You give me pause on how wealthy I might have been if I stayed being a minister. Having a flock of sheep who don't question you as long as you say the right words.

Damn. Honesty isn't the best policy.

 

Yep, Bill has nothing to gain and only something to lose.

 

 

 

Definitely. With how passionate he seemed when talking about creationism, I'm sure he's seen their (awful) arguments. I hope he's also seen a good amount of their rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies. I definitely think that Bill Nye will have done his homework on this one. I just hope he makes sure he has access and permission to air full unedited video.

I hope you are right Vastet.

                It appears Aronra  agrees with you and me ex-  and many others as well.  AS AronRa pointed out "this is not a job for a scientist it's for a stratigist."   Nye is from a TV background designed for children I'm sure his production staff rarely disagreed nor lied to him now he's going to  run into an expert liar with a friendly home audience.  I'm still hoping Bill Nye backs out of this.   

 

because they did win. comfort got exactly what he wanted: probably the largest audience ever to be exposed to him, served up on a platter, on which to unleash his same tired old gimmicks.


i was actually a ray comfort fan during my fundy college days, and i can tell you the man considers any chance he's had to "witness" a victory. i can also tell you he said absolutely nothing new that night. imo, the person who did the best in throwing him off his guard was the angry lady who insisted he explain specifically why cancer exists in the world. he kept trying to get onto his speech about suffering in general (one i've heard many times) and she kept not letting him. you saw how flustered he got. it didn't have anything to do with the difficulty of her question: his patented biblical response for suffering works just as well for cancer. the problem is, the word "cancer" was throwing him off-script.


if i was nye, i would watch every youtube video, every dvd, every cd this guy has ever put out, learn his routines by heart, and keep derailing him. that would go a longer way than hard science, i'm sorry to say, both in embarrassing ham and convincing the public.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/22/bill-nye-joining-debate-creationism-video_n_4645263.html

 

The creation museum has proposed building a replica of Noah's ark (conveniently on land), but have not been able to raise the necessary funds.  (They're even offering junk bonds to current donors.)  This is on top of their current financial problems, which has prompted them to add a dragon exhibit to boost flagging attendance.  The publicity from this debate is likely to help remedy these financial straits.

I think a simpler way of settling the debate is to simply let Ham build his ark:  With the help of 3 other men (to represent Noah's sons), let them build an ark entirely of wood (using only primitive tools; modern machiner), of the proper dimensions, then wander the high seas for a year.  If Ham and his crew survive, then he'll have made a credible case for Genesis.  With the requirements waived of gathering 2 of each kind from all over the earth; and enduring an actual global flood, this should be quite easy, especially since Ham isn't quite 600 years old like Noah was.  

Of course, I think even Ham knows it would be impossible to buid; and that a wooden boat would not survive for long on the open water.

 

I won't be watching it tonight but I suspect the servers will crash from the load.

I hope some one can get on and capture some of the circus and then post it.

I saw a posting from someone who was there, they said that Bill Bye did a pretty good job of holding his own. Ken Hamm started getting tired and then stopped answering questions, but instead started to quote the bible and say that faith was the answer to every thing.

But Hamm got what he wanted. A publicity stunt. Now he has the DVD to create. You can bet that he will edit the heck out of it, making him look like the winner.

 I didn't get to the debate til near the end and the feed kept failing.

 

Gonna watch now.

Right out the box Hamm appeals to authority. HA!

 I see debatelive.org has a Post-Debate Answers Live with Ken Ham at 8pm tonight.

Licking wounds, shaking off the cognitive dissonance of the believers i.e. waste of time.

 

Hmmmm, an aside, I can post now in Chrome instead of Firefox. Excellent.

i don't agree. i don't necessarily think scientists should actively seek out nuts to debate, but i also think the only people ignorant enough to award the creationists "credibility" for those debates would award it to them regardless.

i agree with all that. i didn't mean brian was wrong to debate comfort, i was just saying we shouldn't be surprised comfort acted like he'd won a victory.

although i do have to say that, afaik, the nightline debate was the first and only time comfort has ever been on national network television. even among evangelicals, he was never terribly well known, even after he got his claws into kirk cameron. his media coverage has mostly consisted of crappy video-taped seminars with poor production values. i say all this from a former insider's perspective. when i was a fundamentalist, i heard of comfort through word of mouth. i found him fascinating and thought he was right about everything. i was really into him for about 2 years (about 2001-2003) and i couldn't believe that every christian i met (literally every one) would go "who?" when i mentioned his name. so did the nightline exposure bring comfort a bogger audience than he'd ever had before? without doubt. much, much bigger.

did it do the same for brian? absolutely. was comfort better known among christians than brian and the rrs? sure, but not nearly as much as you'd think. he was no falwell or dobson or haggard, not even close. for one thing (and i have to say this to the man's credit), he does seem to be the genuine article. not a speck of greed or conscious self-promotion adheres to his name.

I was actually responding to zara. You managed to sneak in while I was typing and I didn't notice after I'd posted.

Fwiw, I knew about Ray before the nightline debate. Before I knew about the RRS actually. Not by much, but at least a few months. Maybe a couple years. The forum I used to post on had a hardcore christian who I got in a number of debates with, and Ray was one of the idiots the guy liked to refer to.

 Read a Christian website about the debate and they did give some praise to Bill Nye. The site covers a large range of Christians, some of which accept evolution.

Thoghts on the debate: I didn't like the format. Having to listen to 30 minutes of Ken Ham without being interrupted when he was spewing some of the most refined bullshit I've heard in a while, was really difficult. I think what should have happened is the two having a 10-15 minute intro each, followed by just back and forth. It would allow Nye to more effectively and obviously call Ham on his BS, and would make Ham address Bill's points more directly. Also, after several rounds of "the bible says this" and "you weren't there" people might see just how hollow Ham's arguments are. I still think it was a net win for the good guys, as Bill is a great educator, and what was most likely an overwhelming majority creationist audience got to hear him very concisely explain a lot of the evidence for evolution and an old Earth. I'm 100% sure that out of everyone watching (live and otherwise), it's possible that some creationists finished it with something in their head that bothers them because it conflicts with creationism. I'm also 100% that not a single non-creationist who watched that thought "Boy, Ken Ham has some good points".

That late question was simply great. "Ken, what would change your mind?" "I'm a Christian...etc. etc., therefore, nothing". "Bill, what would change your mind?" "Evidence." A body of evidence showing creationism to be plausible, or a single piece of evidence that makes the theory of evolution impossible. 

 

 Vastet,

why are you saying radioactive dating is very limited? I haven't heard that before from a non YEC. Do u not trust using other elements besides carbon? I thought they all were within 1% accuracy even done correctly.

if what you saying is true then how can we know the earth is 4.6B yrs old? Is Ham right?

 

what about that thing Ham said a 12k year piece of wood was buried in rock millions of years old? Nye dismissed it saying the rock shelves moved the two parts together then Ham corrected him by saying the wood was embedded.

What was Ken's good points?

I'm not saying the method is limited. But the materials are. Carbon is useless for dating anything more than 45,000 years old. Completely useless. Similarly, uranium is useless for anything less than 10,000 years old.
Elements decay at different rates. Which is why we use different elements to date different time periods. When Ken said that different methods give different results he was right. But Bill had the opportunity to explain why that is. Unfortunately he didn't take it.

Re: the wood. I'm actually pretty sure Ken said it was dated at being 45k years old. I'm not going to open it up and look to double check, but if that is what Ken said then it was the perfect opening. Since carbon dating is only effective up to about 45k years, anything older will show the same thing. All the carbon has decayed so something 4.5 billion years old will have the same test results as something 45k years old.

Good point. I guess I'm so used to it I didn't even notice that bit went unchallenged.

If you spend all your time and effort pissing people off you'll never convince them they are wrong. A lesson the majority of America needs to learn.

Also important to note is that Ken Ham constantly re-iterated this important distinction between observational and historical science. Then when he was discussing the common ancestor of all dogs, he said it was discovered that they were all the same dog (rather than more than one off-shoot of a wolf). May I ask what type of science was used to prove this? Hmm, the same analysis of DNA that shows us that we ALL have a common ancestor? Dishonest, stupid, or deluded...not sure which. 

what does that mean, "intellectually honest"? again, this is what i was talking about in another thread. ever since the middle ages, man has got it in his head that we're somehow "cheating" if we don't swallow our ideologies whole. everybody, theist and atheist, throws around words like "cherry-picking" as a pejorative, but i advocate it as the rational faculty at work. we ought to have enough sense to take what's beneficial and leave the rubbish. then again, for those who like to debate it's frustrating because it makes it difficult for us to draw assumptions about a person's position. i think that's why so many don't like it.