Hey, everybody. Welcome to Nontrivial. I'm your host, Sean McClure. In 2014, there was a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham regarding whether or not creationism is a viable explanation for earth's origin. Now, regardless of which side you agree with, there was what I consider a problematic response from some of the scientific community, which was that the debate never should have happened because it gave a voice is something counter to the scientific consensus.
I argue that such a response is antithetical to science itself, which above all is supposed to be a process that welcomes debate and updates its position as needed. I argue that no matter how wrong you believe your opponent to be, public debate and conversation gives us a chance to point out, fallacies, educate the public, and bring us all closer to the truth. Let's get started. You d***.
Back in 2014 there was a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham and it was called is creation a viable Model of origins? And so it was one of these kind of broadly speaking science versus religion debates. But that's not really a good way to put it because on the religion side, Ken Hamm is a founder of something called the Young Earth Creationist Ministry. And it's probably not representative of most Christians or most religious people in general. The young Earth creationism.
Young Earth creationism, YEC, is a form of creationism which holds as essential tenet that the Earth and its life forms were created by supernatural acts of the Abrahamic God between approximately 6010 thousand years ago. So creationism is taking a very literal interpretation of the Bible and saying that the earth isn't the supposed 4.5 billion years like the scientific consensus would say.
It's actually only 6000 to 10,000 years ago, and maybe the humans and the dinosaurs actually coexisted and things like this. So probably not representative of most Christians or really religious people. And that's why I say it's not really a science religion debate, it's kind of more scientific consensus versus maybe fundamental or creationist religion, if you will, debate.
But anyway, so this was between Bill Nye and Ken Ham in 2014 and it took place at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Again. Ken Hamm is just this. Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Young Earth Creationist Ministry. And Bill Nye, most of you have probably heard this guy's name, is a science educator, or maybe you might say a popularizer, right? Best known for hosting a television series in the 1990s called Bill Nye the Science Guy, right?
And what happened was Bill Nye back in the day, I guess he jumped on YouTube and basically started lamenting the refusal of a large segment of the US population to accept evolution. He's saying like, look, evolution is obviously very accepted in science and there's all kinds of evidence for it and for a bunch of people, particularly young people, to not accept evolution because of something that is said in some older texts is really problematic.
We need young people to grow up with a proper understanding of science. They need to be innovating and all this kind of stuff. So he took issue with that and because of that then I guess Ken Ham obviously reacted to that and then he proposed that they go and have this debate at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky and Bill Nye agreed. So this episode is not really about who won or who I agree with or anything like that. The debate is the debate. You can go check it out.
I think it's on YouTube and it's obviously on a number of other sites that show the video. It's about two and a half hours long and it was moderated by someone from CNN, I believe, but no score was kept. So it's not like there was an official winner. But I think by and large the scientific community thought that Bill Nye won and I think some people thought that maybe Ken Ham won and I think even Kem Ham made the know it's not really about winning.
I think it's just good to get in front of people and have these conversations. So anyway, this episode is not like who won or who do I agree with. I mean I think by and large the literal interpretations of the Bible do run into problems with unfalsifiability and things like that. And I think that if you go watch the debate, some of the things that Kem Ham raised about there's this difference by difference between observed science and historical science or something like this.
What we observe today we can all agree on. So we can agree that there are atoms and there are certain properties to nature and photosynthesis and all this kind of stuff. But when it comes to talking about the past, nobody was really there and so it's problematic to do all this carbon dating and that can't really be trusted.
And so essentially the creationists are arguing that you can take science as it is today and we can agree on all those things, but when it comes to the origins, that's when it differs. And we think the Bible is still literal and stuff like this anyway. So I'm not going to take the sides or really speak to who I agree with.
I mean what I want to talk about is the scientific response to this which was by and large that Bill and I should not have had the debate and this is really, really problematic for reasons I'm going to get into. I think I think it's a very unscientific stance to take.
In fact, I think it's quite hypocritical because I think it actually does what many people would argue the creationists are doing, which is kind of taking this dogmatic fundamentalist approach to basically saying look, you have to just take unfalsifiable approach to basically saying you just have to take something at face value and you don't get to update that. And it is what it right.
And at the end of the debate, ken Hamm admitted that nothing would change his mind concerning his views on creationism, whereas Bill Nye acknowledged that if enough convincing evidence were presented to him, he would change his mind immediately. So just from in the spirit of science, bill Nye, I would argue, definitely has the better answer there because Ken Hamm is basically saying something that's very dogmatic and just kind of you're supposed to accept it at face value.
Nothing could change his mind. And I guess to very kind of fundamentalist or creationist type religious people, that kind of makes sense, right? Like, they just totally accept it, and nothing can change that. Whereas Bill Nye is doing something more in the spirit of true science, which is to say, no, if you give me enough evidence, I will change my mind. Now, I'm not going to get into this because this is kind of a different issue.
There is still something problematic with what Bill Nye is saying. What he is saying is correct. The problem is if you actually ask someone what that evidence is supposed to be, that's when you're going to run into a lot of challenges, right? So Bill and I is like, yeah, if you show me enough convincing evidence, I would change my mind. Okay, what evidence would that be? What would that be? Have you ever heard whether it's an atheist or a scientist actually come up with that answer?
I mean, it's not obvious, right? Is it somebody walking on water? Well, people do that all the time. You can do that with optical illusion. I mean, David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, right? You could have someone floating down from the sky. It would always get chalked up to technology or smoke and mirrors or something like that. So what would that evidence actually be?
There's a bit of unfalsifiability in saying, oh, yeah, if the evidence was shown to me, then I would totally change my mind, but not actually saying what that evidence would be, I challenged someone, hit me up on Twitter to tell me what that evidence would actually be. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but you never hear someone say what the evidence would be, and I argue that that anyways. So that's kind of a different issue that I take with that.
But on its face, without getting into that, bill Nye does have what I would argue is the more correct answer there is that you have to be able to update or change your opinion. No matter how much you believe what you believe, you should always be able to update, whereas Ken Hammond saying, no, nothing can change my mind. So that's very problematic. So if we just look at that, we could, you know yeah, whatever.
Interesting debate, and two people had their sides, and two people believe what they believe. And I guess if you lean more towards that kind of more fundamental religious side of things, maybe you'd go with Ken Hamm and if you're more on the scientific side of things, you'd go with Bill Nye, and that's that.
But the scientific response to this, at least by many people, was that Bill Nye never should have had this debate to begin with, that Bill Nye never should have given a voice to Ken Hamm or the followers of Ken Ham or people like that. That it lends too much credibility to something that is, quote unquote, obviously wrong. Now, that is something that I really, really take issue with without getting into which side me or anyone else should fall on the debate.
I mean, just generally I do lean more to the scientific side of things, although I do have a lot of things I complain about on the science side, too. But I'm not talking about that.
I'm just saying that in the true spirit of science, bill Nye is getting it right because he took the debate and he you know, I'm paraphrasing, but he's basically saying, look, I mean, people are allowed to believe what they believe, and this gives us a chance to have a public forum about this so people can understand the arguments and see know. Maybe what Bill Hammond is saying is not correct or know. People don't realize just how much evidence there is for evolution.
I mean, it gives people a chance to hear some solid arguments, but for the scientific community to step back and say, no, this never should have happened in the first place, I'm going to argue that that's deeply problematic and actually quite counter to what you might call the spirit of science or the purpose of science. The reason for science. Okay. And really what this comes down to is if we think about what science is. So what is science? You can go look at Wikipedia.
You can go get some dictionary definition, accumulating knowledge or scientific method kind of thing, right? But at the end of the day, it is not about some set of facts. It is not about some accumulated knowledge. It's not really about that. You have accumulated knowledge. You have things that are considered more or less facts, although they still have to be falsifiable, right? You still have to challenge them. What it is, is a process. The whole point of science is that it's a process.
And the process says no matter what, you have to be willing to update it in the face of contrary evidence. You must be willing to change it. As Bill Nye said. Again, you can get into what evidence would that actually be? But the point is not getting into that whole conversation. Science is about a process of constant updating. Constant updating. That is its purpose. It's not about any particular set of facts.
It's not about a particular consensus because by definition, new theories are by definition going to go against the consensus. That's what makes them a new theory, right? Nobody had the consensus on relativity before it came out. Nobody had that on quantum mechanics before it came out, or very few people would have had that, right? The whole point is to kind of go against consensus. And that's not to say that there's no value in scientific consensus or what the majority of scientists think.
I mean, there's some weight to that, obviously. But at the end of the day, it is not about some current set of facts. It is not about what is in the textbooks today. It is the process. It is the process of science. So it is extremely problematic, and I would argue unscientific, regardless of who your opponent is, to say, no, we shouldn't even have this debate. People shouldn't even be listening to this kind of stuff.
We shouldn't give a platform for this because it's just going to spread a bunch of well, you might call it misinformation or whatever it is. And you can see why this is relevant to today. We always hear about the misinformation thing and whether or not that should be governed or controlled. And I'm not here to necessarily make a super strong claim on that. But there is something relevant with the vaccine stuff.
I think it was a few months ago where there was a possible debate that was going to happen between Epidemiologist or one of these doctors that was promoting vaccines and then RFK Jr. Who had some concerns that he wanted to raise about vaccines. And you could say, okay, RFK Jr. Has got these crazy ideas and that's not good. And then the doctor, maybe he's got the proper scientific consensus. So we don't really have to have this debate.
But you got to understand, right, only a select kind of esoteric group of people have the scientific knowledge to make that scientific opinion, to understand what it means. Laymen, which is like 99% of the population, don't have that. They don't have that scientific literacy. So you have to have these conversations so that people can hear the arguments, can hear why.
And again, I'm not taking aside in this episode whether you should or should not do a vaccine, whether you should or should not believe in creationism and all this kind of stuff. That's not the point. The point is, no matter what side you're on, it is deeply problematic scientifically and for any vocation, as far as I'm concerned, any enterprise to not respect the process more than any particular set of facts that you have at the time.
Because the only alternative is just to put pure faith in the authority in a very dogmatic fashion. Right? And of course, that's so hypocritical because that's the very thing that a lot of people who would take more of the scientific side of things, or particularly, let's say, atheists, that's the thing they complain about for religion, right, is that you're not supposed to just take something at face value.
You're not just supposed to take some interpretation at face value and take it kind of dogmatically and leave it at that. It needs to be falsifiable. It needs to be updatable. Well, you have to live by your own kind of rules there, right? I mean, if you're saying that that's what you believe, then science above all would have to also do that. But that's not doing that if you don't allow the debate to happen. Now, I get it. I get that.
If you allow some of these debates to happen, I mean, obviously the worry is that, okay, you give the opponent a platform. And if it's really, really kind of out there ideas you can imagine, like maybe it's the Flat Earth Society or maybe it's this creationism stuff or whatever it is, you might say it's so counter to what all this work that's been done, let's say, in science up to this point, maybe you might think it doesn't even deserve to have a voice.
It shouldn't be convincing people, but it is convincing people. It is a big voice that's out there in some other format, even if it's not part of a debate. But without the debate, without the conversation on the public forum, nobody gets to hear the arguments. And that's what is so critical, right?
That is so critical when Ken Ham brings up something like this supposed difference between observational and historical science, like, yes, we agree on the science that we have today, but the stuff that, you know, billions of years ago now, you can't really say that because you weren't there. I mean, I mean, you can easily, easily counter that. And I'm not saying, you know, the counter, you know, the rebuttal is perfect, but you can easily offer a rebuttal to that.
In terms of processes, we're talking about processes right now. This idea that we can understand that there are these kind of invariant processes in nature, that when you see them today, you do know that they've spanned over a long period of time. And you can talk about how radiocarbon dating works, and you can kind of say, this is why we believe it, as opposed to just know it's untrustworthy because you weren't there. I mean, that's just not a good argument.
I'm not even sure that is an argument. And there's other examples where Ken Ham might be saying, well, he does this what he does towards the beginning of the debate, he actually calls up a bunch of he puts them up on the screen, and he shows genuine scientists who happen to also be creationists. They're either part of his group or at least they kind of subscribe to what he believes. And so they're showing bona fide scientists. They're in peer reviewed journals. They do real research.
They understand science. They're publishing. But they also believe in this creationist side of things. And right away, that should kind of be called out, not because those people are necessarily wrong, but you're arguing from authority. It's a logical fallacy to do that. It is. We should all understand and respect the fact that someone's background cannot ultimately lend credence or validity to someone's argument.
The argument as a statement has to stand on its own, and it's important that we understand that, right? Somebody who's completely not a scientist could say the most scientific thing ever. Of course they could. They might do it randomly. They might do it without knowing it. But as a statement, the statement stands on its own. The person's background is not going to lend validity to the actual logical argument that's being made now.
There might be other reasons to take someone's background into account. If there's a lot of uncertainty in the situation, you don't have much else to go on. The source of information can definitely be something you take into account. But again, remember my logic episode, right? There's limitations to logic, but there's also a power to it in a public forum debate. This is the time to use it. This is the time to rest what we talk about on rational arguments and let the public hear that.
Let them understand what argument from authority means. What does that mean? And explain it and slow it down and say, okay, what you're doing, Ken Ham, right now is you're putting a bunch of people with these big titles up and saying that because they do science and they also believe in you know, there must be some validity to creationism. But there's no causal connection between those two at all in terms of logic. There isn't, right?
There might be for some other reason, but there isn't as a logical argument. That is a fallacy. That's an argument from authority. And it might happen on the scientific side, too, right? Bill Nye might end up saying something about people's background or maybe his own credentials or the people that he talked to, or even just the scientific consensus, which is a bit of a poor argument itself and kind of bleeds into this argument from authority as well.
The point I'm trying to make here is that if you have the conversation publicly, then the people who are not scientifically literate and the people who are not thinking about logic on a regular basis or trying to construct arguments, they get to hear why something Ken Ham is saying might be wrong. If they're not going to hear it from you, assuming Ken Ham is your opponent, right, and they're not going to hear it from you if you're Bill Nye or whoever, then who are they going to hear it from?
How could it possibly if we don't have that debate, the only thing you have is the scientist saying, you know what? We just need to shut down the opposing view. We don't want to give them a platform. The only thing that looks like is weak. That's the only thing it looks like, right? It's either a complete, utter adherence to authority, right?
And I'm not saying all authority is bad, but when you do that, you're 100% putting the faith in the authority, which I think is problematic because science can't function like that. And or you're basically saying that your own position must be weak because you can't debate it and you can't argue it. And it's a really OD thing that a lot of scientists would shy away from that under the guise that they don't want to give a platform to the opposing view.
I don't quite buy that that that's what it is. Not that there's no genuine kind of valid fear there, but if you truly believe and understand your particular field, regardless of which side of the fence you're on, then you would not shy away from an opponent.
You would see that as a chance to bring forward good, solid arguments and point out where you believe your opponent is making a mistake so that the layman can hear that, that they can see that, that they can get educated themselves as why maybe this is correct, or why maybe that is not correct. Okay, so wrap up this episode. What can we do? Well, I think at the end of the day, just what I said is you really have to understand things as a process. It's the process that matters.
This is always the case in anything. People who build if you're building software all the time, you can't just say, okay, cut it, stop it. That's our software. This is perfect. You always have to update it. The market changes, things change things. Get reinterpreted your own life, right? If you're going to cut the line right here, right now, and say, okay, I know all there is to know, I don't need to reinterpret anything, I figured it all out, you're going to be in trouble.
Even if the world doesn't change, you'd still be in trouble because nobody has full access to the truth. The thing you must love above all is your willingness to change. That doesn't mean you're changing a lot at any given time. Most of you maybe doesn't change, probably doesn't change. It's quite invariant through time. But there must be the willingness to that must be the ultimate thing that you're doing.
And I think that's true whether you're on the scientific or religious side or whatever you're doing, I think you must always, always have a willingness to update, even if just slightly, your position based on contrary evidence, based on what someone said, something you read listening to a podcast, whatever it is. And I had a tweet recently that said something along the lines of the only thing more respectable than living what you believe is the willingness to change what you believe.
I think it's really, really important we do that. Don't shut down your opponent. See it as a chance to educate the masses, however big the audience is, on maybe some of the fallacies that your opponent is making, but also as a chance to maybe update what you believe as well, you could easily say, well, why would a scientist update anything based on creationism? But you never know what might be said.
Even if it's something you disagree with, it might make you update the way you explain it, or something like that, right? So it's not that you're necessarily changing your position, but you could still change your approach, or it might trigger something in the mind. You don't know. The whole point is it's a process and we're always updating it. And all of us, at best, only have kind of a proxy to the ultimate underlying truth. So let's have the conversation, open the platform.
You're never going to convince anybody by just putting up a wall and saying, you need to obey your authority. People need to obey your authority. That's not going to work for anything. Have the conversation, have the debate. Respect what logic can give us, what it can point out, how it can educate the masses, and always, always be willing to update your position and your beliefs. All right, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening.
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