Scientific views more flexible, self-critical
Tuesday night, Bill Nye the Science Guy debated Ken Ham the Creation Guy (well, Ken Ham of the Creation Museum) in front of a live audience which booked up in minutes months in advance and on a live feed broadcast on YouTube that was followed by almost 500,000 people at its peak.
Their topic: “Is Creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern, scientific era?” Almost a million people have watched the nearly three hour long debate in less than a day. Just last week, USC hosted a speaker from Oxford about the relationship between science and religion. Clearly, this is a contentious issue that people want to talk about.
But really, what is there to talk about? Ham believes in an absolute Truth written in a series of books authored more than a thousand years ago, the source of which is an omnipotent deity that none of us can see.
As part of that Truth, he believes that the world and everything in it was created in seven days 6000 years ago (and that plants existed before the stars or the sun, which makes photosynthesis rather difficult). He believes that snakes used to talk to humans, and that those snakes were in fact quite cunning. He believes that one man and one woman and their two sons gave rise to the entirety of the human population (and he also believes that incest is a sin). He believes that there was a flood that raised the global sea level almost five miles to cover the top of the tallest mountain on Earth.
As part of that flood, he believes that a man named Noah was able to fit one male and one female of every species of animal onto a boat smaller than a football field that he made by hand, and that he was able to keep them there for forty days without eating each other. Ham believes that all of these things happened literally and historically and that if we had a time machine we could go back and actually see them occur.
By contrast, Nye thinks that the answers to our universe can be found in science textbooks, the source of which are the best efforts, observations and experiments of our brightest minds. Nye thinks that the world was slowly formed by gravity over the course of time beginning billions of years ago and is still continuing today. Nye thinks that humans (and snakes), like all other species, evolved over time as a result of natural selection. Nye recognizes that all of this science can never disprove the existence of the God of Abraham, just as it can never disprove the existence of entrenched deities of the past like Thor or Zeus or Ra. However, Nye thinks that science can provide a reasonable explanation for all we see around us without requiring the existence of any deity or deities.
The true difference between Ham’s religion and Nye’s science is that Ham’s religion is rigid, and does not allow for change, no matter what new evidence is collected, while Nye’s science is constantly changing and adapting its theories to fit new evidence. Let’s take, as an example, the theoretical existence of that time machine that I mentioned earlier. Ham and Nye get into a time machine and take it back 6,000 years. When they get there, they’ll either see God creating the world or they won’t. If they get there and God’s busy at work putting together a planet, Nye would say, “I guess I was wrong. We’ll have to go back and rework our theories.” If they get there and the world is already recognizable as the one we live in now, full of life and even early human societies, Ham would claim that the time machine was broken. He’d say they didn’t go back far enough. He’d say that this was a test of faith from God, that it was all an illusion. He’d come up with any number of excuses in an attempt to reconcile the reality in front of him with his past beliefs, rather than adapting those beliefs to reality.
Those are my thoughts on the issue, but you should not substitute my thoughts for your own. No one should be able to force their thoughts or beliefs on anyone else, only present them as an option and perhaps explain why they’re the best option. There’s evidence and arguments out there to support all sides (there are more options out there than just Abrahamic God or no God). I encourage you to take some time to weigh all of them, some of them or even none of them, and to make your own decision about the origins of our universe.