[This is an old draft that I never completed. Oh well, here it is. As is.]
There was a recent debate on the scientific merits of Creationism between Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) and Ken Ham (founder of Answers in Genesis), held at Ken Ham’s Creationist museum. Unlike many Intelligent Design advocates, Ken Ham actually insists on a young earth, approximately 6000 years old. He believes this because he considers the Christian Bible to be an infallible scientific textbook (among other things). He thinks the Bible infallible because he believes it came from God.
Bill Nye stressed that neither the Bible (nor Ken Ham) provide any hypotheses that can be scientifically tested. Indeed, Ham’s primary point seemed to be that scientists can only make inferences about the past based on what they see today—but since none of us were actually there, we cannot claim that the Biblical account is wrong. And since the Bible comes to us from God, creator of the world, it would be presumptuous to doubt its scientific bona fides.
Bill Nye clearly did not want to attack the Bible as God’s word. In this debate, Nye’s goal was to build a bridge to the religious population and to encourage them to embrace the scientific method. Nye only went as far as to point out that Ham was relying on an English translation of the Bible, and that Ham himself did not take everything written in the Bible as scientific text: therefore (according to Nye) Ham was picking and choosing his “scientific” passages based on his (Ham’s) personal biases.
Ham’s response was simply to wave the Bible in the air and say there’s a book that has all the answers. For his followers, that was enough.
But for scientists, it is not.
For scientists to take Ken Ham’s claim about the Bible seriously, they have to study the Bible not as religious but as scientific text. And as soon as anyone attempted to do so, Ham’s claim would begin to fall apart. I’ll quickly point out two reasons for this.
(1) The scientific information in the Bible is not useful. It is not testable, not consistent, and furthermore is simply too vague to be of any scientific use. (Nye’s point)
Or it is simply silly. The Genesis account of creation furnishes a good example. There we are told that God created darkness and light, night and day, prior to creating the sun. Apparently the author of Genesis did not understand where daylight came from.
(2) As soon as we take the Bible seriously, the claim that it comes from God falls apart.
A few random notes on this point. The Bible that is supposedly God’s unadulterated word, yet contains books which say Moses wrote them. Why don’t they say God wrote them? (Moses dies in one of the books he wrote, so perhaps God had to finish it.) Various Church councils were required in order to decided which books to include in the Bible (these were convened by humans, and God’s attendance was not recorded).
If God wrote the Bible, why are there conflicting flood stories—was it two of every beast and bird on the Ark, or were there six of some? Then the conflicting stories regarding the Ten Commandments, including the embarrassment that the only version which specifically uses the phrase “Ten Commandments” (or “ten words”) lists “thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk” as the tenth commandment. Many other inconsistencies and errors are scattered throughout the Bible.
Then there is the little matter that book after book in the Old Testament slanders God by making him appear vain and evil. As I have previously observed, “a book which slanders God is not likely to have been written by God.”
With as many errors and contradictions as the Bible contains, a perfect God would likely be embarrassed to be associated with it anyway.
