The first half of the debate was a bit frustrating to me. Each man had copious amounts of time to lay down the basis for their arguments in succession, but instead Ken seemed more bent on using the time as an evangelical outreach and Bill was overly, zealot-like in his effort to use the platform to demean and marginalize anyone who has a creationist belief and would dare to call themselves a scientist. In addition Bill was almost embarrassingly "concerned" that our future as a nation is put in grave jeopardy by people "indoctrinating" a generation that had in his estimation stopped looking for answers. For if your conclusion to the ultimate question, "where did we come from?" ends in God, then you stop looking for the "right" answer and therefore scientific discoveries will no longer be made and our nation will fall behind the rest of the world who IS searching for the "right" answer. (he was fervent in his multiple pleas to the "voters and taxpayers" to "please understand what he was saying.")
By far the most interesting format was the question and answer period, but by then most of the time was chewed up by long orations and not all that many questions were addressed. In addition, I was left feeling a little bereft that audience members could ask the questions when what I really wanted was for each debater to pose specific questions to each other that they would have to answer. During the long orations there were many questions they had for each other, but so many so at one time that it was impossible for the other to directly answer.
Obviously I whole-heartedly believe in creation and am ultimately relieved that answers to these difficult and expansive questions are out there. Looking at this neutrally though, it's hard to declare a "winner" of this debate for a couple of reasons. The most important reason being, each man rejected out of hand before even starting this dialogue the basis for the other's reasons they believe what they believe. For example Nye rejects the possibility of a God creator, and the dismissal of that idea inherently throws out anything else that can be said to support it. Conversly, Ham maintains that the universe can't adequately be aged given the flawed scientific method used to determine such. He says that there are hundreds of different methods in how to determine the age of the earth, but that all of them in effect are based at some point on information that is "inferred", or assumed, and that therefore makes the process unreliable. While that is a good point, Ham didn't have enough time to adequately explain what he means by that and therefore in my opinion couldn't "win" that argument.
In the end, while I can't neutrally look at this and say one or the other "won" the argument of creation vs. big bang, I can say that Nye on several occasions had to answer with "I don't know." While he was able to wrap that in neat and shiny packing with a big, distracting bow on top, ultimately that's all it was: distracting us from the fact that he couldn't provide an explanation within his scientific knowledge. Ken Ham did. Ham was eloquent time and time again when Nye would end with, he didn't know, but: "that was the beauty and excitement of the possibility of discovery", Ken would say, "There is this book I know of... "
And that book does have the answers.
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