to where we are now. If a germ shows up, as it did, for example, in World War I, where more people were killed by the flu than were killed by the combatants in World War I, that is a troubling, remarkable fact.

If the right germ shows up, we’ll be taken out, we’ll be eliminated. Being smarter is not a necessary consequence of evolution. So far it seems to be the way things are going because of the remarkable advantage it gives to us over we can control our environment and even change it, as we’re doing today apparently by accident.

So everybody just take a little while and grasp this fundamental idea. It’s how you fit in with nature around you. So as the world changed, as it did, for example, the ancient dinosaurs, they were taken out by a worldwide fireball apparently caused by an impactor. That’s the best theory we have. And we are the result of organisms that live through that catastrophe. It’s not necessarily smarter. It’s how you fit in with your environment.

MODERATOR: Mr. Ham, a response?

KEN HAM: I remember at university, one of my professors was very excited to give us some evidence for evolution. He said, look at this. Here’s an example. These fish have evolved the ability not to see. And he was going to give an example of blind cave fish, and he said, see, in this cave, they’re evolving because now the ones that are living there, their ancestors had eyes, now these ones are blind.

And I remember, I was talking to my professor, wait a minute. Now they can’t do something that they could do before. They might have an advantage in this sense in a situation that’s dark like that. Those with eyes might have got diseases and died out. Those that had mutations for no eyes are the ones that survived. It’s not survival of the fittest. It’s survival of those who survived. And it’s survival of those that have the information in that circumstance to survive.

But it’s not, you’re not getting new information. You’re not getting new function. There’s no example of that at all. So we need to correctly understand these things.

MODERATOR: All right. We’re down to our final question here, which I’ll give to both of you. And in the interest of fairness here, because it is a question to both of you, let’s give each man two minutes on this if we can, please. And also in the interest of you having started first, Mr. Ham, I will have you start first here. You have the first word. Mr. Nye will have the last word. The question is, what is the one thing more than anything else upon which you base your belief?

KEN HAM: What is the one thing upon anything else which I base my belief? Well, again, to summarize the things that I’ve been saying, there is a book called the Bible. It’s a very unique book. It’s very different to any other book out there. In fact, I don’t know of any other religion that has a book that starts off by telling you that there’s an infinite God and talks about the origin of the universe and the origin of matter and the origin of light and the origin of darkness and the origin of day and night and the origin of the earth and the origin of dry land and the origin of plants and the origin of sun, moon, stars, the origin of sea creatures, the origin of flying creatures, the origin of land creatures, the origin of man, the origin of woman, the origin of death, the origin of sin, the origin of marriage, the origin of different languages, the origin of clothing, the origin of nations.

I mean it’s a very, very specific book and it gives us an account of a global flood in the history and the Tower of Babel and if that history is true then what about the rest of the book? Well that history also says man is a sinner and it says that man is separated from God and it gives us a message that we call the Gospel, the message of salvation, that God’s Son stepped in history to die on the cross, be raised from the dead and offers a free gift of salvation because the history is true, that’s why the message based on history is true.

I actually went through some predictions and listed others and there’s a lot more that you can look at and you can go and test it for yourself. If this book really is true it is so specific it should explain the world, it should make sense of what we see. The flood? Yeah we have fossils all over the world. The Tower of Babel? Yeah different people groups, different languages, they have flood legends very similar to the Bible, creation legends similar to the Bible, there’s so much you can look at and prophecy and so on and most of all as I said to you the Bible says if you come to God believing that He is, He’ll reveal Himself to you, you will know if you search after truth you really want God to show you as you search after silver and gold, He will show you, He will reveal Himself to you.

MODERATOR: Mr. Nye.

BILL NYE: Would you repeat the question?

MODERATOR: The question is what is the one thing more than anything else upon which you base your belief?

BILL NYE: As my old professor Carl Sagan said so often, when you’re in love you want to tell the world and I base my beliefs on the information and the process that we call science. It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I had never seen before. It fills me to joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is a wonderful and astonishing thing to me that we are, you and I are somehow at least one of the ways that the universe knows itself.

You and I are a product of the universe. It’s astonishing, I admit I see your faces, that we have come to be because of the universe’s existence and we are driven to pursue that to find out where we came from, and the second question we all want to know, are we alone? Are we alone in the universe? And these questions are deep within us and they drive us so the process of science, the way we know nature is the most compelling thing to me.

And I just want to close by reminding everybody what’s at stake here. If we abandon all that we’ve learned, our ancestors, what they’ve learned about nature and our place in it, if we abandon the process by which we know it, if we eschew, if we let go of everything that people have learned before us, if we stop driving forward, stop looking for the next answer to the next question, we in the United States will be out competed by other countries, other economies.

Now that would be okay, I guess, but I was born here, I’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, in science classes. Thank you.

MODERATOR: One tiny bit of important housekeeping for everyone here. The county is now under a level two snow emergency. Drive home carefully. We have a lot to talk about but drive carefully.

This debate will be archived at debatelive.org, that’s debatelive.org, one word. It will be found at that site for several days so you can encourage friends and family to watch and take it over.

Thanks so much to Mr. Nye and to Mr. Ham for an excellent discussion.

I’m Tom Foreman, thank you, good night from Petersburg, Kentucky and the Creation Museum.

For Further Reading:

AI, Man & God: Prof. John Lennox (Full Transcript)

(Through The Bible) Genesis – Part 1: Zac Poonen (Transcript)

What A Man Is Not – Biblical Manhood (Part 1): Paul Washer (Transcript)

The New Creation (Part 1): Derek Prince Sermon (Transcript)

[/read]

Related Posts

• The Dark Subcultures of Online Politics – Joshua Citarella on Modern Wisdom (Transcript)
• Jeffrey Sachs: Trump’s Distorted Version of the Monroe Doctrine (Transcript)
• Robin Day Speaks With Svetlana Alliluyeva – 1969 BBC Interview (Transcript)
• Grade Inflation: Why an “A” Today Means Less Than It Did 20 Years Ago
• Why Is Knowledge Getting So Expensive? – Jeffrey Edmunds (Transcript)