So I watched the Bill Nye / Ken Ham debate on creationism.
[Update, 10/20/24: They took it off the Answers in Genesis website years ago, but YouTube still has it. Wanna watch it? Here ya go.
I’m guessing the
Some thoughts.
I’m not a young-earth creationist. I used to be, back in high school. I grew up Fundamentalist, so that’s what we were taught. When I became a Pentecostal and left Fundamentalism behind, I did stick with the young-earth creationism for a bit: My church even had the Institute for Creation Research folks come visit for a week.
Then I went to seminary. I studied theology and biblical interpretation. I studied Genesis 1 in detail, both in my Penteteuch class and personally. And I simply can’t interpret Genesis 1 in the same way young-earth creationists do.
You see, it doesn’t actually describe the literal universe we live in. It describes the universe as the ancients thought it was—because it was written to rebut ancient pagans who taught creation happened another way. They believed the universe always existed; that gods spontaneously arose; that they fought for the universe and won; that humans were at best a slave race and at worst an afterthought.
Since it’s not really describing our universe, it’s not really describing our universe’s creation. It’s about God’s almightiness, and place in the universe. And our place. There are plenty of general truths revealed in the Genesis creation stories. Not specific ones.
This being the case, I figure there’s nothing wrong with believing in both evolution and God. And Jesus. Evolution doesn’t negate the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, nor his teachings, nor atonement, nor our need for salvation from sin and death, nor the relationship with him many of us enjoy. Most Christians believe likewise. Fundies are the exception: Fundies, and everyone else whom they’ve managed to convince of their view.
Paul referred to Adam, and to humanity’s sin beginning with him. Therefore Fundies insist Adam has to be a literal, historical man; not just a symbol representing humanity. He can’t be like the Good Samaritan—a fictional character whom Jesus made up in order to teach “Love your neighbor.” He has to be literal. As does Noah’s flood. As do the patriarchs’ genealogy lists. The earth has to have been flooded in 2348
Ken Ham has been teaching young-earth creationism since the late 1970s. In 1994, he left the ICR to found what’s now Answers in Genesis, and began raising money for his Creation Museum, which opened in 2007 in Petersberg, Kentucky. Ham runs AiG autocratically, and as a result it’s been plagued since its beginning with controversy and lawsuits. And that’s not even about the bad science and theology it teaches.
Ham has left a lot of disgruntled people in his wake, which isn’t the best fruit for a bible teacher to have. Neither is the way he plays fast and loose with biblical interpretation. But I digress.
When I first heard last month of the debate with TV science show host Bill Nye, I was a bit curious to see which tack Nye would take. I’d already heard Ham’s spiel. The Chrisitians I know figured it would be interesting at least, and a train wreck at worst: We’re not young-earth creationists, and we don’t want pagans to get the idea all Christians think like Ham. Young-earth creationists make up a small minority of Christians. A loud minority, but still.
Listening to Ham debate was irritating. He kept bouncing back and forth between science and theology. Well, not really: All his “science” was entirely based on his theology, and he only believes the results he cares to. He divides science into observable science, the stuff we can see nowadays; and historical science, the stuff which happened in the past, which we usually deduce through science—but Ham doesn’t believe we can.
Why not? Because whenever we do, it keeps disproving his narrow view of the bible. Therefore it’s automatically wrong, and there is no such thing. Ham’s fallback position, whenever you tell him science detected something in the past, was, “Were you there?” How do you know “while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease”? [Ge 8.22
This sort of agnosticism—yep, that’s what it is—is totally antithetical to science. As Nye kept pointing out: Deducing the past is what science does. It’s the basis for criminology. For archaeology. For physics. For astronomy. For paleontology: Even Ham’s wildly inaccurate dinosaur displays at the Creation Museum are to some degree based on the premise the past can be deduced. If you can’t deduce the past, you can’t predict the future: You can’t claim there are physical laws, or consistent, repeatable processes. You can’t point a spacecraft at Jupiter and have any hope of it getting there. You can’t build a cell phone and guarantee it’ll work a month from now, let alone a year. Every experiment has to rediscover truths from scratch, because you can’t know what’ll happen. You can’t do science.
You can’t do it even if you split it, as Ham does, into the dispensations of “observable science” and “historical science.” He claims you can do science, so long as you don’t try to deduce the past by it. But this idea that the present rules don’t apply to the past, and vice-versa… Actually, that’s dispensationalism. But it sure ain’t science.
Nye’s problem is, as he himself said, he’s not a theologian. He couldn’t detect where Ham’s flawed view of science ended, and his theology began. He seemed to find the whole thing confusing and dumbfounding. I don’t blame him. But I wish a theologian could’ve coached him a little.
Last thing: When you listen to Bill Nye talk about science—about what’s still out there to discover, about the possibilities in the future—he sounds way more thrilled and enthusiastic about it, than Ken Ham sounds about Jesus. If you’re going for which of the two was more winsome, my vote’s for Nye.