Bill Nye (CEO of The Planetary Society) struck controversy in the minds of atheists and those of faith when he decided to debate Ken Ham on the topic of evolution at the Creationist Museum. Bill Nye has since been making the rounds on different media outlets to recap the debate. Here is a clip of Bill Nye on Bill Maher (Real Time With Bill Maher).
What controversy?
“Stupid people are everywhere.” – Bill Maher
Some atheist believe that agreeing to a debate with a creationist is actually harmful to science. Said people state that by agreeing to debate someone with such ridiculous views that Bill Nye is essentially saying (with actions, not words) that the creationist view is of equal validity. Dan Arel at the Richard Dawkins Foundation has a great article about it. In the article titled: “Did Bill Nye Hurt Science?” Dan argues that merely agreeing to the debate is admitting defeat. This is a view held my Richard Dawkins himself. Dawkins has often denied invites to debate creationists in the passed. However, it could be argued that some of the people he has debated fall in to this realm. His debate with Cardinal George Pell comes to mind. In some cases debating a creationist might in fact do more harm than good. However, this may not always be true.
Bill Nye choosing to debate Ken Ham was a good idea.
In this interview with Bill Nye on Bill Maher, Nye talks about the reasons for agreeing to the debate. Bill Nye actually seems to have respect for Ken Ham as a person… although not his views. What a lot of people, both of faith and not, tend to think is that nobody actually believes in The Bible literally. Most moderate Christians don’t take The Bible as scientific fact. However, some do. Some people honestly believe the earth is only six thousand years old. This is an astronomically sized error. What proof do we have that shows otherwise? As Bill Nye puts it “Well there are trees, within a few hours drive of here that are more than 6,800 years, if you go drilling ice in Antarctica and Greenland you’ll find hundrens of thousands of layers of snow-ice. Right there, why would you go any further?”
When Bill Nye debated Ken Ham, it was big news. Really big news. At one point, there were over 800,000 people watching the debate live. Sure that isn’t Super Bowl numbers but its a big number. It also doesn’t count for the people who have watched the debate since on youtube for free. The amount of people that were interesting in the topic and the debate marked a huge win for science. Bill Nye never wanted to debate Ken Ham. He wanted to educate the viewers. This wasn’t a debate of evolution vs creationism. This was a public relations event for science.
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