How Really to Debate Creationists: Bill Nye versus Ken Ham

Yesterday, Ken Ham, nutty founder of Answers in
Genesis and the Creation Museum in Kentucky debated Bill Nye, the
Science Guy on the evidence for Young Earth Creationism versus that
for Evolutionary Science. A lot of media outlets, e.g., the

DailyBeast and
Slate, are tut-tutting Nye for participating in a debate
that provided Ham a platform from which to spread his nonsense.
Sadly, it is true that rank demagoguery has a much easier time
being entertaining than does a careful exposition of science. But
there is a way to beat Creationists at their own game – mockery.
More on that in a moment.

I got to know Ken Ham when I reported on the 2005 Creation
Mega-Conference at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. I noted in
my reports from the conference, “Creation
Summer Camp” and “The
Myth of Millions of Years,” that the Ham was the author a
lavishly illustrated children’s book, The Dinosaurs of
Eden. In that book, children garbed in biblically appropriate
duds frolic with pet dinosaurs and their parents saddle some up to
ride and carry cargo.

At the Mega-Conference, I learned that Noah’s ark carried at
least 1,000 different species of dinosaurs and (paradoxically) all
dinosaur fossils were all created from being buried by Noah’s
flood. In addition, starlight appearing to travel millions of light
years (more than 6,000 years since Creation) can be explained by
the fact that God created a “mature” universe. The Young Earth
creationists also decried the Intelligent Design creationists for
being too namby pamby. Ham asserted that the Big Bang must be
rejected as inaccurate because Genesis explains that God created
the Earth and the waters on the third day and THEN the
sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day.

So how to beat back this kind of nonsense? I humbly suggest the
approach I took when Michael Shermer and I debated Discovery
Institute intelligent designers Stephen Meyer and George Gilder
back at the 2008 Freedomfest. See the YouTube of my ten minutes of
opening remarks, “Intelligent Design by Purple Space Squids,” as
nicely illustrated by Memosphere below:

Of course, my Purple Space Squid disquisition was aimed at the
claims of intelligent design proponents who pretend to be
interested in scientific investigations. My talk clearly did not
persaude Meyer and Gilder, but by show of hands Shermer and I did
win the debate at Freedomfest. So don’t try to knock down each
individual assertion of mountebanks like Ham during such a
“debate,” but instead concentrate on the goal of explaining by
entertaining with a bit of mockery thrown in. You will gratify your
intellectual friends; annoy your enemies; and perhaps persuade some
of the confused to take a deeper look into the scads of evidence
for biological evolution.