Watch the Highly-Anticipated Evolution/Creationism Debate: Bill Nye the Science Guy v. Creationist Ken Ham

in Religion, Science | February 5th, 2014 6 Comments

Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy has spent his career try­ing to “help fos­ter a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate soci­ety, to help peo­ple every­where under­stand and appre­ci­ate the sci­ence that makes our world work.” A grad­u­ate of Cor­nell and a stu­dent of Carl Sagan, Nye has pro­duced edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams for the Sci­ence Chan­nel, the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel, and PBS. Most recent­ly, he has gone on record say­ing that teach­ing cre­ation­ism in Amer­i­ca’s class­rooms is bad for kids, and bad for Amer­i­ca’s future. “If the Unit­ed States pro­duces a gen­er­a­tion of sci­ence stu­dents who don’t believe in sci­ence, that’s trou­ble­some” because the Unit­ed States needs sci­ence to remain com­pet­i­tive,” he warns in this video.

For some weeks, the inter­net has been abuzz about a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, the pres­i­dent of Answers in Gen­e­sis (AiG) and the Cre­ation Muse­um. The debate — some­thing Richard Dawkins called a point­less endeav­or — took place last night in Peters­burg, Ken­tucky.  It’s now online, all two and a half hours of it. We’re you’re done watch­ing the spec­ta­cle, you can view some oth­er high-pro­file reli­gion-sci­ence debates that we’ve fea­tured in the past.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell and F.C. Cople­ston Debate the Exis­tence of God, 1948

Does God Exist? Christo­pher Hitchens Debates Chris­t­ian Philoso­pher William Lane Craig

Has Sci­ence Refut­ed Reli­gion? Sean Car­roll and Michael Sher­mer vs. Dinesh D’Souza and Ian Hutchin­son

Richard Dawkins and Jon Stew­art Debate Whether Sci­ence or Reli­gion Will Destroy Civ­i­liza­tion

Ani­mat­ed: Stephen Fry & Ann Wid­de­combe Debate the Catholic Church

Find the Stan­ford course Dar­win’s Lega­cy in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties


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Comments (6)
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  • Adam says:
    February 5, 2014 at 12:22 pm

    The link that says the debate is some­thing “Richard Dawkins called a point­less endeav­or” actu­al­ly links to an arti­cle writ­ten by some­one else (Dan Arel). It’s just post­ed on Dawkins’ site. I assume Dawkins did­n’t even both­er to com­ment on this!

    Reply
  • Casey says:
    February 5, 2014 at 12:51 pm

    Bill Nye wins automatically…I could not lis­ten to Ken Ham for 5 min­utes straight here.

    Ken Ham and Dawk­in’s both suck.

    Reply
  • Mike says:
    February 5, 2014 at 3:02 pm

    “High­ly antic­i­pat­ed”? By whom?
    This is going to be less inter­est­ing than lis­ten­ing to Stephen Hawk­ing explain to a slow teenag­er that San­ta Claus isn’t real. Why is this even hap­pen­ing?

    Reply
  • Michael says:
    February 6, 2014 at 5:33 am

    I’ve enjoyed sift­ing through your lec­tures sec­tions but wish that you folks would also cre­ate a “debates” sec­tion for things like this. There are a mul­ti­tude of debates sim­i­lar to this across the web & it’d be nice if you com­piled a good list of these for Open Cul­ture.

    Reply
  • fred says:
    January 1, 2015 at 12:20 pm

    I have seen no rea­son and evi­dence why some peo­ple should still believe in that myth­i­cal book called ‘bible’ i mean there is no proof that life was cre­at­ed and they should stop bring­ing up our chil­dren with such fable sto­ry of Adam and Eve.

    Reply
  • Fred says:
    January 1, 2015 at 12:43 pm

    cre­ation­ist can nev­er win evo­lu­tion­ist in deba­tion because evo­lu­tion is fact with many evi­dences and proofs and cre­ation is a believe.It will be dif­fi­cult for an edu­cat­ed or intel­li­gent per­son to believe with­out a con­vinc­ing evi­dence and proof, and that means ‘believe’ will be dead in future.

    Reply

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