While listening to the Ken Ham, Bill Nye evolution debate tonight, I was reminded of something a Latin professor told my class many years ago. He related to us a story about a Harvard classics professor, who, so the story went, would make the same statement to his incoming class of hot-shot graduate students, “You may have small opinions,” he would say to them, “tenuously held.” The professor, it seems, sought to disabuse his students of the notion that they were in the business of discovering truth. At the end of the day, the most even a brilliant scholar could claim for his conclusions was that they were his opinions. They were not truth.
This bothered me a bit at the time. “Is there any hope at all of discovering truth,” I thought to myself. In retrospect, I realize the wisdom of the Harvard professor. Indeed, he was right. Classics does not furnish us with truth. But this is not a shortcoming unique to that field. All other secular academic disciplines fail in the very same way, including, though this is hard for may to believe, science.
I bring this up, because while listening to the debate tonight, I realized that for all his good points – and he really did make many good points – Ken Ham did not strike at the vitals of Bill Nye’s scientism. Nye took his stand several times on the predictive power of science. He boasted about how researchers, armed with the scientific method, had managed to predict the existence of a species of frog before it was even discovered. In another instance, Nye claimed that science predicted the existence of radio waves from the Big Bang, then lo and behold discovered them. This predictive power, Nye would have us believe, is the scientist’s strong tower. An impregnable intellectual fortress, against which the Bible thumpers must rail in vain. But what Bill Nye took to be solid ground, is really an logical quicksand.
Suppose I were to make the following statement, “If my battery is dead, my car won’t start.” I then proceed to the garage, turn the ignition key and, amazing to say, my car in fact doesn’t start. Then I exclaim in delight, “Eureka! Just as I predicted, my car won’t start, therefore my battery must be dead.” For those auto mechanics out there, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Well, Steve, that’s pretty foolish. While it’s true a dead battery will keep your car from starting, so will a lot of other things. You can’t just say because your car won’t start that the problem must be a dead battery.” Of course, the auto mechanic is correct. He has caught me in an elementary logical fallacy, the fallacy of asserting the consequent.
This same logical fallacy lies at the heart of Bill Nye’s scientism and goes something like this: “If the Big Bang theory is true, then we will find radio wave echoes in the universe. Eureka! We do, in fact, find radio wave echoes in the universe just like we predicted, therefore the Big Bang theory must be true.” Operating under the assumption that Christians are as logical as the auto mechanic above, the proper retort to Nye is this: Well, Bill, that’s pretty foolish. While it’s true that the Big Bang, if it happened, would cause radio wave echoes in the universe, so could a lot of other things. You can’t just say because you pick up electromagnetic radiation with a radio telescope that the cause must be the Big Bang. You’re committing the logical fallacy of asserting the consequent.”
The entire scientific enterprise rests on a logical fallacy, all of it. The fallacy is not limited just to historical science, but to all science, including observational science. If Christians are ever to stop the mouths of the atheist priests of scientism, this is an argument that they must drive home. Unfortunately, Ham did not quite get there. He did not lay the axe to the root.
Left unaddressed in this essay and yet of at least equal importance are the problems related to the epistemology of science. Several times Nye fulminated against Ham for foolishly believing a book translated into English when it was contradicted by the supposed truth of observations that can be made all around us with our own eyes. In other words, Bill Nye makes the same intellectual mistake as his ancestor Eve: he is an empiricist. But empiricism, the belief that observations furnishes us with truth, is a failure. Eve found this out the hard way when, disregarding the revealed word of God, she relied on her observation that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes and desirable for making one wise.
In closing, should anyone suppose that the above refutation of the scientific method means that this author is anti-science, he would be mistaken. The opinions of science are useful and have done much good for many people. Properly understood, science is a wonderful tool for carrying out God’s command to subdue the earth, what some Christians call the cultural mandate. The conflict Christianity has is not with science, but with scientism, the belief that science furnishes us with truth. It does not. It cannot. Truth does not come from a test tube. Truth is a gift of God given to men by revelation alone in the 66 books of the Bible. All else is opinion, which at best should be tenuously held.
Lux Lucet 
I watched the debate as well. Your critique closely reflects my own observations. A let down of a debate on many levels. Coincidentally, I had just spent the last few weeks familiarizing myself with Rev. Joe Boot’s debating technique on epistemological matters. I hope I’m not being too critical of Ham, but along with his restrained argumentation, he seemed rather lackadaisical and distant.
I’m not familiar with Joe Boot. How does he argue epistemology?
He focusses on the assumptions of truth, morality, and logic, and consciousness, as metaphysical necessities. Boot pastors a church in Toronto. He courageously speaks out on culture with reference to the church.
If you can get past the sound quality of the link below, I highly recommend his twenty minute opening statement. He’s debating Christopher DiCarlos (Humanist of the Year) in Canada, at a 2009 debate about the existence of God at a The University of Ontario with an audience that looks to be a couple thousand.
The video link won’t play.
I found this YouTube video where Booth defines apologetics. I liked his comment at the end where he said that apologetics aims to show where we are without Jesus Christ, that we have no basis for logic, morality etc. That’s true and an excellent point. One of the most important responsibilities of a Christian apologist is to expose the foolishness on non-Christian systems of thought. God tells us the wisdom of man is foolishness. We need to make the foolishness explicit. While Christians can and should positively state their beliefs, at the same time they cannot ignore destructive criticism of opposing worldviews. Ham did a good job stating the positive case for Biblical creation but did not go hard after Nye’s naturalism the way he needed to.
Thanks for that link. Boot gives a cogent, succinct definition of a Christian apologetic in that clip, as does your preceding comment.