Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

[kmay]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

that tree is 6800 years old? where you there to watch it grow? no? well HISTORICAL SCIENCE SAYS WE CAN'T PROVE ITS AGE BUT THE BIBLE CAN PROVE IT.

[Crazyjayde]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

This center video was suggested as related material:



I enjoyed it much more.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

Another interesting debate

[Cavernio]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

Creationism is pretty irritating.

The opposite of 'not knowing what happened with certainty' isn't 'divine intervention'
Why would God give us a brain capable of imagining and learning everymore things about evolution if God didn't want us to use it?
The laws of physics could be called God's laws, how life exists and all the biology behind it could all be God who initiated it. But the very nature of all our knowledge is deterministic, one thing leads to another, everything affects everything else. Evolution just makes sense. There is still plenty of mystique that humanity will never know about the existence of our world, questions like why and did we come from nothing or was there always something...so many reasons I could see that someone would be rational, intelligent and still believe at least in the possibility of God.
If I were religious at this point in time I certainly wouldn't believe in creationism. But, if I did, I might as well not believe anything my eyes see or my ears hear either, as that's how much I'd have to doubt my own observations and understanding of the world around me in order to believe that creationism is real.

[korny]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

Another interesting debate

I watched that the other week. Pretty interesting. I would like to see Dawkins or some other prominent scientist or evolutionary biologist debate with Dr. William Lane Craig.

[GuidoHunter]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

Evolution is what the evidence suggests is the case. The overwhelming amount of evidence, at that.

Science has no "jurisdiction" over God, nor does it care to; it is concerned solely with the realm of the observable, testable, repeatable, and makes conclusions of varying degrees of certainty in response. As such, evolution has gotten the gold star of support from science.

Could God have created the world six thousand years ago with pre-buried fossils and other age-suggestive elements as initial conditions? I suppose; this is God we're talking about, after all. Hell, he could have created the universe yesterday and just implanted us with false memories and imagined thoughts for all we know. Is entertaining that possibility a worthwhile intellectual endeavor? Hardly. "I know nothing and anything is possible" is only a brick wall for the development of knowledge and, as Cavernio said, a gross insult to the minds God gave us.

Since it would be foolish to accept those premises and halt our intellectual development, it is fully reasonable to examine the world around us and draw conclusions based on what the evidence suggests.

Again, that may not be what *really* happened (though the argument is pretty damn convincing), but who cares? Your belief in the true origins of the world and your acceptance of (note: not belief in) evolution are two completely different issues. Evolution, as a science-based theory, merely shows what the evidence suggests. Since the evidence overwhelmingly supports evolution, you'd be foolish not to accept it even if you believe the Earth is actually 6000 years old.

--Guido

[stargroup100]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

okay seriously why is this even a topic of discussion

fucking creationism

[Izzy]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

okay seriously why is this even a topic of discussion

fucking creationism

I don't know, but I liked Guido's point. I've always taken the stance that things that are untestable are irrelevant, but that way of wording it makes more sense. Although of course it would never make sense to someone that doesn't understand it in the first place.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

okay seriously why is this even a topic of discussion

fucking creationism

I think, at some level, it becomes a matter of:

1. Emotion. Some people have lived their whole lives believing in Creation, and so it's really troubling to them for science to come along and say, "Uh, here's what really happened." It's not exactly easy to outright drop such a huge component of your mental process/life/psyche/emotional worldview/whatever. It's much easier to just stick with shitty arguments that substantiate your view even if you have to be willfully ignorant to the rest. It's always easy to keep in mind that you can't be proven wrong 100% (the "beauty" of unfalsifiable paradigms), so that means there's a chance you're right -- and for some, that chance, no matter how small, is enough to resolve the cognitive dissonance.

2. Intellect/education. I seriously think some people just lack the means to understand the arguments, either because there's so much science they simply haven't learned yet, or they don't have the capacity to make sense of it.

[qqwref]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

One problem I have with the whole creationism viewpoint is that some people take fundamentalism/anti-science to an extreme, where everything they are sufficiently confused by gets explained away with a "well God did it that way, and we just can't understand His reasoning" argument. Like why God apparently created light from all these stars and galaxies and pulsars, appropriately red-shifted, and sufficiently far along on their journey to make us think they are billions of years old when they're not. That's all well and good if you're just talking to a bunch of people who believe exactly what you do, but from the perspective of someone who doesn't agree, the same argument can be used by a believer in any all-powerful deity. There's really no difference to an atheist between "God did it that way and doesn't have to tell us why" and "Aten did it that way and doesn't have to tell us why", except that people tend not to believe in Aten anymore. And it hasn't explained anything, either.

In fact, a lot of arguments I've seen for a God fall into this same trap: even if there is a supreme being out there, how do you know it's the one you believe in? I've seen some Christians making argments for the existence of God that are so general they could even apply to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And even if all the 6000-year-old-earth stuff is true, it could actually be the Mormon or Jewish version of God that did it, or even an entirely different being, and you may be eternally punished for obeying the wrong set of rules. People of other religions believe in their holy book as much as Christians believe in theirs.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

It's actually a kind of insult to God when you think about it.

If God made a universe that is indistinguishable from one that didn't need him to create it in the first place... then what good is God for?

God may as well be a trickless magician:

[stargroup100]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

I guess I should elaborate.

Everything we discuss here about the relationship between what we observe and the actual reality of the world around us, the nature of science, the nature of knowledge, etc. falls in the subject of philosophy (or something like that, maybe I'm not being technical).

What we discuss here is worthy of discussion as philosophy. Creationism has nothing to do with it. Discussing the psychology behind why people believe in creationism and how it affects a person is fine. Discussing why creationism is wrong, however, is as meaningful as discussing why it's impossible for a human being to consume a full-sized elephant in under 12 seconds.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

I think you may be referring to epistemology (the study of knowledge / what it means for something to be knowable / true / a belief / justified / etc).

[korny]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

it could actually be the Mormon God that did it

Just for clarification purposes, the mormon god is the same god as they are just another Christian denomination like the Methodists, baptists and Catholics.

[Snowcrafta]

Re: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham, live debate, going on now

Catholic #1