Bill Nye to Debate Evolution at Creation Museum

I don't understand why Science and Genesis can't agree. Genesis says God made everything in 6 days,,,,but how long is a God Day. Maybe it's 100s of millions of man years per God day? Both evolution and Genesis are possible if we just reconsider what the 6 days mean.

That said, Ham apparently argues about time since Noah's arc, which is clearly 4000 man years. Why?

 

I thought the creation guy did well.

 

So why don't we just freely interpret everything in the Bible then.

Maybe Noah's Ark was a giant living turtle.

 

I agree. I made the point earlier in the thread that those wishing to define "days" as the 24 hour construction we're familiar with are diminishing God's glory and power. Seeking to confine Him into boxes we're familiar with does Him a disservice.

Reading the Old Testament as a literal document is willfully ignoring the great intellectual strides we've made as a species. Noah's Ark is a physical, biological impossibility. A man named Noah did not travel the earth, across oceans and continents, to collect two of every animal (including deep sea anglers, Chinese sun bears, Costa Rican toucans, etc.) and have them repopulate through inbreeding. He certainly didn't feed them to each other either.

The problem with debates like this is that it both places "young earth creationists" on equal footing with scientists, as if their opinion is valid, and it highlights a certain strain of evangelical Protestantism (Pope John Paul II, voicing reason and common sense, proclaimed that there was no conflict between natural selection and Christianity) that many of us Christians, and I include myself, are embarrassed by. If God, in His wisdom and power, created the universe through the Big Bang and created life on earth through natural selection, He did a good thing that humanity has never stopped being curious about. That lack of curiosity is what's so frustrating about Biblical literalists.

 

So Ham starts by trying to re-define the word science because science has been hijacked by secularists. Mkay...

 

The bible is full of allegory, symbolism, and metaphors. "Day" can mean an era or age age. Or for the few bible literalists, exactly 1000 years.

Possible, but not likely.
(Because there were two turtles)

 

I think there is a big problem in how some people view creation/God. Some people just look at The Bible and maybe they find some things in it that they don't understand or agree with so they just write off the idea of a God altogether because of what a book says.

You have to understand how The Bible was written to realize that it should be taken with a grain of salt. It was written over hundreds of years, It was composed of a select few text, and most of the time the people writing and putting all of these texts together into the bible were not at the events they were writing about. The stories were told for 100 of years before they were actually written down and put in a book, and if you have ever played the game telephone you know how quickly something can be interpreted and told differently.

So we have that issue, plus we have the fact that many of the people selecting these text had agendas of their own so they would select the text that would emphasize what they wanted to happen in society at that time. Also many words do not translate very easily or at all to english.

I believe in Jesus, and I believe in christian ideals for the most part, but I can't act like The Bible has all the answers to the universe. That would be ignorant of me. But it would also be ignorant for an atheist to totally dismiss the possibility of a creator/God because they simply do not agree with the Bible or any of the other religious text that support the idea of a creator.

So when it comes to religion I always like to quote Socrates' famous last words, "I know now, that I know nothing." And the rest is really just faith.

 

I mean, he spent the debate trying to argue that his position was an evidence-based conclusion, while coming from a position of presupposition. If a logically-thinking person without an opinion either way had watched that debate, I don't see how they possibly could have come away convinced by Ham's reasoning.

 

I don't think you understand how linguistics works. It is very common to interpret words from oral history in context of time and place.

It is very sound to say a Day for God is millions of man years. However, once Adam appears, Genesis starts logging everything in real man years. That's pretty clear. The first 7 days, no so much.

 

You owe me $20 Finalsbound & SamFisher.... I told you SacTown would be swayed by the amazing logic of the Carnie.

 

Ham's point of unreliable dating methods really were quite confusing and interesting. If current radioactive decay/carbon dating methods are inaccurate, then the things we think are really old may not be at all. For example, if the bones of the dog that I buried last year are excavated and dated for age, and if readings show that it is 5000 years old, that would be really detrimental to the scientific community.

In regards to Nye, he was fairly decent considering this was his first major debate on a topic he may not be the best at defending and arguing against. Nye makes the distinction that Ham's model of the origins of the world arent consistent with science and its process. Nye uses examples of the layering of the Grand canyons and fossil that are visible within these layers to prove his evolutionary scheme. Nye repeatedly called into question the Noah's global flood account and states that if such a flood existed, species of those times would be scattered throughout the layers of sedimented rocks/ice etc...

Overall, while the debate was a bit drawn out, I thought both parties did a good job...and Ham really did hold his ground.

Once again, these debates really dont do much to change my opinion...its just nice to see reasoning at high levels...

 

You just answered your own question.

 

How do you KNOW it will eventually be that?

So you are saying as more and more people become "FACT" based, they are less and less being "FAITH" based. You just criticized religion to be nonfactual.

What do you mean eliminated? What exactly is it that Muslims are being allowed to do but Christians are not?

 

I don't think you understands how linguistics works. It is very common to interpret words from oral history in context of time and place.

It is very sound to say an Ark for Noah is a giant living turtle for the common men. However, once literalists started preaching everything in sensationalism terms, it became a wooden ark. That's pretty clear.

 

Saw these posted on BuzzFeed via Reddit ...

"I asked 22 self-identifying creationists at the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate to write a message/question/note to the other side"

The sun goes up ... it goes down ... you can't explain that!


This one actually is a little scary


Link: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/messages-from-creationists-to-people-who-believe-in-evolutio

 

Came across this interesting MLK quote in an otherwise nondescript article about the "debate" last night:

 

awesome quote, i haven't seen that one before. greatly describes my views on each subject.

 

If people want to live and die limiting themselves to whatever biblical standard they set for themselves, then that is fine. Not my life, not my problem.

That being said, if you religious folk could please stop trying to alter public policy to brainwash the non vacuous of us with that fairytale bull**** that'd be nice.

 

What a sad post. That's all I'm going to say.