Well its the talk of the internet: Bill Nye debated the Creationist Museum Guy. Bill Nye did better than I expected and used an interesting tact appealing to very accessible evidence such as local geology to support his case, but a few times his personal interests hurt his argument because of a reliance on only a few sources of evidence (such as his failure to mention other sources of evidence for the age of the Earth beyond radioisotope dating). As an argument against a young earth it was pretty good but as an argument for evolution it was lacking (only one transitional form, and no genetics nor taxonomy).
More interesting (and enraging) was Ken Ham's argument which seemed almost schizophrenic, at times claiming science can tell us nothing about the past and only a moment later claiming science supports the Genesis fable. At once trying to make a distinction between science in the present and its interpolations into the past, and failing to distinguish between "dog" as a taxonomic family (which includes wolves, coyotes, foxes, African wild dogs, jackals, etc...) from "dog" the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris - the domestic dog. Simultaneously repeatedly claiming evidence supports his position while presenting not a shred of evidence which exclusively supports Creationism rather than evolution. To top it all off was his idiot appeal to the authority of young-earth scientists (or more often retired scientists) so few in number you could count them on one hand making it necessary for him to repeat them over and over to it seems substantial.
This difference in argumentation style illustrates one of the issues many atheists have with religion - that it teaches deference to authority rather than independent thought or evidence. The fact that not only does Ham barely present only 2-3 instances of observations which support his story but he barely explains the Creationist explanation at all and then not till more than half-way through his time is astounding. Christ! I think Bill Nye spent more time discussing the details of the creationist story than Ken Ham did!
The vast majority of Ham's 'argument' is spent trying to claim authority for his position by using the very techniques his stupidly claims the 'atheist/secularist/humanists" are using to make 'historical science' (aka interpolating/inferring from historical data points on the basis of experimentally confirmed scientific theory/measurements) equivalent to current 'observational science' (aka interpolating/inferring general patterns/rules from a small number of experimental data points). He deliberately mis-defines science (using some un-referenced definition I highly suspect he just made-up himself) and name-drops famous scientists in order to shroud his claims in the cloak of authority held by science. Later in the debate he simply defers to the authority of the Bible as "God's word" so end of discussion.
To increase our sample size we can also consider the questions from the floor and messages from the creationists in the audience afterwards. The vast majority of these messages are the standard stock issues repeated by every proselytizing creationist and found on every pro-creationism website, to the extent that in a sample of size 22 there were 2x 2nd law of thermodynamics, 2x only one Lucy, 2x no meaning of life, and 2-3x "just theory" comments. Several more obviously have no idea what they are talking about and the remained don't even bother to try to discuss the evidence or opposing explanations.
To top it all off, the Ham blatantly mis-represents or mis-understands the few examples of evidence/observational support he offers for the young-earth creationist view: while humans are sufficiently genetically similar to be clearly a single species genetics can easily identify separate sub-populations (aka separate races), and the study claiming genetic evidence supports a single domestication of dogs from wild canines (the Eurasian wolf) has nothing to do with whether all members of the dog family constitute a single Biblical 'kind' - oh and his "45,000 year old wood inside 45 million year old basalt" is conveniently and atypically un-referenced so I highly suspect it is also un-true.
