My wife and I have been
watching it in chunks over meals. It's fun to watch, gets us talking. It's a
curious debate for me because although I'm deeply invested in the topic,
neither Bill Nye nor Ken Ham present my own view.
I don't think Christians are bound to a strictly
literal interpretation of the Creation story in Genesis. Like Bill Nye I think
the world is billions of years old, and for many of the reasons he presents.
E.g. we can see stars that are billions of light years away -- if the universe
was created 6000 years ago that light would not have reached us yet.
Nevertheless I found myself constantly standing on Ken Ham's side in this
debate. He and I agree on basically everything important, except how to read
certain parts of the Bible -- and those not the most essential parts. He is a
Christian, and that is the most important thing to get out of the Bible, as he
points out: man is severed from God by sin, but God so loved the world that He
sent His only begotten Son, that those who believe in Him should not die but
should have eternal life...
Ken Ham made some very important points in this
debate. To talk about them all would take too long, but there are two I thought
were really key.
1) Ken Ham's distinction between observational and
historical science is an important one, and although he might have put it too
strongly, Bill Nye is just wrong to dismiss it the way he does. The fact is
that there is an enormous difference between the level of certainty involved.
Observational science, operating in the present, is about as certain as you can
get (outside of the very rock-bottom foundations of knowledge, like that I
exist). If you tell me "if you strike a flint on a rock, you'll make
sparks," I can check it for myself right away, and *see* it happening.
But once you start talking about the past you can
carry a much lighter burden of certainty. Because we have no direct access to
the past. We simply cannot go and *look* the way we can with the flints today.
So every claim about the past is based on a chain of reasoning. "I strike
this flint today, and it made a spark, THEREFORE: it must have made a spark 100
years ago." It might be a very reasonable chain of reasoning, but it is
simply less certain than the observational science, because people make
mistakes in their reasoning. And once you start talking about things more
complicated than striking flints, and building long chains of reasoning, and
many different ones, and basing more chains of reasoning on those chains... there
are lots of places you can go wrong. Now I'm not saying that means the world is
6000 years old, it doesn't -- I'm saying there *is* a distinction between
observational science and historical science, and it's *true* that historical
science is far less certain.
On that note it's interesting that people sometimes
treat pieces of historical science as though they are more certain than their
own observations of the world around them... I think Ken Ham's discussion of
'kinds' is a good example, where mainstream science has divided up species
based on an idea of how evolution happened, which is the result of a long chain
of reasoning, whereas the concept of dog-kind, cat-kind, etc. fits very well
with what we presently observe and can all verify with our own eyes. Yet the
latter, which is more certain, is rejected because it contradicts the former,
which is less certain.
Anyway this has gone on longer than I thought so I'd
better get to the really essential point:
2) For me the most essential point, and the one I
would like everybody to grasp, is that naturalists have hijacked the word
'science' through a bait-and-switch with the meaning of the word. Science
nowadays can mean two things:
A) Gaining knowledge through observing and
experimenting on the world around us.
B) Disbelief in the supernatural;
or, at least, disbelief in the supernatural as a cause
of things that happen in the world around us. We call this naturalism.
We're all agreed, including Ken Ham, that we want A,
which we call science. But naturalists also call B with the name 'science.' And
they use that double definition to confuse people into thinking you can't have
A without B. It's not true! Anybody can do A, and do it well, if he is
inquisitive, attentive, and honest. But anytime somebody attacks naturalism B,
he is construed as attacking science A, which is exactly the move Bill Nye
makes. He keeps harping on how America needs science and innovation or it'll
fail, implicitly saying that if you reject B, as Ken Ham does, you are not doing
science and cannot innovate.
I think most naturalists would say that they believe B
on the basis of experiments performed by science A. But it's not true. It
cannot possibly be true, because B is not the kind of thing that *can* be
proved that way. Naturalism B is a philosophical belief which requires
philosophical, not scientific, argument and proof. How could you prove 'there
is no supernatural being' through science, which studies only the natural
world? The whole meaning of the word 'supernatural' is that it is beyond the
natural world, so you can't disprove its existence by investigations *in* the
natural world.
But it's worse than that. Naturalism cannot be the
*result* of scienctific study, because naturalism is the assumption *on the
basis of which* naturalists *do* scientific study. They're always saying when
you start doing science you have to rule out the supernatural. But if you're
ruling out the supernatural when you *start* doing science, how can it then be
the *result* of doing science? You've got it backwards.
Actually naturalism is just a metaphysical belief. You
could call it the religion of non-religion. And the history of philosophy
suggests that it was the people who were already naturalists who embraced
Darwin so eagerly and elevated evolution to a dogma, *because* they thought
Darwin gave them the key to eliminating God from the cosmos.
The point is that when you see debates on how to teach
science to kids, you always hear the naturalists claiming, implicitly or
explicitly, that you have to teach B in order to teach A. It's not true. And
when a naturalist claims Christians aren't teaching science if they don't teach
B, what it amounts to is the intolerant naturalist forcing his own religious
beliefs onto everybody else. Which is what Ken Ham claims has happened in the
last century, and I agree with him.
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