I actually watched the entire Bill Nye-Ken Ham creation-evolution debate this evening. I was worried that Nye would have trouble in the debate, going up against a very skilled and experienced proponent of a world view that Nye might not fully understand. (The fear was that Nye would 'walk into a buzz saw,' as someone on the web put it.)
But it seemed to me that Nye did all right. Not great, but not as bad as I feared. There were often times when I wished he would say something in particular, but didn't, although he eventually got many of those points in. For example, early in the debate, he mentioned "billions of people" who believe in religion but who accept science and evolution; I wanted him to mention prominent scientists who are Christian and who accept evolution, specifically Francis Collins (director of the NIH; he's an evangelical Christian who has written a book defending evolution). But Nye did mention Collins late in the debate. Nye also managed to bring up a variety of evidences for an old earth (he was wise enough to focus on that specific aspect of Ham's belief system, rather than try to defend evolution). He used the Grand Canyon to point out that trilobite fossils are always found in lower layers of rock and mammal fossils in upper layers of rocks, and several times he repeated the challenge to find any example of an earlier life form swimming up through the layers to later rock layers. He mentioned pine trees known to be older than young-Earth creation (9000 years vs. 6000 years). He mentioned yearly layers in Greenland ice cores: 600,000 of them. He pushed on the point that kangaroos found their way to Australia after surviving the flood in Noah's ark, but no fossils of these have been found outside of Australia. In one telling discussion, he described fossils found in Idaho (if I remember right) that were buried by a volcanic eruption; this brought to mind Ham's assertion that fossils buried around the world in sedimentary rock layers are consistent with a global flood. Occasionally, Nye seemed a bit unsure and hesitant, as if he wasn't fully familiar with creationist arguments and how to rebut them. But one strong positive was Nye's refrain that we must encourage young people to go into science and we must promote good science education. He emphasized the value, wonder and reliability of science.
I was a bit surprised that Ken Ham didn't do as well as I thought he might. He spent much of his opening statement introducing via video clips scientists who believe in young-Earth creationism, such as the inventor of the MRI medical scanner, and a microbiologist who teaches at Liberty University. But he kept repeating a point about observational vs. historical science, saying that we cannot reliably reconstruct the geological past without beginning with our beliefs---he asked evolutionists to admit that they're basing their work on beliefs in the old age of the Earth. His performance later in the debate was worse, when he kept answering every question by pointing to the Bible. Especially dismal was his response to one excellent question: what would change your mind? His response was to say he knows that the Bible is true. (Nye's response to the same question was simple: any piece of evidence, such as finding fossils in the wrong rock layers.) Ken Ham had an appallingly bad discussion as to why Christians should believe in a young-Earth creation, where he asserted that predation, tumors and the like post-date the fall, which forces all the fossils that show these sorts of things to be after the creation of humans, and therefore this implies a young universe. Indeed, throughout the debate, Ken argued science directly from the Bible; I suspect he understands his audience not to be hard-bitten evolutionists such as myself, but evangelical Christians. Ken was not above completely bald assertions; several times, he claimed that nothing in observational astronomy that contradicts a young universe. (This is complete hogwash, as anyone who is familiar with how distances are measured in astronomy knows.) But the worst thing that Ham did was assert that evolution is responsible for decaying moral values, racism, abortion and same-sex marriage; a smear that is factually and ethically wrong (not to mention, homophobic to a fault).
This is not the first evolution-creation debate I've witnessed. I may have mentioned this on this blog before, but circa 1978 I saw Duane Gish debate a Reed College biology professor. This was held in a large ballroom space at Portland State University, and there were several hundred in the audience, mostly church-goers. Gish was the Ken Ham of that era, and he gave a predictably polished and entertaining presentation. He had full-color, professionally produced overhead slides, and used folksy humor as he brought up standard creationist points (the tornado in the junk yard assembling a 747, the second law of thermodynamics contradicting evolution, etc). The poor biology professor (I forget his name) spent 40 minutes in his opening presentation explaining how radiometric dating works, complete with logarithms; he wrote on the overhead projector as if giving a math lecture to college freshmen. It was clear to me that Gish won the debate, at least as far as the audience was concerned. At the end of the debate, I approached Gish to ask him a question of my own: How can we see the Andromeda Galaxy, when it is 2 million light years away (implying it's 2 million years old at least)? His answer was to say that the Bible says that God created the lights in the sky to instruct humans, so God wouldn't have created the lights in the sky if we wouldn't be able to see them---so he created the light in transit. Of course, by that point, it was abundantly clear that creationism is not science. This was a bit of a relief, because I had recently come out of the conservative evangelical beliefs of my early to mid teens, and I now knew that this no longer had any power over me.