The True Purpose of the Ham/Nye Debate

Thunderf00t is one of the most famous atheists on YouTube. He minces no words telling people exactly what he thinks, even when it is unpopular and not politically correct. Normally, I ignore the cheerleading of the New Atheists, but this clip shows that Thunderf00t actually got the real point of the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye:




 Ironically, this is the one point in the debate in which Ken Ham clearly and decisively defeated Nye. But don't take my word for it. Atheist Michael Schulson says as much in his review in The Daily Beast:

Last night, it was easy to pick out the smarter man on the stage. Oddly, it was the same man who was arguing that the earth is 6,000 years old.

He goes on:

Nye went into the debate, he says, in order to protect and promote science education in the United States. His most important argument was that people like Ham are ruining America’s global competitiveness by weakening science education. It’s a shame that Nye pushed that point so strongly, because it was the one thing he said all night for which he did not have any actual evidence. Creationism in public schools may be a social disaster, but it’s hard to prove that it’s a financial one, too. And Ham was ready. He had a recorded statement in which Raymond Damadian, who helped invent MRI, expressed his firm belief that the world was created in six days, six thousand years ago, as outlined in Genesis. Ham’s message was clear—and accurate: you can be a creationist and invent economically useful stuff.

Nye made a video a while back, arguing that belief in creationism stifles a nation's ability to compete in industries that require scientific research. What is implied in Nye's case is that we should use the law to shut down creationism, lest we lose our ability to compete economically. It is the one important point of that debate, since it has political implications. If creationism is harmless, why spend all that time and energy trying to talk people out of it?

In this area, Ham gave quotes and showed video after video of young earth creationists who were also top research scientists. If there is one point in which Ham won the debate, it is that belief in creationism does not in any way damage one's ability to do scientific research.

This makes sense if you think about what scientific research entails. When you do economically useful scientific research, you are investigating how things currently work. One's belief as to what happened in the distant past is irrelevant. Bertrand Russell argued that there is no way to disprove the hypothesis that the world popped into existence five minutes ago with the appearance of age. We would have food in our stomachs from meals we never ate, and memory traces from events that never happened.

This is why one's view about origins is not relevant to one's ability to do economically useful scientific research. All the young earth creation groups that I know of, believe that species change over time. Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. You don't need to believe that all life evolved from a single-celled lifeform in order to do research as to how species currently change over time.

Michael Egnor has been particularly vocal about this issue.

I do use many kinds of science related to changes in organisms over time. Genetics is very important, as are population biology and microbiology. But evolutionary biology itself, as distinct from these scientific fields, contributes nothing to modern medicine. 

 The problem with evolution advocates: they argue that fields like population genetics require belief in the Darwinian model of biology. In fact, the dependency relationship is the exact opposite. The evolutionary tree of life depends on fields like population genetics. To argue that the converse is also true is to argue in a circle. The dependency is strictly one-way. Evolution is not the foundation of modern biology, but the metanarrative that they use to turn research into a coherent story.