Ham-on-Nye Debate: 'Anti-Science Guy' Automatically Wins

The media is buzzing with news of the upcoming debate between Bill Nye the "Science Guy" and Ken Ham, America's leading young earth creationist the "anti-Science Guy." Much of the buzz has come from allies of Bill Nye, telling him to avoid climbing on stage with Ham to debate the credibility of biological evolution lest people get the mistaken impression that there actually is a debate about evolution.

People who hold marginal positions love debates because it makes their position seem credible -- after all we wouldn't be debating this question if it wasn't a real question would we? We wouldn't "defend" evolution unless it needed defending would we?

Creationists have long used public debates to advance their agenda. Leading creationists have speaking and writing skills that translate well into the rhetorically dominated debate format. By way of contrast, their debate opponents are often more schooled in technical scientific argumentation, where data, expertise, and consensus are far more important than rhetoric. But Bill Nye is an exception to this rule -- a "science entertainer" rather than a scientist and it will be interesting to see how he does.

Unfortunately many of the points needing to be made about evolution -- like the reliability of radioactive dating techniques, the interpretation of fossils, or the role of "assumptions" in science -- are too technical to work in a popular format. As a result, more than one leading scientist has "lost" the debate about evolution. I attended one such debate at Boston University in the late '70s and watched young earth creationist Duane Gish -- the dean of anti-evolution debaters -- humiliate a biology professor who got lost in details that he just couldn't explain to his audience. Such outcomes were so common 40 years ago that a consensus developed in the scientific community that their cause was not advanced by the debate format. Richard Dawkins echoed this wisdom recently in his warning to Nye that debating Ham was a bad idea.

<snip>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-giberson-phd/ham-nye-debate-evolution_b_4714334.html