Today I’ll post four short postmortem analyses of the Nye/Ham debate on evolution vs. creationism, all from different venues.

I talked several times to Sudeshna Chowdhury, a science writer at the Christian Science Monitor who produced a postmortem analysis of the Big Debate in her paper: “Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham: Who won?” While it quotes Professor Ceiling Cat, you already know that stuff, and most of the article’s contents also summarize what you already know if you watched or followed the debate. What interested me, however, was Ms. Chowdhury’s interviews with creationists, which reveal a schism in that movement as well as a nonconvincing rationalization by the faithful of Ham’s performance.

One scientific correction first: Chowdhury quotes me about the ways to check the accuracy of radiometric dating:

“The debate was Ham’s to win and he lost. And the debate was Nye’s to lose and he won,” Dr. Coyne told the Monitor. Nye missed some great opportunities and if he was on top of his game, he could have really called Mr. Ham out, he says.

For example – Ham is simply wrong in saying that there’s no way to test whether radiometric dating is accurate. “We have ways to cross check radiometric dating,” he says.

Independent checks on radiometric dating include studies of coral deposits, plate tectonics, the periodic reversal of the Earth’s magnetic fields, and the slowing of the Earth’s rotation.

This is all true, and there are many other ways as well (for a cogent summary of the various methods, go here).  But I was referring specifically to the isochron method, whereby different minerals in the same igneous rock serve not only as a cross-check on each other’s dates (and invariably agree), but also take into account the possibility that different minerals were formed with different amount of parent isotopes (these “criticisms” were mentioned by Ham in the debate). For a description of the isochron analysis, go here.  It’s actually quite a clever method, and not hard to understand. Remember that radiometric dating for old samples is done almost entirely using igneous rocks, while fossils form in sedimentary rocks, so fossils are usually dated using adjacent igneous material.

But that aside, here are a few statement from Chowdhury’s piece. First, Michael Behe is predictably butthurt that Ham ignored Intelligent Design, many of whose advocates don’t agree with Ham’s Biblical literalism or belief in a young earth:

“I was upset that both the parties kept talking on about the age of the Earth than on the elegance and complexities of life,” says Michael J. Behe, a biology professor at Lehigh University and an advocate of Intelligent Design, a form of creationism that rejects a literal biblical view of origins, but asserts that there exist ‘irreducibly complex’ biological structures, such as protein transport mechanisms, that point to their creation by an intelligent entity. Dr. Behe is one of the few proponents of this view to hold a position in the biology department of an accredited university in the United States.

“I think neither of them did too well,” he said.

Poor Behe! He and his views were not publicized. I would love to see someone like Behe debate someone like Ham. Now wouldn’t it be fascinating to see two forms of creationists fighting about whose interpretation of the Bible was correct (Behe, of course, would try to leave the Bible out of it, for IDer pretend to be agnostic about the identity of the Great Designer)? But I doubt we’ll ever see such a debate, for the old- and young-earth creationists have a greater interest in promoting their common belief in God and Jesus than in squabbling about who created what and when.

One preacher even suggests that Ham threw the debate out of a Jesus-inspired love of his opponent. Now how many of you believe that?:

Ezra Byer, blogging for the website Powerline Kingdom Ministries, a site that seeks to [Use] the Power of Media to Display Jesus, Develop Disciples, and Deepen Lives” argued that Ham lost the debate in the narrow sense, by failing to provide compelling factual reasons for why he held is views, but won it in a larger sense by raising awareness of biblical creationism, emphasizing the importance of a 6,000-year-old Earth, and preaching the Gospel to a large audience.

Byer suspects that Ham may have even thrown the game on purpose. He writes: ” As I watched Mr. Ham’s mannerisms, you could sense a tremendous Spirit about him. He was gracious and the power of God showed through his life. There were multiple times I believed he could have hammered Nye on some of his inconsistencies but in my opinion chose not to.”

God softened Pharaoh’s heart!!

Finally, there’s some undiluted criticism of Ham from his fellow religionists (Don Boys, described as a “strong, fundamental Baptist preacher who believes that the Word of God will produce character in people who hear and obey its teachings,” is probably a Biblical literalist):

Even those who thought Ham won the debate say the Creation Museum founder could have done much better. Don Boys, the author of “The God Haters: Shallow Scholars, Silly Scientists, Pagan Preachers, and Embattled Evolutionists Declare War on Christians!” [exclamation point in original] said Ham won but didn’t hit a “grand slam.” He criticized Ham for getting drawn into a discussion about the precise age of the Earth and the construction of Noah’s Ark. Still, writes Dr. Boys, “this was not a Scopes Trial, 2014. Ken Ham was far more informed than William Jennings Bryan.”

The problem is that Ham could hardly have avoided being drawn into such a discussion, given that he was supposed to be defending his model of origins, which is literalist. How do you do that without mentioning a young eEarth and Noah’s ark as the mechanism for species preservation and a source of ancestors for post-Ark “microevolution”?

As for Ken Ham being far more informed than William Jennings Bryan, that’s only the case because science has raised more facts that Ham has to sidestep.  Bryan, in fact, wasn’t a young-earth creationist (he waffled on the issue at Dayton), making him less extreme in that respect than is Ham.

There’s no need for me to reprise this short but informative piece by NBC News‘s science editor Alan Boyle, so go read “Bill Nye wins over the science crowd at evolution debate.” Your host is quoted, but there are two more interesting parts of the piece. One is the tw**t below, reflecting something I’m sorry I missed: Ham’s claim that no evidence could change his mind about the Biblical-literalist view of biology. It’s by Dan Arel, who writes for the Dawkins Foundation and originally thought that Nye shouldn’t debate Ham:

Ham made a serious error when he said that—one that will come back to haunt him!

And a bit of dissent, which I predicted, from the old-earth creationists (i.e., Intelligent Designoids); this is from the NBC piece:

Tuesday’s debate dwelled on Genesis and didn’t consider alternatives to evolutionary theory that are less overtly biblical — such as old-Earth creationism or intelligent design. That led Casey Luskin, an advocate for intelligent design at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, to characterize the event as a “huge missed opportunity”:

“People will walk away from this debate thinking, ‘Ken Ham has the Bible, Bill Nye has scientific evidence,'” Luskin wrote on the institute’s Evolution News blog. “Some Christians will be satisfied by that. Other Christians (like me) who don’t feel that accepting the Bible requires you to believe in a young earth will feel that their views weren’t represented.”

And here’s a Christian making excuses for Ham, proving his lameness:

On the creationist side of the fence, Ham drew strong support on the day after the debate. “The debate was how viable is teaching of creation in today’s world, and from that perspective I would give Ken Ham the victory,” one commenter said on Ham’s Facebook page. Another wrote, “Yes, maybe somebody else could have done a better job on defending creation, but maybe God was more interested in people hearing the gospel message! And on that note Ken Ham did a great job.”

Translation: “Ham might have not done so well, but he sure could praise Jesus!”

Finally, reader Barry sent some amusing tw**ts from a dialogue in which he participated: