Watched the Nye-Ham debate this
evening. I thought it was a good exchange, well worth the time. I
don't think this debate could be scored in win-loss terms. Ken Ham
did a good job making sure the Gospel was proclaimed, and he did not
shrink back in any way from the Bible. He did a good job of
representing the truth.
I think Nye did a good job of
representing his position. Apart from the Spirit of God the Word is
foolishness to him. That was clearly seen, but I thought (with a few
exceptions) that he did a good job of avoiding some of the more
outrageous slanders that folks like Sam Harris sling around.
I would have liked to see Ken Ham do a
better job with the point of historical science. At times he was
almost contradictory. On the one hand, he asserted that because we
were not there in the past we don't know what the rates of processes
were. On the other hand he asserted that God is a God of order, and
because of that fact we can do science and know that we will obtain
the same results yesterday, today and tomorrow. I felt his
explanation of this was a little clumsy and a little lacking.
The best model I can think of is that
of a discontinuous function in mathematics. In some discontinuous
functions as you approach the boundaries the value of the function
gets out of hand. An example might be y=1/x. As x approaches zero
the function value approaches infinity.
Here's the point. With some possible
exceptions, "historical science" works precisely like
"experimental science" - except as you approach the
boundary of Creation. The Law of the Conservation of matter and
energy doesn't work at the moment of Creation, for example. But it
works immediately following Creation.
Ken Ham made it sound like if an event
occurred in the past, the present processes can't tell us anything
about it. That simply is not true. What is true is this: science can
not tell us about origins because it was the supernatural power of
God that originated all things. The origin of Creation is the
"boundary" of the function, to use my illustration above.
The other problem extrapolating origins is that God created with the
appearance of age. For example, to assume the presence of no
radiometric daughter products is unwarranted.
Anyway - this was my only beef with
Ham's performance tonight. Though I am sure he did not intend this,
he made it sound as though we can not extrapolate processes reliably
backwards into history. We can - so long as we do not approach the
"boundaries," and as long as we acknowledge that we do not
necessarily know the starting conditions.
Otherwise, he did an outstanding job.
