On February 4, 2014 Bill Nye, well-known as “The Science Guy” debated Ken Ham at Answers in Genesis in Kentucky. It was a very interesting debate and it has generated a great deal of interest on the internet. It was very popular on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Answers in Genesis people estimate there were probably at least 5 million people that watched the video. It can still be watched online or purchased on DVD from Answers in Genesis.

Bill Nye has done a great service over the years in explaining science to young people and lay people in an engaging and fun way. His TV programs are very well done in general. So I really like what he has done to get people interested in science. But on origins and creation versus evolution, I find his comments very disappointing and troubling. He treats it as if teaching young people a creationist view of science is somehow harmful to kids and keeps them from getting a good education. I couldn’t disagree more with this.

The debate was set up with first a 5 minute introduction from both presenters, followed by 30 minutes from each, followed by two short rebuttals from each. There were also some questions and answers at the end, making the entire program around 2 hours long. It was very fairly moderated and was well done.

Bill Nye was generally polite but he was not totally respectful of Ken Ham. He kept referring to Mr. Ham’s world view or Mr. Ham’s followers almost as if Ken Ham was a cult leader or something. Ken Ham’s world view is simply historic Biblical Christianity. Bill Nye was obviously extremely ignorant about what creationists think about all sorts of issues. He brought up worthwhile issues but often didn’t understand well enough to explain the difference between an evolutionary view and the Biblical creation viewpoint.

Bill Nye brought up a number of things that creationists have thoroughly addressed. His comments bring up many common misconceptions people in the sciences and in the media have about creationists in particular. One example was claiming that there are too many species to explain how they could all come about since Noah’s Flood. Nye totally failed to understand this issue. His answer shows he hasn’t read or understood what creationists say about it. The number of species alive today is far more than what needed to be on Noah’s Ark. There really has been some serious research on this and Nye seems to know nothing about what creationists say on it. He implied that a creation view is unlike what he thinks of as “real science” in that “real” science makes predictions. But creationist scientists have occasionally developed models that have made predictions. A great example is physicist Dr. Russ Humphreys. He developed a theory on the creation of the magnetic fields of the planets. He used this to predict the magnetic field strengths of Uranus and Neptune, before the Voyager spacecrafts measured it. When the Voyager spacecraft measured the magnetic field strengths of these planets, it was within what Humphrey’s had predicted, but evolutionary secular scientists were very surprised and were way off. I wish Ken Ham would have mentioned this but he didn’t.

Ken Ham did very well I thought in giving real Biblical answers to Nye’s challenges and in bringing up good examples of well qualified scientists, successful in the scientific world, who happen to be creationists. I don’t think Ken Ham is the best at giving scientific answers on some issues but in a debate format like this you have very limited time and it is really difficult to answer everything in the brief time of a debate setting. (I once debated a biology professor.) There are multiple articles that have popped up on answersingenesis.org and creation.com since the debate that give various commentary on it. There are also some videos on Youtube that congratulate Bill Nye for how “wonderfully” he did. He did keep a good composure but I’m not impressed with Bill Nye’s understanding of the issues. People in the secular media are too ignorant of a creationist point of view to properly evaluate how Nye did.

There’s often a tendancy of people in science to treat it as if we are superior today because of our scientific knowledge, compared to people of the past. We do have a lot of scientific knowledge and this knowledge has been to our great benefit. But you can’t just assume that people in the past were uncapable of things. There’s been examples of skills known in the past but lost as modern technology has developed. Then somewhere an archeologist rediscovers clever ways ancient peoples did things. Ancient peoples did not have knowledge equivalent to us today, but they were sometimes more ingenious than we are, in spite of the limitations of their knowledge.

This is all relevant to Bill Nye’s comments about Noah building the Ark. People in science treat many things from ancient history the same way. He brought up the idea that a large wooden ship would not hold together in the open ocean but would come apart. We don’t know many details of how Noah built the Ark. Just because few people today, including many modern ship engineers, don’t know how to build such a wooden boat doesn’t mean that Noah couldn’t do it. Ken Ham’s museum has models showing how the ancient Greeks were able to build ships that were stronger than other people using a special multi-layered interlocking construction technique. This would be a plausible method for building a very large boat. We also have historical records from China from a Chinese ruler named Zheng He. Zheng He led several journeys across the world in a very large treasure fleet in the 15th century Ming Dynasty. Chinese writings say some of these wooden ships were 450 feet long and 180 feet wide. Historians have questioned the size of these ships. But this would be bigger than anything from the Greeks and would compare in size to Noah’s Ark. There have also been modern engineering studies of the Ark based on its dimensions given in the Bible and there’s no real valid reason to doubt that building such a ship was possible or that it would not be safe or stable in the ocean. I could give technical sources to back this up. This is real research that Bill Nye has no idea about.

There’s a mindset from the unbelieving world we live in that leads people away from the answers people really need. A debate such as the Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate is a rare opportunity that can attract interest enough for people of various points of view to hear both sides. I am sorry for how Bill Nye misses the boat in his understanding about creationism. While evolutionists have been dismissing and insulting creationists for the last 60 years, young age creationists with science degrees have been doing research that is important. But creationist ideas are shut out of things in many settings, sometimes even in Christian settings. Creationist answers have become stronger and stronger, but people don’t know about them. This ignorance is a sad state of affairs. But there are occasional bright lights in the darkness.

Since the early 1960’s creationists with a science background, and a few others from other disciplines, have done research. What is research? I don’t mean the kind of research you do when you want to find out where a certain shop or restaurant is. I don’t mean the kind of research done by a college freshman to get a research paper done for a class, though that is getting closer. Since science has been misguided and off track regarding origins because of evolutionary and naturalistic thinking, the science of origins has been in need of being rethought and reworked from first principles. So the kind of research I’m talking about is original scholarly research on a technical level to deal with many challenging questions about origins from a truly Christian perspective. The answers that are based on unbelief in God’s word are not satisfying. But sometimes it takes a lot of work to find an alternative to the naturalistic approach that assumes the Bible is wrong or outdated. Doing original research can take different forms but it is often a slow difficult and sometimes tedious process and it usually gets no recognition. It is something you can’t expect most people to understand, most of the time. But it is necessary and creationist research has paid off, though it has not been perfect.

This summer in Pittsburgh, PA at the International Conference on Creationism (ICC) the Creation Research Society celebrated it’s 50th Anniversary. The ICC conference was well attended, over 400 people there. The evenings are open for anyone to attend and there are four full days of meetings with lecture followed by question and answers. This year it was also broadcasted over the internet via live Webinars. So questions came in from the internet during the Q and A time, which was great.

The Creation Research Society Quarterly has been publishing a peer-reviewed journal on creation research for 50 years! The CRS Quarterly is a great resource. Before new findings on creation can be communicated to the public they need to be published on a technical level by the author and scrutinized on a scholarly level. This is how there is some accountability and refinement of new ideas before they are more widely disseminated on a more popular nontechnical level. If ideas presented on a nontechnical level have not gone through this kind of peer-review scrutiny, it may not have much impact or may be a disappointment. I have often observed that the sensational new ideas are usually not important and the important new ideas are not sensational. So to find the really important research you have to learn where to look. Sometimes there are well-meaning efforts that turn out to be misguided or mistaken.

I have presented at four of the ICC conferences in the past, but this time I just attended without presenting. I did review one paper. I have been on both sides of the peer-review process, as author and as reviewer. Being a reviewer is a quiet thankless job but very important. The ICC is perhaps the best venue for creationists to share and critique each other’s research. There are always important new findings. It’s not that all the papers presented are totally right all the time, or in total agreement with each other. But over time there is progress in understanding from the efforts.

I was encouraged by new important findings such as the soft tissue found by creationist scientists in a Triceratops horn. There is a project called iDino that is researching this tissue. There are absolutely amazing microscope images and results from it. It severely challenges evolution and old age thinking. Then there was the research from Timothy Clary, now a geologist at ICR, about overthrusts and superfaults. This is some of the best evidence of a really catastrophic global Flood I’ve ever heard. Really great work. In genetics there is now important research being done by creationists on the differences between human and chimpanzee DNA. It has always been misleading to say Chimp DNA is 98% like human DNA. Now it is just so far wrong as to be absurd. Such a number may still be quoted but is very out of date and was always misleading. There has also been progress in creation biology on identifying the Biblical “kinds” or “baramins” as they have been called. The research clarifies what has happened to life in Noah’s Flood and since the Flood. I think it also underscores that God intervened into Earth history to carry out his purposes.

At the ICC Russ Humphreys presented a great paper about the problems with Earth magnetic dynamo theories. This is an important area that I’ve studied. It serves as the basis of understanding planetary magnetic fields also, even though it hasn’t been very successful in planetary science. Humphreys young age creationist approach is much more realistic in my opinion. There were other papers relating to Egyptian history, biology, geology, and cosmology. Some very interesting new ideas sometimes. The Creation Science Fellowship of Pittsburgh will produce discs that that have the proceedings papers and another disc of the presentations.

There was a panel discussion on impacts from space and Noah’s Flood at the ICC this year. Such a panel discussion, done for all the attenders during the day, had not been done before. This was very significant to me since I have done some ICC papers on the subject. I was not part of the panel up front. The discussion showed that there were different views on when impacts from space could happen in a young age view of Earth history. There was a lot of discussion of whether to have impacts occurring in the Creation week or not. There seems to be an acknowledgement of the possibility of impacts during Noah’s Flood but there’s a wide range of opinions on how many impacts and their significance. Some ideas on impacts and the Flood presented at the ICC confirms certain things in my papers but there are still a number of puzzling questions. There is radioactive decay data, impact crater data, and magnetic data and creationists have not come to a consensus on how to reconcile all these types of data. We need God’s help to figure out these puzzles.

Young age creationist scientists have a lot more good solid research than the evolutionists know. There are many exciting evidences from creation research that confirm the truth of the Bible. There are also many questions raised by new findings that show we are finite creatures who don’t have all the answers.