When word got around that Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) was going to debate Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum, I was skeptical because just understanding the science of evolution is not good enough, you also have to understand and be prepared for all the creationist criticisms of evolution, and most scientists have no reason to learn about those.
Among other things, I wrote:
In other words, in order to debate the subject of evolution, it’s not enough to learn all about evolution. You also have to learn all about creationism, and how creationists think about evolution. You have to be familiar with things like Jonathan Wells’s anti-evolution Icons of Evolution and Alan Gishlick’s explanation of why it’s wrong. You have to absorb the creationists’ way of thinking about evolution in order to explain your point to them in a way they will understand.
And that’s just not something I’m willing to spend a lot of my time on. And unless Bill Nye has been secretly setting up Ken Ham for this debate for months, it’s not something he’s spent a lot of time on either.
As it turns out, Nye didn’t quite set Ham up, but as he explains in a Skeptical Inquirer article about his view of the debate, he did do a lot of prep work:
I consulted the world’s foremost authorities on arguing or debating with creationists. I flew to Oakland, California, and consulted with the famed, venerable, and formidable Genie Scott, along with Josh Roseneau, and the staff at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). They schooled me on what to do in great detail. Later that week, I managed to arrange a lunch with Don Prothero and Michael Shermer, two hardcore skeptics. Don even debated the notorious Duane Gish back in the 1980s. All of these people were wonderfully helpful. They were very patient with me and helped me figure out what to say and, especially, what not to say. They said to prefer the word “explanation” to the word “theory,” for example. I just can’t thank them enough.
I haven’t seen the debate, but it sounds like he also managed to pull off a strategy I’ve seen work before, which is to steer the debate so it isn’t constantly about the attacks on the theory of evolution, but rather a discussion of what the alternative might be. I’ve seen forum discussions where creationists were hammered by repeated requests to “state the theory of creationism.” After all, if they think they’ve got a better theory, they should be able to explain what it is and why it does a better job of explaining the physical evidence of the real world.
Ken Ham’s theories are well known, so Nye didn’t have to challenge him to describe them, which allowed Nye to address them directly and point out why they were deficient:
If you take the time to watch, Mr. Ham repeatedly mentioned or droned on about the less-than-a-handful of scientists who subscribe to the weird idea that the Earth is crazy (or crazily) young. When my turn came, I talked about geology and the Grand Canyon. Creationists from the United States, or in Australian-born Ham’s case, in the United States, just can’t get enough of the Grand Canyon. I pointed out that not a single fossil form had tried to swim from one rock layer to another during his purported worldwide flood, only 4,000 years ago. Were we to find such a fossil, it would utterly change geology and our scientific worldview. I did a bit of engineering, pointing out that no wooden boat has ever been built as big as Ham’s imagined ark. In fact, the big ones that were built were smaller and generally twisted apart— and sank (for this I used a chart from Ham’s website). I made it personal where possible. The Nyes are an old New England family, many of whom sailed wooden ships. I also spoke of decades in the Pacific Northwest, where I observed the enormous boulders washed westward by ancient collapsing ice dams in what is now Montana.
…
If kangaroos got off the ark in Mesopotamia, why aren’t there kangaroos in Laos? (Again, I used a map from Ham’s very website.) Then, from geology: If I find ice that has evidence of 680,000 layers of summer-winter cycles, how could the Earth be any younger? Thanks to Don for that. How can there be 9,500-year-old trees if the Earth is only 6,000 years old? And so on.
Apparently, the whole debate went like that.
Those of you familiar with creationism and its followers are familiar with the remarkable Duane Gish (no longer living—at least as far as we know). His debating technique came to be known as the “Gish Gallop.” He was infamous for jumping from one topic to another, introducing one spurious or specious fact or line of reasoning after another. A scientist debating Gish often got bogged down in details and, by all accounts, came across looking like the loser.
It quickly occurred to me that I could do the same thing. If you make the time to watch the debate (let’s say for free at http://billnye.com—wink, wink), I hope you’ll pick up on this idea. I did my best to slam Ken Ham with a great many scientific and common sense arguments. I believed he wouldn’t have the time or the focus to address many of them.
So I guess I was mistaken to worry about how this would turn out. From the accounts I’ve heard, it sounds like Nye came across very well and pretty much won the debate.
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