Observational Observations

I watched the whole thing.  The whole debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham.  Happily, Bill Nye is every bit the man I thought he was.  Unfortunately, so is Ken Ham.  If you read my post yesterday, you know I had hoped for a debate that would add to and enrich the dialogue between science and religion.
That did not really happen, and it's not Bill Nye's fault.  In fact, @TheScienceGuy practically bent over backwards to be deferential to an obviously partisan audience at the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  In my opinion, he was a little too nice to them.  He allowed Ham to repeatedly get away with rhetorical monkey business and hide behind ridiculous cliches.  I think he had decided ahead of time, just not to be the rabid, anti-god, anti-religion character that so many of the young earth creationists expected him to be, and for that I admire him even more now than I did yesterday.
Nye stuck to his guns, and kept hammering at a single premise: "Is Ken Ham's model of young earth creationism viable?"  Meaning specifically can it make predictions about the world we live in, because after all that is the purpose of science in the first place.  It's not just inventing useful things like the MRI, which Ham gleefully and repeatedly pointed out was invented by a young earth creationist.  In fact, that was one place where Ham repeatedly tried to take refuge: the fact that a handful of actual scientists actually do subscribe to young earth creationism, as if that somehow validates the whole mess as a genuine statement of fact.  Henry Ford was a rather outspoken anti-semite and before WWII broke out was known to admire Adolf Hitler, which doesn't mean he was somehow less of an innovator, but it does mean that he was a bit of a whack job.  The argument, that because some people with a Ph.D agree with your craziness does not make it sanity.  If that was the case Scientology would be true.
Ham has fairly clearly painted himself into a corner by insisting on the young earth aspect of creationism.  Let me be clear, I believe that there is a Creator God, who is the Author of all that is, I am not, in any sense a pure scientist.  I believe the Bible is the source of our knowledge of the Creator God, and a vehicle of divine revelation.  But it is not a science textbook.
Every time Ham trotted out his rather obnoxious cliche: "there's a book," I wanted to "tag in" to the argument, because while I defer to my bow-tie-brother on the science stuff, I think Ham needs some straightening out about the Bible, and that's sort of my thing.  Ham even went so far as to say that he understood that the Bible contained different kinds of literature, including poetry, and that obviously we interpret poetry (by which I gather he meant the Psalms) a little differently, than we do prose.  He said he did that.  At which point I was gripping the arms of my chair to keep from yelling at the computer screen: "Genesis 1 IS A FREAKING POEM!"  Seriously, it is.  Obviously, it is.  In Hebrew, it has rhyme and meter and even a few puns.  Even in English, where it has been largely changed to prose, it still has certain elements of verse.  It was also composed, even by the most conservative estimates, sometime after the time of Moses, which means, if you're going to do all the addition of lives and generations that Ham is so fond of in dating the world, that it was actually written at least a THOUSAND YEARS after Adam and Eve, and that's a low estimate.
Which leads me to another annoying cliche that Ham kept tossing out there: we can't really know what happened in the past because "we weren't there."  So I guess Moses or whoever wrote Genesis one, by virtue of not being an eyewitness, really should have just kept their mouth shut.  Or maybe not, because actually we know a lot of stuff that we didn't actually observe.  I wasn't there to watch the Declaration of Independence being signed, but I'm reasonably sure it happened.
Ham is so sure that the Bible should trump scientific observation that he willfully ignores a whole lot, yet as a student of the Scripture, I was painfully aware that he doesn't even understand the book that he's making his ultimate authority as well as a first year seminary student.  He conflated the New and Old Testament, switched hermeneutic principles midstream, he even at one fairly embarrassing juncture, said that Christianity was the only religion that "has a book" that explains how the world was made.  At which point, I gripped the arm of my chair again, because the part that does that, ISN'T EVEN OUR PART OF THE BIBLE!  It was the Torah, a long time before we started calling it the Old Testament.  Not only that, but besides the Jews who wrote it, a whole bunch of Muslims think it's pretty keen too.  Besides all that, almost every culture on the face of the earth has some version of a creation story.  The Aborigines in Ham's native Australia have this amazing story about the Dreamtime, Babylonians had Marduk slaying the giant world creature Tiamat and making everything out of her entrails, Native American Tribes have literally hundreds of origin stories involving different deities, and the stories are fascinating and powerful, and not at all meant to be perceived as scientific truth.
Neither was Genesis 1, it wasn't thought of as scientific truth by the fairly primitive people who first told the story around the fires at the base of Mount Sinai, it was simply a statement of faith and trust in a God who has made us in His image.  I'm fairly certain that Jesus himself, standing in the Jewish tradition that had held Genesis as a sacred account of the covenant between the Creator and creation for thousands of years, didn't read Genesis 1 the way Ham would like us to.  How do I know this?  Because they wrote down what they thought of stuff, some of which made it into other parts of Scripture, some of which came to be called Mishnah, but all of which was painstakingly argued and debated at length.
But the most telling moment of the whole debate for me, came when Ham was asked to respond to an audience question that went something like this: "What if it was proven that the earth was older than 10000 years old?  Would you still believe in God?"
Ham dodged the question, utterly dodged it, refused to even deal with the hypothetical.  In that moment, I knew he had lost, and I felt a little bit bad for him.  Nye had been ever so careful not to attack him, or call his beliefs absurd, he had steadfastly steered the course of scientific observation instead of ad-hominem attack, he had even said, in response to a question about where human consciousness came from: "I don't know."  Nye was not responsible for Ham's biggest failure: his own unwillingness to admit that his perspective might be wrong.
I felt bad for Ken Ham at that moment, even as I was angry with him for being so pig-headed.  I realized that he was literally trapped by his own stubborn insistence on taking the expansive truth about God's creative action and cramming it into his twisted little scheme.  Nye was free, free to say, "I don't know,"  free to enjoy the majesty and the mystery of the universe and actually free to encounter a loving Creator in those things.  Ham was stuck in a benighted state of understanding, which for all his science-ish evidence and concurring Ph.D's is essentially less enlightened than the attitude of the bronze age nomads who originally said the words "In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth..." except, you know, in Hebrew, which went something like this:
Berashath bara elohim ath shemayim yath ha-eretz.
Beautiful?  Yes!
True? Yes!
Scientific? Not so much.