More on Bill Nye and Ken Ham — 'historical science' versus history

In the scenario you’ve set up—striking a flint one million times over nine years—if you want to know what happened the first time you struck it, nine years in the past, you will not be relying on ‘historical science’ at all, but on simple history. You were there and witnessed it (and so did others), so you know what happened.

This is precisely why Ken Ham relies on the Bible to explain the history of the universe: God *was there*, and has told us what happened, so we do not have to work only with extrapolations from present-day scientific observations—we have been given a history of the events by someone who witnessed them. That’s how Ken Ham reads Genesis, anyway, and although I don’t myself accept all of his conclusions, he’s right in principle that if you have credible historical testimony you should rely on it and should use it to check your extrapolations from science. For instance, if your scientific theory predicts an eclipse on 25 March A.D. 1405, and you find that the historical records reveal that no astronomer or anybody else recorded an eclipse that day, but they did record one on 25 December, when your theory said there would be none—then you would be wise to accept the testimony of witnesses and revise your scientific theory. I expect Bill Nye would agree and would use the same principle in his own work. Well, that is the principle Ken Ham is defending when he talks about ‘historical science’, he just includes the Bible on his book list.

Going back to your flint example, the point about historical vs observational science isn’t that you cannot extrapolate from the present to the past—when things follow a regular pattern, like the flint or the motion of the stars, you can. The point is that you can’t *check* your answers, because the past is inaccessible. If you make a claim about the behaviour of flint, you can verify it here and now. If you make a prediction about the position of the moon in ten years, you can verify it in ten years time. But if you make an extrapolation about the position of the moon ten thousand years ago, you cannot verify it. You have no way to do so, because you cannot go back and *look*. If all the witnesses to your flint striking were dead, you could safely assume that each time the flint was struck it sent out sparks. But if one day you found a living witness, who said that every second time you struck it, nothing happened, then, assuming the witness is credible, you would have to revise your theory.

The book of Genesis gives us a history of the universe. Ken Ham reads it as a strictly literal account, and it doesn’t agree with the extrapolations of mainstream science. If he’s right about how to read the Bible, then he’s absolutely correct to say ‘we know from reliable authority that the Earth is a few thousand years old; mainstream science says the Earth is billions of years old; therefore mainstream science must be going wrong somewhere, and we have to revise it.’ My only disagreement with Ken Ham is whether Christians are obliged to read Genesis as a strictly literal account of the way things happened. I don’t think we are, and so when scientific discoveries make it appear immensely improbable that the Earth is a few thousand years old, I accept that and say the Earth is probably *not* a few thousand years old. It doesn’t shake my faith in the book of Genesis either, because it is not in the same genre as scientific treatises, and so I don’t expect it to have the same application.

The relevance of all this to the Bill Nye — Ken Ham debate is that you cannot use what is less certain to disprove what is more certain. Extrapolations about the past may be, and often are, extremely probable, but their weakness is that they cannot be *checked* by testing, because we can’t get back to the past. In Ken Ham’s view, we have God’s absolutely reliable testimony about the history of the universe, and that trumps even seemingly probably extrapolations about the past. What’s ironic is that all of Bill Nye’s evidence about the age of the universe, the age of fossils, trees, and the rest, is utterly beside the point if he wanted to convince Ken Ham to change his mind. Because Ken Ham will always say, ‘you *think* it’s that old, but you’ve got it wrong, and we know because God told us how old the Earth is.’ The way to change Ken Ham’s mind would be either to argue with him about Biblical interpretation (which is what I would do) or show that his assumptions lead him to make mistakes about science *here and now*. The closest he came to that, I think, was asking Ken Ham to make *predictions* based on his Creation science. That would be a true test.