Transcripts For CSPAN Media Coverage Of Religion 20140223

People over the years had found in canada there was clearly a fossil marsh. A place that used to be a swamp dried out and they found all sorts of happy swamp fossils there, ferns and animals and fish that were recognized. People realized with the age of the rocks as computed by traditional scientists this would be a reasonable place to look for in animal, a fossil of an animal that lived there. They found several specimens. They made a prediction this animal would be found and it was found. So far it cannot make predictions and show results. Here is an externally one that i find remarkable. There are certain fish that have them are remarkable ability to have sex with other fish, traditional fish sex and they can have sex with themselves. One of the old questions in life science, everybody, one of the chin strokers is why does any organism whether you are and ash tree or ec jelly, a squid, apartment, why does anyone have sex . There are more bacteria in your tummy right now than there are humans on earth. Bacteria do not bother with that. They can split themselves and half and getter done, lets go. Think of all the trouble arose bush goes to to make a flower and thorns, why does anybody bother with all that . The answer seems to be your enemies and your enemies are not lions and tigers and bears. Oh my. No. Your enemies are germs and parasites. That is what is going to get you. Germs and parasites. My First Cousins son died tragically from essentially the flu. This is not some story i heard of. This apparently the virus had the right genes to attack so when you have sex you have a new set of genes, a new mixture. People studied these top men knows and they found the one to reproduce sexually had fewer parasites than the ones that reproduced on their own. This black spot disease. There is more. Any populations with putting and so on when river pound ponds get isolated and the river flows again, in between some of these fish will have sex with other fish sometimes and they will have sex on their own that happens asexually. In this fish the ones that are in between, they have an intermediate number of infections. The explanation provided by evolution made a prediction and the prediction or prediction is extraordinary and subtle but there it is. How else would you explain it . And to mr. Hamm and his followers this is something that we in science one. Want the ability to predict and your assertion that there is some difference between the natural laws they used to observe the world today and the natural laws that existed 4000 ago is extraordinary and unsettling. I travel around and i have a great many family members in danville, virginia. One of the u. S. s most livable cities, it is lovely. I was starting along and there was a sign in front of a church from a big bang theory, you got to be kidding me, god. Why would someone at the church, pastor put that sign up unless he or she did not believe the big bang was a real thing. I want to review briefly with everybody why we except in the outside world, why we except the big bang. Hubble there you go. You got to be kidding me, god. Edwin was in pasadena. You can see where the rose parade goes. In the early 1900s, the people who selected the siteexcellent site. The clouds and smog are below you and edwin hubble sat there at this very big telescope studying the heavens. He found the stars are moving apart. The stars are moving apart. He was not sure why but it was clear that the stars are moving further apart all the time. So people talked about it for a couple of decades. And eventually another astronomer almost a couple of decades fred hoyle remarked it was like there was a big bang. There was an explosion. This is to say since everything is moving apart it is reasonable that it one time they were altogether. There is a place from whence or whence these things expanded and it was a remarkable insight. People went still questioning it for decades. Conventional scientists have been questioning it for decades. These two researchers wanted to listen for radio signals from space. Radio astronomy. This is why we have visible light for our eyes and theres a whole other bunch of waves of light that are much longer. The microwaves in your oven or about that long. The radar at the airport is about that long. Your fm radio signal is about like this. Am radio signals are the size of several soccer fields. They went out listening and there was this his hiss that would not go away. The thought there were some loose connector. They rescrewed it and made it tight. They thought it was pigeon droppings that had affected the reception of this horn, it is called. This thing is still hair is still there. It is at a National Historic site. They had found this cosmic Background Sound that was predicted by astronomers. Astronomers running the numbers, doing math, predicted that in the cosmos would be left over this echo, this energy from the big bang that would be detectable and they detected it. We built the cosmic observatory for background emissions, the kobe spacecraft and it matched exactly the astronomers predictions. Along that line is some interest in the age of the earth. Right now it is generally agreed that the big bang happened their 13. 7 billion years ago. What we can do on earth, these elements that we all know on the periodic table of chemicals, even ones we do not now were created when stars explode. I attended a lecture by hans beata. The ones that interest me are our good friends rubidium and strontium. A neutron becomes a proton and goes up the periodic table. It turns to rock and locks the rubidium and strontium into place so by careful assay, by careful by being diligent, you can tell when the rock froze. You can tell how old the rubidium and strontium are and you can get an age for the earth. When that stuff falls on fossils, you can get a very good idea of how old the fossils are. I encourage you all to go to nebraska on go to ash fall state park and see the astonishing fossils. It looks like a hollywood movie. There are rhinoceroses and three toed horses in nebraska. None of those animals are extant today and they were buried catastrophically by a volcano in what is now idaho, illest on park. It is a remarkable thing. I can tell you as a northwestern are from around Mount Saint Helens, i am on the Mount Saint Helens board. When it goes off the gives a great deal of gas. It is toxic and knocks these animals off. The go to a watering hole and then when the ash comes they were all buried. It is an extreme replace. If in the bad old days you had heart problems, they would write away cut you open. Now we use a drug based on rubidium to look at the inside of your heart without cutting you open. My kentucky friends, i want you to consider this. Right now, there is no place in the commonwealth of kentucky to get a degree in this kind of nuclear medicine. This kind of Drugs Associated with that. I hope you find that troubling. I hope youre concerned about that. You want scientifically literate students in the commonwealth for everybody. You can i get this here. He have to go out of state. As far as the distance to stars, understand, this is very well understood. It is february. We look at a star in february and measure and a goal and wait six months, we look at that same star again and we measure that angle. It is the same way that carpenters built this old thing and surveyors survey the land. You can figure out how far away it is, that star and the stars beyond it and the stars beyond that. There are billions of stars. Billions of stars, more than 6000 light years from here. A light year is a unit of distance, not a unit of time. There are billions of stars. How could there be billions of stars more distant than 6000 years if the world is only 6000 years Old Western Market is an extra night claim. There is another astronomer who remarked first about the reasonable man. Is it reasonable that we have ice older by a factor of 100 then you claim the earth is . We have trees that have more tree rings in the earth is old. We have rocks with rubidium and strontium and uranianuranium and potassium argon dating that are far older than you claim the earth is. Could anyone have built an ark that would sustain better than any other ark anyone was able to build. So if you are asking me and i got the impression you were, is the creation model viable . I say no. Absolutely not. One last thing. You may not know that in the u. S. Constitution and the founding fathers, it is the sentence to promote the progress of science and useful arts, kentucky voters. Voters who might be watching online in places like texas, tennessee, oklahoma, kansas. You do not want to raise a generation of science students who do not understand how we know our place in the cosmos, our place in space. Who do not understand natural law. We need to innovate to keep the u. S. Where it is in the world. Thank you very much. [applause] that is a lot to take in. I hope everyone is holding up well. That is a lot of information. There is a fiveminute rebuttal time for each to address the other ones comments and there will be a fiveminute counter rebuttal after that. Things will start moving quickly so this point in particular. If you would like to begin with your fiveminute rebuttal first. I will deal with some of them. I will you mentioned the igf a couple of times. You cannot observe the age of the earth and i would say that comes under what we call historical origin science. To understand where im coming from, we have built our origins with historical science on the bible. I hebrew word was used that means an ordinary day. When you add up the genealogies, from adam abraham, you have got 2000 years to the resin. That is how we get 6000 years. There is where it comes from just so you know. A lot of people say by the way the earths ages 4. 5 billion years old. We have radioactive decay dating methods that found that. We certainly observe the rate of decay. Whether there is uranium or lead or potassium argon. When you talk about the past we have a problem. In australia there were engineers that were trying to search for coal mine. When dr. Andrew spelling said that to a lab in massachusetts, the used potassium argon dating. He also sent the woods to the radiocarbon section and they were dated 40,000 45,000. There is a problem. Let me give you another example. There is a lot the dome forming after Mount Saint Helens corrupted. A geologist sampled the rock there. He took all rock encrusted and sent it to the same lab created and got a date of 3. 5 million years when he separated the minerals out and used he got 2. 8 million. All these dating methods give all sorts of different dates. We can show two different dates. There is a lot of assumptions. The amounts of the parent and are isotopes in the beginning. Assumption number two, all daughter atoms measured must have been derived in situ radioactive decay. There is a lot of evidence that is not so. Assumption number three, the decay rates remained constant. There is lots of assumptions. There is no dating unit you can use. There is a lot of christians out there who believe in millions of years. I am not saying they are not christian. There is an inconsistency with what the bible teaches. If you believe in millions of years he has got death and bloodshed, suffering, disease because that is what you see in the fossil record. Death is the result of mans sin. The bible makes it clear. Theres the sacrifice pointing toward what happened with jesus christ. If you believe in millions of years as a christian in the fossil record there is evidence of animals eating each other. The bible says in the beginning man and animals were vegetarian. The bible says there are fossilized torrence in the record. These two things cannot be true at the same time. There is hundreds of dating methods out there. 90 of them contradict billions of years. The point is also stating records are not infallible. I would say that the earth is only 6000 years. There is nothing in astronomy. And the thing in geology to contradict of a leaf and a young age for the year earth and the universe. A fiveminute rebuttal. Thank you. Let me start at the beginning. When you find a 45 million old rock on top of the trees, maybe the rock slid on top. That seems a much more reasonable explanation then it is impossible. As far as dating goes the methods are very reliable. One of the mysteries or interesting things that people in my business especially at the Planetary Society are interested, why all the asteroids seem to be so close to the same date. In age. 4. 5 billion years, 4. 6 billion. People expect there is more of a spread. I understand that you take the bible as written in glacier and translate it many times over the last three millennia. It has to be the more accurate, the more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see. That to me is unsettling, troubling. About the disease thing, have the fish centers done something wrong were they centers to get diseases . That is an extra ordinary claim that takes me past where i am come to bowl. As far as you cannot observe the past, i have to stop you right there. That is what we do in astronomy. All we can do is look at the past. By the way, youre looking at the past right now. The speed of light bounces off of me and gets to your eyes. I am delighted to see that people in the back of the room appear that much younger than the people in the front. This idea that you can separate the natural laws of the past from the natural laws that we have now is at the heart of our disagreement. I do not see how were going to agree with that if you insist that natural laws have changed. It is magical for lack of a better word. I have appreciated magic since i was a kid but it is not what we want in conventional mainstream science. Your assertion that all the animals were vegetarians are for the got on the arc, that is remarkable. I have not spent a lot of time with lions but i can tell they have got teeth that are not set up for broccoli. That these animals were vegetarians until this flood. It is something i would ask you to private provide proof for. I give you the lyons lions teeth. That is not enough evidence for me. If you ever played telephone, wed have a secret and whispered to the next person to the next and things often go wrong. It is reasonable to me that instead of lyons being vegetarians on the ark, lions are lions and the information that you use to create your worldview is not consistent with i is a reasonable man would expect. I want everybody to consider the implications of this. If we accept mr. Him hams point of view that the bible serves as a science text and he and his followers will interpret that for you. I want you to consider what that means. It means that his word or his interpretation of these other words is somehow to be more respected than what you can observe in nature. What you can find in your backyard and kentucky. A troubling and unsettling point of view and it is one i would like you to address when you come back. As far as the five races that you mentioned, it is kind of the same thing. The five races were claimed by people who were of european descent and they said we are the best, check us out and that turns out to be if you have traveled anywhere or done anything not to be that way. He bought much more alike than they are different. I we supposed to take your word instead of what we can observe in the universe around us . Would you like to offer your fiveminute counter rebuttal question mark counter rebuttal . The wood was inside in the basalt. That is why i was making that point. I said we had the rules of logic, the uniformity of nature. That makes sense within a biblical worldview anyway. We can go to experimental silent science because we assume those laws are true and they will be tomorrow. I do want to say this. You said a few times his ken hams view or model. I had video quotes from some scientists. It is dr. There are a lot of creation scientists who agree with what were saying concerning the bible and the bibles cap account of creation. It is not just my model in that sense. There is so much i could say. As i listened to you i believe you are confusing terms and regrind regard to species and times. We are not saying god created species, he created kind. We are not saying species got on the ark, we are saying kind. There is a number of papers on our website with dogs and this one breach with this one and you can look at the papers around the world and connect them and said say that represents one kind. They have predicted probably less than 1000 kinds were on noahs ark. Under 2000 animals. There was plenty of room on the ark. A lot of what you were saying was illustrating my point. You were talking about tree rings and ice layers and kangaroos getting to australia and all sorts of things. We are talking about the past. We did not see those tree rings forming. If you assume one layer a year to much it is like the dating method. You are assuming things in regard to the past that are not necessarily true. Eric i regard to lions and teeth. Most bears are primarily vegetarian. Effort that has sharp teeth. It looks like a savage little creature and it rips and different. Just because it has sharp teeth doesnt mean that it is a mediator. In regard to the [inaudible] the flood was a catastrophic event. Why would you say noah was not skilled . I did not meet him. It is an evolutionary view of origins because you are thinking that people before us are not as good as us. They were civilizations that existed in the past and we cannot understand how they did some of the things they did. Who says noah could not build the big boat . Some of their Research Indicates that some of the wooden boats had three layers into locking so they would not twist like that and leak. We have an exhibit where we have rebuilt one percent of the ark to scale and shows three interlocking layers like that. Concerning the speed of light, i am sure you are aware of the horizon problem. That is from a big bang perspective. Even the secularists have a problem of getting light and radiation out to the universe to exchange with the rest of the universe. Even Background Radiation. 15 billion years, they can only get it about half way and that is why they have inflation theories which means everyone has a problem concerning the light issue. People do not understand that we have some models on our website to help explain those sorts of things. Your counter rebuttal. I am completely unsatisfied. You did not in my view address fundamental questions. 680,000 years of snow ice layers which require wintersummer cycles for lets say you have 2000 kinds instead of seven, that makes the problem even more extraordinary. All flying 11 by 3. 5. We get to 35, 40 species every day that we do not see. They are not extent. We are losing species due to mostly human activity and loss of habitat. As far as know of being an extraordinary shipwright, my family spend their whole life learning to make ships. It is very reasonable perhaps to you that noah had superpowers and was able to build this extraordinary craft with seven family members but to me it is not reasonable. By the way the fundamental thing we disagree on is this nature of what you can prove to yourself. This is to say when people make assumptions based on radiometric data, when they make assumptions about the expanding universe, when they make assumptions about the rate at which genes change in populations of act. Laboratory growth media, theyre making assumptions based on previous experience. They are not coming out of whole cloth. Next time you have a chance to speak, i encourage you to explain to us why we should accept your word for it that natural law changed 4000 years ago completely and there is no record of it. There are pyramid said her older than that. There are human populations that are far older than that. With traditions that go back farther than that and it is not reasonable that everything changed for thousand years ago. By everything i mean the species, the surface of the earth, the stars in the sky, and the relationship of all the other living things on earth to humans. It is not reasonable to me that everything changed like that. Another thing i would very much appreciate you addressing mode there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious and i respect that. People get Tremendous Community and comfort and nurture and support from their religious fellows in their communities and faves and churches. They do not accept your point of view. There are christians who do not accept that the earth could be this extraordinarily young age because of all the evidence around them. What is to become of them . In your view . This thing started as i understand it, based on the old testament. When you bring in i am not a theologian, when you bring in the new testament, it is and that a little outofthebox . I am looking for explanations of the creation of the world as we know it. Based on what i am going to call science. Not historical science, not observational science. Things that each of us can do akin to what we do. We try to out guess the characters on murder mystery shows or crime scene investigations especially. What is to become of all those people who do not see it your way . For us in the Scientific Community, i remind you that when we find an idea that is not tenable, it does not work, it does not fly, it does not hold water, whatever it him you would like to embrace, we throw it away. We are delighted. If you can find a fossil that is between the layers, bring it on. If you could show that the microwave Background Radiation is not a result of the big bang, kaman. Writer paper, tear it up. Your view that we are supposed to take your word for this book written centuries ago, translated into american english is somehow more important than what i can see with my own eyes is next ordinary claim. For those watching online especially i want to remind you that we need scientists and especially engineers for the future. Engineers use science to solve problems and make things. We need these people so the u. S. Can continue to innovate and be a world reader. We need innovation and that needs science education. Thank you. Thank you both. We are going to get things moving faster. I think they might be quite interesting. Questions and answers submitted by our audience. We handed out these cards to everyone. I shuffled them and the back and i dropped a lot of them and skip them up again and to view summary sorting through them here he was to get a pile for each so we can alternate reasonably between them. The reason i will skip over one if i cannot read it or if it is a question i do not know how to read because it does not seem to have sense. What is going to happen is we will go back and forth between mr. Nigh nye and mr. Ham. The other will have one minute to answer the question. Mr. Ham, you have been a first. Mr. Nye, you can stand by. How does creationism account for celestial bodies moving farther apart and what function does that serve in the grand design . When it comes to looking at the universe, we believe that in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and creationist astronomers say you can observe the inverse expanding. He it says he stretches out the heavens and seems to indicate that there is an expansion of the adverse. We would say yeah, you can observe that in that fits with observational science. I cannot answer that question. The bible says god made the heavens for his glory and that is why he made the stars that we see out there. It is to tell us how great he is. One of our programs looks at this when you see how large the universe is and it shows us how great god is. How big he is and he is and allpowerful god and infinite, allknowing god who created the universe to show us his power. Can you imagine that westmark the thing that is remarkable as it says on the fourth day of creation, he made the stars also. So much like by the way. He is an all powerful god. He made the stars and made them show us how great he is. The more they understand what that means is god is allpowerful, infinite, you realize how small we are and realize he would consider this planet is so significant that he created human beings here. That is what i would say when i see the adverse as it is. One minute. And your response . There is a question that troubles us all from the time we are youngest and first able to think. That is where did we come from . Where did i come from . This question is so compelling that we have invented the science of astronomy. We have invented life science, we have invented physics. We discovered these natural laws we can learn more about our origin and where we came from. To you, when it says he invented the stars also, that is satisfying. You are done. To me when i look at the night sky i want to know what is out there. I am driven. I want to know what is out there is any part of me and indeed, it is. By the way, i find compelling you are satisfied. And the big thing i want from you mr. Ham is can you come up with something that you can predict. Do you have a creation model that predicts something that will happen in nature . How did the atoms that created the big bang get there . This is a great mystery. You hit the nail on the head. What was before the big bang . This is what drives us. This is what we want to know. Lets keep looking. Lets keep searching. When i was young, it was presumed that the universe was slowing down. Theres the big bang. Except its in outer space, theres no air so. Goes out like that and so people presumed that it would slow down. That the universe, the gravity especially will hold everything together and maybe its going to come back and explode again and people went out and the mathematical expression is is the universe flat. Its a mathematical expression. Will the universe slow down, slow down as. Without ever stopping . Well in 2004 Saul Perlmutter and his colleagues went looking for the rate at which the universe was slowing down. Were going to, lets go out and measure it and we do it with these extraordinary system of telescopes around the world, looking at the night sky, looking for supernovae. These are standard brightness that you can infer distances with and the universe isnt slowing down. Its accelerating. The universe is accelerating in its expansion. And you know why . Nobody knows why. Nobody knows why. And youll hear the expression nowadays dark energy, dark matter which are mathematical ideas that seem to reckon well with what seems to be the gravitational attraction of clusters of stars, galaxies and their expansion and then isnt it reasonable that whatevers out there causing the universe to expand is here also and we just havent figured out how to detect it. My friends, suppose a science student from the commonwealth of kentucky pursues a career in science and finds out the answer to that deep question. Where did we come from . What was before the big bang . To us, this is wonderful and charming and compelling. This is what makes us get up and go to work everyday is to try to solve the mysteries of the universe. Bill, i just want to let you know that theres actually a book out there that actually tells us where matter came from and the very first sentence in that book says in the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth. And really, thats the only thing that makes sense. Its the only thing that makes sense of why not just matter is here, where it came from but why matter when you look at it, we have information and language systems that build life, not just matter. And where did that come from because matter can never produce information. Matter can never produce a language system. Language can only come from intelligence. Information only comes from information. The bible tells us that the things we see like in the book of hebrews are made from things that are unseen. An infinite creator god who created universe, created matter, the energy, space, mass, time, universe and created the information for life. Its the only thing that makes logical sense. The overall majority of people in the Scientific Community have presented valid, physical evidence such as carbon dating and fossils to support evolutionary theory. What evidence besides the literal word of the bible supports creationism . First of all, you know, i often hear people talking about the majority. I would agree that the majority of scientists would believe in millions of years. The majority would believe in evolution but theres a large group out there that certainly dont. But the first thing i want to say is that its not the majority that judge the truth. There have been many times in the past when the majority have got it wrong. The majority of doctors in england once thought that after you cut up bodies, you can go. And wonder why the death rate is high in hospitals until they found out about a disease caused by bacteria and so on. The majority once thought that the appendix was a leftover organ from evolutionary ancestors. When its okay, rip it out. When its diseased, rip it out. These days, we know that its for the immune system and its very, very important. Its important to understand that just because the majority believes something doesnt mean that its true. One of the things i was doing was i was making some predictions. I made some predictions. Theres a whole list of predictions. And i was saying if the bible is right, theres adam and eve, theres one race and i talked about that. If the bible is right, god made kinds and i went through and talked about that and so you know really that question comes down to the fact that were again dealing with the fact that theres aspects about the past that you cant scientifically prove because you werent there but observational science in the present. Bill and i have all the same observational science. Were here in the present. We can see radioactivity but when it comes to talking about the past, youre not going to be scientifically able to prove that. Thats what we need to admit. But we can be great scientists in the present as the examples i gave you. Dr. Damadian , or dr. Stuart burgess or dr. Fobich and we can be investigating the present. Understanding the past is a whole different matter. Thank you mr. Ham. I have to disabuse you of a fundamental idea. If a scientist, if anybody makes a discovery that changes the way people view natural law, scientists embrace him or her. This persons fantastic. Louis pasteur, he made reference to germs. If you find something that changes, that disagrees with common thought, thats the greatest thing going in science. We look forward to that change. We challenge you. Tell us why the universe is accelerating. Tell us why these mothers were getting sick and well find an explanation for it. The idea that the majority has sway in science is true only up to a point and then the other thing i just want to point out, what you may have missed in evolutionary explanations of life is the mechanism by which we add complexity. The earth is Getting Energy from the sun all the time. And that energy is used to make lifeforms somewhat more complex. How did consciousness come from matter . I dont know. This is a great mystery. A dear friend of mine is a neurologist. She studies the nature of consciousness. Now i will say i used to embrace a joke about dogs. I love dogs, who doesnt. And you can say this guy remarked ive never seen a dog paralyzed by selfdoubt. Actually, i have. Furthermore, the thing that we celebrate. There are three sundials on the planet mars that bear an inscription to the future. To those who visit here, we wish you safe journey and the joy of discovery. Its inherently optimistic. That the future of human kind that we will one day walk on mars. But the joy of discovery. Thats what drives us. The joy of finding out whats going on. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] and by the way, if you can find what we in science call a second genesis. This is to say did life start another way on the earth . There are researchers, astrobiology researchers supported by nasa, your tax dollars that are looking for an answer to that very question. Is it possible that life can start another way . Is there some sort of a lifeform akin to Science Fiction thats crystal instead of membranes. This would be a fantastic discovery that would change the world. The nature of consciousness is a mystery. I challenge the young people here to investigate that very question. And i remind you, taxpayers and voters that might be watching, if we do not embrace the process of science, i mean in the mainstream, we will fall behind economically. This is a point i cant say enough. Bill, i want to say that there is a book out there that does document where consciousness came from. And in that book, the one who created us said that he made man in his image and he breathe into man and he became a living being and so the bible does document that. Thats where consciousness came from. That god gave it to us. And you know, one thing i want to say is i have a mystery. And that is you talk about the joy of discovery but you also say that when you die its over and thats the end of you and if when you die its over, you dont even remember you were here. Whats the point of the joy of discovery anyway. I mean it in an ultimate sense. I mean, you know, you dont even know you were here. So whats the point anyway . I love the joy of discovery because this is gods creation and im finding more about that to take dominion for mans good and for gods glory. What, if anything, would ever change your mind . Well, the answer to that question is im a christian. And as a christian, i cant prove it to you but god has definitely shown me very clearly through his word and shown himself in the person of jesus christ. The bible is the word of god. I admit that thats where i start from. I can challenge people that you can go and test that, you can make predictions based on that, you can check the prophecies in the bible, you can check the statements in genesis, you can check that and i did a little bit of that tonight. And i cant ultimately prove that to you. All i can do is to say to someone, look, if the bible really is what it claims to be, if it really is the word of god and thats what it claims to be then check it out. If you cant believe that he is, he will reveal himself to you. And you will know. As christians, we can say we know. And so as far as the word of god is concerned, no, no ones ever going to convince me that the word of god is not true. But i do want to make a distinction here and for bills sake. We build models based upon the bible and those models are always subject to change. The fact of noahs flood is not subject to change. The model of how the flood occurred is subject to change because we observe in the current world and were able to come up with maybe different ways this couldve happened or that couldve happened and thats part of that scientific discovery. Thats part of what its all about. So the bottomline is that as a christian, i have the foundation. That as a christian, i would ask bill the question what would change your mind . I mean you said even if you come to faith, youd never give up believing in billions of years. I think i quoted you correctly saying Something Like that recently. So that would be my question to bill. We would just need one piece of evidence. We would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another. We would need evidence that the universe is not expanding. We would need evidence that the stars appear to be far away but theyre not. We would need evidence that rock layers can somehow form in just 4000 years instead of the extraordinary amount. We would need evidence that somehow you can reset atomic clocks and keep neutrons from becoming protons. Bring on any of those things and you would change me immediately. The question i have for you though fundamentally and for everybody watching mr. Ham, what can you prove . What you have done tonight is spend most of it, all the time, coming up with explanations about the past. What can you really predict . What can you really prove in a conventional scientific or in a conventional i have an idea that makes a prediction and it comes out the way i see it. This is very troubling to me. Outside of radiometric methods, what Scientific Evidence supports your view of the age of the earth . The age of the earth. Well, the age of stars. Radiometric evidence is pretty compelling. Also the deposition rates, it was lael, a geologist who realized in my recollection he came up with the first use of the term deep time when people realized that the earth had to be much much older. And in a related story, there was a mystery as to how the earth could be old enough to allow evolution to have taken place. How could the earth possibly be three billion years old . Lord calvin did a calculation that if the sun were made of coal and burning, it couldnt be more than a hundred thousand or so years old. But radioactivity was discovered. Radioactivity is why the earth is still as warm as it is. Its why the earth has been able to sustain its internal heat all these millenia. And this discovery, its Something Like this question without radiometric dating, how would you view the age of the earth . To me its akin to the expression well if things were any other way, things would be different. This is to say thats not how the world is. Radiometric dating does exist. Neutrons do become protons and thats our level of understanding today. The universe is accelerating. These are all provable facts. That there was a flood 4,000 years ago is not provable. In fact the evidence for me at least as a reasonable man is overwhelming that it couldnt possibly have happened. Theres no evidence for it. Furthermore, mr. Ham, you never quite addressed this issue of the skulls. There are many, many steps in what appears to be the creation or the coming into being of you and me. And those steps i just wanted people to understand, too. When it comes to the age of the earth being billions of years, no earth rock was dated to get that date. They dated meteorites and because they assumed meteorites were the same age as the earth left out from the formation of the solar system, thats where they come from. People think they dated rocks on the earth thats four and a half billion years. Thats just not true. And the other point that i was making and that is i said at the end of my first rebuttal time that there are hundreds of physical processes that set limits on the age of the earth. Heres the point, every dating method involves a change with time and there are hundreds of them and if you assume what was there to start with and if you assume something about the rate and you know about the rate, you make lots of those assumptions. Every dating method has those assumptions. Most of the dating methods, 90 of them contradict the billions of years. Theres no absolute age dating method from Scientific Method because you cant prove scientifically young or old. Can you reconcile the change in the rate continents are now drifting versus how quickly they must have traveled at creations 6,000 years ago . Can you reconcile the speed in which continents are now drifting today to the rate they would have traveled 6,000 years ago to which where we are now . This again illustrates exactly what im talking about in regard to historical science and observational science. We can look at continents today and we have scientists that have written papers about these on our website. Im definitely not an expert in this area, i dont claim to be but there are scientists even dr. Andrews spelling a phd geologist has done a lot of research here too as well and there are other people out. You plate tectonics. Certainly we can see movements of plates today and if you look at those movements and if you assume at the way its moving today the rate its moving that its always been that way in the past. See, thats an assumption. Thats the problem when it comes to understanding these things. You can observe movement, but then to assume that it has always been like that in the past, thats historical science. And in fact, we would believe basically in catastrophic plate tectonics that as a result of the flood the time of the flood, there was catastrophic breakup of the earths surface. And what were seeing now is sort of a remnant of that movement. And so we do not deny the movement. We do not deny plates. What we would deny is that you can use what you see today as a basis for just extrapolating into the past. Its the same with the flood. You can say that the layers today can only lay down slowly in places but if there was a global flood, that would have changed all of that. Again, its this emphasis on historical science and observational science. I would encourage people to go to our website in answers in genesis because we do have a number of papers. In fact, very technical papers. Dr. John bumgardner is one who has written some very extensive work dealing with this very issue. On the basis of the bible, of course we believe that theres one continent to start with because the waters were gathered in one place. So we do believe that the continent has split up. Particularly the flood had a lot to do with that. It must have been easier for you to explain this a century ago before the existence of tectonic plates was proven. If you go into a clock store and theres a bunch of clocks. They are not all going to say exactly the same thing. Do you think that they are all wrong . The reason that we acknowledge the rate at which continents are drifting apart, one of the reasons is we see whats called sea floor spreading in the midatlantic. The earths Magnetic Field has reversed over the millenia and , as it does, it leaves a signature in the rocks as the continental plates drift apart. So, you can measure how fast the continents were spreading. Thats how we do it on the outside. As i say, i lived in Washington State when mt. St. Helens exploded. Thats a result of a continental plate going under another continental plate and cracking and this waterladen rock led to a steam explosion. Thats how we do it on the outside. Whats your favorite color . [laughter] i will go along with most people and say green. And its an irony that green plants reflect green light. Deny not did i not ask for a oneword answer . [laughter] its a mystery can i have three words since he had three hundred . Observational science, blue. How do you balance the theory of evolution with the second law of thermodynamics . What is the second law of thermodynamics . [laughter] oh, the second law of thermodynamics is fantastic. And i call the words of eddington who said that if you had a theory that disagrees with isaac newton, thats a great theory. If you have a theory that disagrees with relativity, youve changed the world, thats great. But if your theory disagrees with the second law of thermodynamics, i can offer you no hope. I cant help you. And the second law of thermodynamics is basically is where you lose energy to heat. This is why car engines are about 30 efficient. Thats it, thermodynamically. Thats why you want the hottest explosion you can get in the coldest outside environment. You have to have a difference between hot and cold and that difference can be assessed scientifically and mathematically with this word entropy, this disorder of molecules but the fundamental thing that this questioner has missed is that the earth is not a closed system. So theres energy pouring in here from the sun, if i may day and night, cause at night its pouring in on the other side and so that energy is what drives living things on earth especially for, in our case, plants. By the way, if youre here in kentucky, about a third and maybe a half of the oxygen you breathe is made in the ocean by phyto plankton and they get their energy from the sun so the second law of thermodynamics is a wonderful thing. It has allowed us to have everything you see in this room. Because our Power Generation depends on the robust and extremely precise computation of how much energy is in burning fuel whether its nuclear fuel or fossil fuel or some extraordinary fuel to be discovered in the future. The second law of thermodynamics will govern any turbine that makes electricity that we all depend on and allowed all these shapes to exist. Let me just say two things. One is you know what, heres a point that we need to understand, you can have all the energy that you want but energy on matter will never produce life. God imposed information, language system, and thats how we have life. Matter by itself can never produce life no matter what energy you have. Even if you have a dead stick. You can have all the energy in the world on the dead stick, its going to decay. And its not going to produce life. From a creationists perspective, we certainly agree, i mean, before man sinned, you know there was digestion and so on but because of the fall now things are running down. God doesnt hold everything together as he did back then. So now we see in regard to the second law of thermodynamics, wed say sort of in a sense a bit out of control now compared to what it was originally which is why we have a running down universe. Hypothetically, if evidence existed that caused you to have to admit that the earth was older than 10,000 years and creation did not occur over 6 days, would you still believe in god and the historical jesus of nazareth and that jesus was the son of god . Well, ive been emphasizing all night. You cannot ever prove using the Scientific Method in the present. You cant prove the age of the earth. So you can never prove its old. So theres no hypothetical because you cant do that. Now, we can certainly use methods in the present in making assumptions. I mean creationists use methods that change over time. As i said, theres hundreds of physical processes that you can use to set limits on the age of the universe but you cant ultimately prove the age of the earth. Not using the Scientific Method, you cant ultimately prove the age of the universe. Now, you can look at methods and you can say that there are many methods that contradict billions of years, many methods that seem to support thousands of years as dr. Faulkner said in the little video clip i showed you, there is nothing in observational astronomy that contradicts a young universe. Ive said it to you before and i admit again that the reason i believe in a young universe is because of the bibles account of origins. I believe that god who has always been there, the infinite creator god revealed in his word what he did for us. And when we add up those dates we get thousands of years. But theres nothing in observational science that contradicts that. But as far as the age of the earth, the age of the universe, even when it comes to the fossil record, thats why i really challenge christians if youre going to believe in millions of years for the fossil record, you got a problem with the bible. And that is youre going to have death and disease and suffering before sin. So theres no hypothetical in regard to that. You cant prove scientifically the age of the earth or the universe, bottomline. Of course, this is where we disagree. You can prove the age of the earth with great robustness by observing the universe around us. And i get the feeling mr. Ham that you want us to take your word for it. This is to say, your interpretation of a book written thousands of years ago as translated into american english is more compelling for you than everything that i can observe in the world around me. This is where you and i, i think are not going to see eye to eye. You said, you asserted that life cannot come from something that is not alive, are you sure . Are you sure enough to say that we should not continue to look for signs of water and life on mars, that thats a waste. Youre sure enough to claim that . That is an extraordinary claim that we want to investigate. Once again, what is it you can predict . What do you provide us that can tell us something about the future, not just about your vision of the past . Is there room for god in science . Well, we remind us, there are billions of people around the world who are religious and who accept science and embrace it and especially all the technology that it brings us. Is there anyone here who doesnt have a mobile phone that has a camera . Is there anyone here whose family members have not benefited from modern medicine . Is there anyone here who doesnt use emails or is there anybody here who doesnt eat . Because we use information sent from satellites in space to plant seeds on our farms. Thats how we are able to feed 7. 1 billion people where we used to barely be able to feed a billion. So thats what i see. Thats how we have used science and the process. Science for me is two things. Its the body of knowledge. The atomic number of rubidium. And its the process, the means by which we make these discoveries. So for me, thats not that connected with your belief in a spiritual being or in a higher power. If you reconcile those two, scientists, the head of the National Institute of health is a devout christian. There are billions of people in the world who are devoutly religious. They have to be compatible because those same people embrace science. The exception is you, mr. Ham. Thats the problem for me. You want us to take your word for whats written in this ancient text to be more compelling than what we see around us. The evidence for a higher power and spirituality is for me separate. I encourage you to take the next minute and address this problem of the fossils, this problem of the ice layers, this problem of the ancient trees, this problem of the ark, i mean really address it. And so then we could move forward but right now i see no incompatibility between religions and science. Yeah, i actually want to take a minute to address the question. Let me just say this, my answer would be god is necessary for science. In fact, you talked about cellphones, yeah i have a cellphone, i Love Technology. We Love Technology here in answers and genesis. And i have email. We have millions of them as we speak up here. And satellites, and what you said about the information we get, hey, i agree with all that. See, they are the things that can be done in the present and thats just like i showed you. Dr. Burgess who invented that gear set for the satellite. Creationists can be great scientists. But you see, god is necessary because you have to assume the laws of logic. You have to assume the laws of nature. You have to assume the uniformity of nature. And heres a question i have for you. Where does that come from if the universe is here by natural processes . Christianity and science, the bible and science go hand and hand. We love science. But then again, you gotta understand, inventing things, thats very different than talking about our origins. Two very different things. Do you believe the entire bible is to be taken literally . For example, should people who touch pigs skin be stoned . Can men marry multiple women . Do i believe the entire bible should be taken literally . Well, remember in my opening address, i said we have to define our terms. So when people are asked that question say literally, i have to know what that person meant by literally. Now, i would say this, if you say naturally and thats what you mean by literally, i would say yes, i take the bible naturally. What do i mean by that . Well, if its history as genesis is, its written in typical historical narrative, you take it as history. If its a poetry as we find in the psalms then you take it as poetry. It doesnt mean it doesnt teach truth but its not a cosmological account in the sense that genesis is. Theres prophecy in the bible and theres literature in the bible concerning future events and so on so if you take it as written naturally according to literature and you let it speak to you in that way, thats how i take the bible. Its gods revelation to man. He used different people. The bible says that all scriptures are inspired by god so god moved by his spirit to write his words. And also theres a lot of misunderstanding in regard to scriptures, in regard to the israelites, i mean we have laws in our civil government here in america that the government sets. There were certain laws for israel. Some people take that out of context and then they try to impose them on us today christians and say you should be obeying these laws. Its a misunderstanding of the old testament. Its a misunderstanding of the new testament and you know again its important to take the bible as a whole in interpreting scriptures. If scriptures really is the word of god then theres not going to be any contradiction which says not, and by the way when men were married to multiple women , there were lots of problems and the bible condemns that for what it is. And the bible is very clear. You know the bible is a real book, there are people who did things that were not in accordance with the scriptures and they were recorded to help us understand its a real book. But marriage was one man and one woman. Jesus reiterated that in matthew 19 as i had in my talk and so those that did marry multiple women were wrong. So it sounds to me just listening to you during the last two minutes that theres certain parts of this document of the bible that you embrace literally and other parts you consider poetry. So it sounds to me in those last two minutes like youre going to take what you like, interpret literally and other passages youre going to interpret as poetic descriptions of human events. All that aside, i would say , scientifically or as a reasonable man, that it doesnt seem possible that all these things that contradict your literal interpretation of those first few passages. All those things that contradict that, i find unsettling when you want me to embrace the rest of it as literal. Now as i say im not a theologian, but we started this debate, is the ken ham creation model viable . Does it hold water . Can it fly . Does it describe anything . And im still looking for an answer. I believe this is ms. Written because they repeated a word, but i think i know what they are trying to ask. Have you ever believed that evolution was accomplished through way of a higher power . I think thats what theyre trying to ask here. The intelligent design question, i think. If so, why or why not . Why could not the evolutionary process be accomplished in this way . Have you ever believed that evolution partook by way of evolution . Let me introduce these ideas for mr. Ham to comment. The idea that theres a higher power that has driven the course of the advance of the universe and our own existence is one that you cannot prove or disprove. And this gets us to this expression, agnostic. You cant know. I grant you that. When it comes to intelligent design, which is if i understand your interpretation of the question, intelligent design has a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of nature. This is to say the old expression is if you were to find a watch in the field and you pick it up, you would realize that it was created by a somebody who was thinking ahead. Somebody with an organizational chart with somebody at the top chart with somebody at the top and hed ordered screws from screw manufacturers and springs from spring manufacturers and glass crystals from crystal manufacturers. But thats not how nature works. This is the fundamental insight in the explanation for living things thats provided by evolution. Evolution is a process that adds complexity through natural selection. This is to say nature has its mediocre designs eaten by its good designs. And so the perception that there is a designer that created all this is not necessarily true because we have an explanation that is far more compelling and provides predictions and things that are repeatable. Im sure mr. Ham here, the facility, you have an organization chart, i imagine youre at the top and its a topdown structure. Nature is not that way. Nature is bottomup. This is the discovery. Things merge up, whatever makes it keep going, whatever doesnt makes it falls away. And this is compelling and wonderful and fills me with joy and its inconsistent with a topdown view. What bill nye needs to do for me is to show me an example of something, some new function that arose that was not prio