[Aptorian]

It seems there was a debate last night between Bill Nye, the Science Guy and Ken Ham, the director of the Creationist Museum. It's hosted by a CNN guy and takes place at the Creationist museum with a room full of press people.

They each take turns doing presentation and arguing various topics.



Just started watching it and thought I'd set up this thread to have a discussion with the rest of you if you can stomach a two and half hour debate about creationism.

PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD (Ha ha see what I did there) TRY TO KEEP IT JUST SLIGHTLY CIVIL AND TAKE A WALK IF YOU GET ANGRY.

This post has been edited by Maybe Apt: 05 February 2014 - 09:23 AM

[Aptorian]

I have just started the part where Ken Ham is doing his presentation and showing various clips of prominent scientists who are also creationists. I can already tell that it is going to bother me that he is going to be allowed to just present various "facts" without Bill interjecting. Some of the stuff these people are saying is making me pretty frustrated, like the astrophysicist stating that nothing in his field of work contradicts the ideas of the Creationists, oh boy.

EDIT: Had to go google "Historical science" and "historical geology" because I had no idea what he was talking about. A bit disconcerting considering I have studied history. Turns out it is just a crackpot term creationists are using to create uncertainty around scientific observation.

This post has been edited by Maybe Apt: 05 February 2014 - 09:10 AM

[Cause]

I have been brought around to Richard Dawkins claims in regards to arguments like this. Having them lends credence to the creationists side but does nothing, neither hurting or helping the rational scientists side. Those who believe in creationism do so for reasons completely outside of science. No scientific argument can sway them, we must stop pretending otherwise. These arguments simply give them an opportunity to exercise their incredibly powerful confrontational Bias.

[Tsundoku]

That is why faith is defined as belief in the absence of fact.

Of itself, that is neither good nor bad; like a penis it's what you do with it that counts.

Or so I'm told.

[Silencer]

While an inherently odd position to hold, to a certain extent, everyone believes some things without proof. This is fine, or even necessary, to some extent. Indeed, science itself tends to rely on "this isn't perfect, but until we figure out something better, it'll have to do." in a lot of areas.


The issue is more when one holds to a belief which has been directly contradicted, or rendered extremely unlikely, by the proof.

E.g. if there was someone who still believed the world was flat, this would be considered extraordinarily odd, if not outright stupid. We've been to space, ffs. Prior to that, even, we had plenty of evidence that the Earth was not, in fact, flat. Now, once you get to that stage - even if one does not have a reasonable alternative hypothesis - it is foolish to cling to the belief that you have strong evidence is not true.

So it is with religion. While there is no obvious "killer evidence" against *God* (or at least, some form of higher power - much in the same way that there is not evidence of the absence of other life in the universe) (and bearing in mind that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"), the fact that the belief in various deities stems largely from texts which contain many other things which are scientifically unsound, and moreover, that a large enough, vocal enough, portion of people who believe in the veracity of the Bible, still hold to beliefs which are extremely unlikely to be true given the evidence available to us, and despite all the shenanigans which have happened to the contents of their holy text over the intervening centuries, so on and so forth...that, I think, is the main problem "science" has with "religion".

I say "science" and "religion" because realistically it's "groups of people A, B...and Z", with science and religion being the vehicles of those groups in the war they wage for social approval of their ideas, not actually a united front of all things science versus all things religion.


In that sense, faith in the absence of observation is fine. Faith in denial of observation, is both foolish and problematic. Because it is the latter which allows people to ignore reality in favour of fantasy and therefore they are capable of being made to do almost anything on the basis of nothing. Thus, most of human history.



It is, indeed, almost as foolish to be a staunch atheist as it is to deny the possibility of other life in the universe. Just because the Abrahamic, or Greek/Roman, or whatever other mostly-unlikely religion's deities you choose, are not very plausible or justifiable given the source of our belief in them, or lack thereof, and the evidence that said sources are wrong, does not mean that there *is not* or *cannot* be some form of higher power. Again, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". There is room for faith. It just shouldn't be taken as truth in the face of evidence to the contrary.

[Cause]

The problem with debates like these, after watching only the first thirty minutes, is that the one debater is a scientist arguing facts and science the other is a master orator and propagandist.

Ken Ham with his opening salvo sought to achieve the initiative right away by using his chance to go first to redefine long established and understood words. He creates needless complications by introducing observational and historical science. He right from the start has re-framed the debate, a common and duplicitous tactic in debate but not science. He does ad-hominem attacks by repeatedly suggesting a secular conspiracy to control science and drive out creationist scientists. He makes appeals to authority by suggesting that a man who builds a piece of technology on a satellite has in some way an understanding and superior insight into whether the world is 6 billion or a thousand years old. He cleverly manipulates the format of the debate by asking Bill to ask questions, which because of debate rules he is not allowed to answer but he scores points because it instead looks like he cant. What kind of debate gives people 30 min blocks to talk and allows no rebuttals?

He provides no proof for his position and does everything he can to muddle the issue without ever tackling the scientific evidence against him. The truth is science does not give over well to this kind of debate. Scientific debates should last days, they should be done through writing, not orally, and they should include a reference for every statement. In such a debate Bill could bury him under a mountain of papers and evidence and proof. It would just make a very boring tv show.

Edit- I should also add that its incredibly worrying and telling that he can see no distinction between an argument for god/creation and an argument for his god/creation mythos.

As for observational history according to the Jewish calendar we are in the year of the word 5775 (I believe creationists use this same dating system?). Recorded history is itself longer than this.

This post has been edited by Cause: 05 February 2014 - 01:23 PM

[End of Disc One]

[Ukjent]

This is just dumb, you got one guy talking facts and one guy talking bull. I don't understand why people believe that shit.

[Aptorian]

 Cause, on 05 February 2014 - 11:29 AM, said:

I have been brought around to Richard Dawkins claims in regards to arguments like this. Having them lends credence to the creationists side but does nothing, neither hurting or helping the rational scientists side. Those who believe in creationism do so for reasons completely outside of science. No scientific argument can sway them, we must stop pretending otherwise. These arguments simply give them an opportunity to exercise their incredibly powerful confrontational Bias.

Personally I dislike Dawkins because he seems like as much of a fanatic as the Creationists he rails against. He is very aggressive in his approach and every "interview" I have seen where he argues with some christian fundementalist, has made atheists look as bad as the die hard religious people.

Personally I don't think ignoring or shunning Creationists works or is in any way productive, just like how I think ignoring Holocaust revisionists is a bad idea. Just because you can't win the argument doesn't mean you shouldn't give the fools any opposition. It will create the illusion that you are trying to silence them, suppress their "truth" rather than simply dismissing it.

 Cause, on 05 February 2014 - 12:56 PM, said:

The problem with debates like these, after watching only the first thirty minutes, is that the one debater is a scientist arguing facts and science the other is a master orator and propagandist.

After their first 30 minute presentation they did two rounds of rebutals and counter-rebutals. Then they went on to almost and hour of Q&A where they could take shots at one another.

I think it worked nicely.

 Cause, on 05 February 2014 - 12:56 PM, said:

He provides no proof for his position and does everything he can to muddle the issue without ever tackling the scientific evidence against him. The truth is science does not give over well to this kind of debate. Scientific debates should last days, they should be done through writing, not orally, and they should include a reference for every statement. In such a debate Bill could bury him under a mountain of papers and evidence and proof. It would just make a very boring tv show.

I actually think that from an objective viewpoint Ham did well. This is the first time I have actually watched a good speaker for the Creationists and I understand where he is coming from.

People forget that before we developed the scientific method, the fathers of science and philosophy battled back and forth between whether "Observation" was really the right way or the only way to view the world and truly understand it. If you don't know yourself, in the case of the Creationists I assume they'd say if you don't have god in your heart, how could you possibly understand the nature or the universe?

This is of course all nonsense in the greater sense, when we are discussing hardcore science based on quantifiable data but I do understand the Creationist viewpoint. They just need to stay out of the physics and biology classroom.

Generally I think this was an excellent show. They kept it civil, which is more than I would expect from guys like Dawkins or Bill Maher, and they did well to present their wildly different views of history and science.

You could tell that Nye had a second agenda, trying to appeal to the parents and kids out there in the states where the have Creationis teaching, and I think he did a good job trying to address them, all though at times he was probably a bit too high brow for them to understand what he was talking about.

[HoosierDaddy]

In a nutshell, when asked what it would take to reconsider his position Ham said that he was a Christian. Belief in the face of all hypothetical possibilities stating otherwise being true is no longer faith, it is willful ignorance. It has no place in education outside the Greek and Roman pantheons, Nordic gods, and Cthulu.

[LinearPhilosopher]

I stopped keeping tracks of all the appeals the authority, irrelevant arguments he made. The only somewhat credible argument he made is that there is a "hi-jacking" of terms. Though i wouoldn't use that term. Every words has implications, assumption that go into it. For example: religion in the western sense of the wolrd neccesiate the presence of a metaphysicasl being as in western history it's always been the case. In the eastern sense there isn't this requirement (see daoim, confucianism/buddhism etc). However that flip and switch argument is predicated upon the viability of his own position which he did not even establish in the first case. That's what you call sophistry my friends.


Bill Nye was amazing however. Informative as usual

 Maybe Apt, on 05 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

People forget that before we developed the scientific method, the fathers of science and philosophy battled back and forth between whether "Observation" was really the right way or the only way to view the world and truly understand it. If you don't know yourself, in the case of the Creationists I assume they'd say if you don't have god in your heart, how could you possibly understand the nature or the universe?

you touch upon a good point. To a creationist (and any other fundie, the ontological centre of their understanding of the world is the way by whic the understand and judge the world around them. They asses sciences through a distorted lens called "religion" 9 (i say distorted because none of my religious firends believe in that bullcrap). So because they judge everything by means of their twisted interpretation of the bible, they will never really be convinced by any amount of logical or scientifc evidence to the contrary. Now if one were to asses their faith by means of scientific enquiry, by means of logic, that would be another story, however fundies lack the critical thinking required to perform such a "feat"

This post has been edited by BalrogLord: 06 February 2014 - 04:20 AM

[LinearPhilosopher]

delete this, i fail @ using forums

This post has been edited by BalrogLord: 06 February 2014 - 04:20 AM

[Cause]

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