The great debate—Bill Nye, Science Guy, versus Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum—just wrapped up, and corners of the Internet are enraged for opposing reasons. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that a great many of the viewers were trying to hold themselves back from chanting “Bill! Bill! Bill!” and reliving 7th grade science class greatness. Of course, not everyone felt that way.
But I went into it with eyes wide open for revelation. I watched the whole thing. I wanted to hear out both sides. Here’s how that went down.
This is Ham.
He seems nice. He mentioned multiple times he’s friends with lots of scientists.
OK! Let’s see what you got, Ham!
Uh oh. This slide wasn’t really making me feel good about where things are going.
And then… then this happened.
Oh… oh no. That’s not going to fly. Right? It can’t! Things got worse from here, very quickly.
Shoot. This didn’t bode well.
Annnnnnd there’s the first Bible verse drop! Ham used this time to explain how marriage was made by God, that it’s for men and women (to the opposite sex only, FYI), and that abortion is wrong because something about how “we got too many cats, kill those—too many kids, same thing.”
Things went south pretty quickly.
What! Nooooo! Why!?!? I came here for a debate that maybe could make me think deeper about my ideologies, perhaps challenge me even a little—not scare the bejesus out of me with a nightmarish picture that looks like it’s from the children’s version of Dante’s Inferno.
Cool job. Nothing like Adam waving at the skulls of sinners in a pile of blood to convince people you aren’t a condemnation-heavy religious extremist.
I really wanted to be as fair and balanced as I reasonably could be during this thing, but alas, like Fox News, the above is enough evidence why that was never going to happen. Next time you want to try and drop some knowledge on Bill Nye, universally beloved math and science savior to children of the ’90s everywhere, you need to chill out with the scary Powerpoints. You just can’t terrify me out of logic.
Photo by Will Folsom/Flickr (CC By 2.0)