Ham-strung

On February 5, 2014, Bill Nye ("The Science Guy") debated Ken Ham (President of Answers in Genesis and The Creation Museum) on whether the Genesis account of creation is a viable model of origins given what science has taught us so far. Both of these guys are characters and they were very well behaved, so it's actually a reasonably entertaining debate as far as these sorts of events go. I thought that Nye could have done a better job, but he clearly did a good enough job. A poll at Christian Today - a Christian Website - had Nye winning by a land-slide. Ham was very clear and polite and he actually garnered a few laughs along the way. You've got to hand it to him for doing a great job of exposing the Christian fundamentalist/literalist mindset.

Ham repeatedly made a distinction in the debate between “observational science” and “origins or historical science”. This distinction is based upon what one can observe in the present and conclude about the present (what he calls “observational science”) and what one can observe in the present and infer about the past (what he calls “origins or historical science”). There is a difference here, to be sure, but it’s not the difference Ham needs for Creationism to be considered as science. Here’s what he says in his introductory statements explaining what is different about what he calls “origins or historical science”:

“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.”

Well, Ken, your science isn't science. Science doesn’t proceed from the bible. It proceeds from efforts to assess evidence as objectively as possible and it leads to whatever conclusions that assessment produces. If the best explanation for the evidence we find around us is that Yawheh exists and that He created the universe 4-6,000 years ago with all of the “kinds” in their present form, then that would be a scientific conclusion. But Ham starts and ends there, without providing any evidence or justification for doing so. This is textbook circular reasoning and it’s just one of the many fallacies and biases that science tries its best to avoid.

As he demonstrates in the debate, Ham is both woefully ignorant of the evidence and guilty of the most wishful of thinking in trying to conclude that the evidence around us is best explained by the creation account in Genesis. In this regard, the debate exposed the reality of the situation quite well: there is no debate. There is no controversy. The matter has been settled, and there is only ignorance and wishful thinking on the literalist creationist side.

Since Ham’s “origins or historical science” begins with the conclusion it "proves"(according to Ham, at least), it can’t possibly represent anything anybody would rightly call science. Moreover, the evidence doesn’t support that presupposition. A real scientist - any reasonable person, actually - should reject it. Accordingly, creationism, at least Ham’s version of arriving at it, while appropriate for religion classes, has no place in science class. If that is one of Ham’s goals (and surely it is), I’m afraid he has handily defeated it all by himself.