I wonder if Bill Nye wishes he hadn't debated Ken Ham. I've heard that his friends were generally telling him that it was a bad idea – lots of risk with very little upside. After the debate, die-hard evolutionists breathed a sigh of relief, thinking he'd done a good job defending Darwin's theory while sufficiently bashing creationism.
I have a completely different opinion. A lot of the points Nye made were epic fails. He wasn't just a little wrong; he blew it. I've written before about his flimsy, 11-new-species-per-day argument. I've exposed his failed Tiktaalik prediction. There is also his blatant argument from ignorance when he said Noah could not have built a wooden boat to the dimensions given in the Bible. And some people think he won? I'm struggling to think of one thing he said that was factual. Oh, wait! I know one...
About 50 minutes into the video, while he was trying to attack the creationists' position that the Grand Canyon was carved out catastrophically at the time of the Flood, Nye made this comment:
And by the way, if this great flood drained through the Grand Canyon, wouldn't there have been a Grand Canyon on every continent? How could we not have Grand Canyons everywhere, if this water drained away in this extraordinarily short amount of time, 4000 years?
In this comment, Nye is making a prediction. Remember that successful predictions are the mark of a good scientific theory. His prediction is that, if the Flood really happened, we would expect to see canyons the size of the Grand Canyon on every continent. Am I lying? Isn't that what he said? OK, let's move on.
I'm going to put his prediction to the test. It's not hard, really; I simply consulted Wikipedia. You can read the article for yourself but let me just point out a few highlights:
The Grand Canyon is big, but it's not even the biggest canyon in North America. Mexico's Copper Canyon is both longer and deeper.
Two canyons in Peru, the Cotahuasi Canyon and Colca Canyon, are both deeper than the Grand Canyon. Each one is over 3,500 meters deep while the Grand Canyon averages only 1,600 meters deep.
The largest canyon in Africa is the Fish River Canyon. Its gigantic ravine is about 100 miles long.
National Geographic reported a giant trench discovered under the snow in western Antarctica that is deeper than the Grand Canyon. It is 15½ miles across and up to 1.9 miles deep.
Another subglacial canyon was found in Greenland in August 2013. Named, Greenland's Grand Canyon, it is believed to be the longest canyon in the world.
Australia has the Capertee Valley which is wider than the Grand Canyon, though not as deep.
Some of the deepest canyons in the world are found in Asia. They are the Indus Gorge, the Kali Gandaki Gorge, and the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge. All are deeper than the Grand Canyon with the latter also being longer.
Nye made his comment out of ignorance. He obviously wasn't aware that, everywhere in the world, we do find canyons that are longer, deeper, and wider than the Grand Canyon. In his own words, it is exactly what we would expect to find if a deluge of water drained off the continents in a short amount of time.
Yeah. Nye has to be kicking himself over that one.
Ouch Nye!!
ReplyDeleteJosue,
ReplyDeleteNice to hear from you. It's been a while Thanks for the encouragement!
Nye should have been embarrassed by his performance given the number of goofs he uttered. The problem is, neither he nor his fellow believers see their error. No worries, though. It's just more material to blog about.
God bless!!
RKBentley
Yes, unfortunately Ken Ham might not have had this information you shared, or the time to look into it. It would have been nice to see Nye's response to this argument Live.
ReplyDeleteGod Bless you too.
Josue
Okay, Bill Nye lost that point. But note that strictly speaking, his claim was that if a global flood explains the Grand Canyon, it predicts such canyons on every continent. That's not quite the same thing as asserting that such canyons are, in fact, a prediction of such a flood. I myself would expect, instead, channeled scablands like those in eastern Washington, along the rims of the immediately post-flood continents (which might not be identical to our present continents, since young-earth creationists often believe in warp-speed continental drift to go along with their warp-speed "microevolution").
ReplyDeleteNote also that such canyons, even if they are a prediction of flood geology, are equally explicable in terms of conventional geology, so don't support Noah's Flood more than they do uniformitarian processes operating over millions of centuries.
Steven J,
ReplyDeleteAre you saying Nye lost just that point? Aren't you embarrassed that his only example of a strong prediction made by evolution was Tiktaalik? I think it's rather hilarious that his canyon-on-every-continent comment turned out to be a better prediction for our theory than Tiktallik was for yours. If evolution has made any predictions more successful than Tiktaalik, I wish you guys would start talking about them. I'm still convinced that the theory of evolution is the trivial-pursuit branch of science.
I'm sure you'd like to walk back Nye's inadvertent endorsement of flood geology but it's rather obvious to everyone that an abundance of enormous geological formations carved by water would be expected had there been a global flood. Besides the ubiquitous canyons I discussed in my post, there are also large cave systems – like the Mammoth Cave in my beloved state of Kentucky. Oh, and there are the 2,000 square miles of channeled erosion which you've pointed out in the Eastern US.
Thanks for your comments. God bless!!
RKBentley
Well, there's always Homo erectus. And the various australopithecines, and the early Homo specimens which are not always sharply distinct from australopithecines. And of course the pseudogenes for vitelligenin (the main protein in egg yolk) in humans, in the same place relative to other genes as they are in chickens. The most obvious prediction of flood geology -- mammoths buried alongside duckbill dinosaurs, whale fossils found along with pliosaurs and mososaurs -- clearly aren't met. In point of fact, the Grand Canyon doesn't seem to me to be at all the sort of drainage feature that would be formed by a flood that covered the entire continent, so multiple such canyons are not better evidence.
ReplyDelete