Thursday, February 6, 2014

The Most Disappointing Debate I've Ever Seen

I don't know about you guys but I've watched the entire Nye/Ham debate already, I was counting the days since they announced it a couple months back and I watched it when YouTube streamed it live. I was excited predominantly because I was looking forward to the arguments Ham would bring to the table given that he knew well in advance that he would be going toe to toe with Bill Nye the Fucking Science Guy in a debate about science; in my naive optimism I was expecting a debate. Unfortunately, Ham retained (and in my eyes, reinforced) his reputation as science's favorite punching bag, making for a pretty boring debate. Every word out of his mouth was bullshit, I've seen some people online trying to say that Ham won the debate and their points are predominantly related to the fact that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but anyone paying attention knows that was all flash and no bang. For all the big talk, fancy words, and claims of scientific inconsistencies, Ham was essentially doing an extensive presentation of his very own personal incredulity fallacy- he went up there and said "Yo science is pretty confusing; I don't understand it and I don't care to try, so yeah it's all bullshit". One spectacular example that we all saw today was when he tried to claim that carbon dating doesn't work, he said that we don't know if the rate of decay for different materials changes over time... without giving us a reason to even consider that as a possibility. As Nye pointed out, he is trying to claim that the laws of nature change over time, which is not only bullshit but if it were to be true it would mean both sides of the argument would have their own inconsistencies. On top of that, Ham brought up that there are hundreds of dating methods, some of which give different numbers, thus we cannot trust carbon dating. Well, the reason why we use carbon dating and NOT those other methods is because the other methods are not as accurate, precise, or reliable as the consistently reliable carbon dating.
And I also have to bring up how Nye was WAY too nice about all his rebuttals, don't get me wrong I dig the whole formal politeness during debate but when something is bullshit I'd like to see it be called bullshit. I don't think Nye sufficiently humiliated Ham, if Hitchens were there in his place Ham would've left in tears.

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