Bill Nye vs Ken Ham - Is Creation a Viable Model of Origins in Today's Modern, Scientific Era? 2014

2.25 stars: Lumpy and overlong, with nothing exciting intermixed to speak of.

This debate ( video | 2 hours plus ) was pretty popular over a year ago and took place between Answers in Genesis head Ken Ham and William Nye the Natural Philosophy Dude. The topic was "Is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern, scientific era?"

Because of Nye's large fanbase this debate got a lot of attention. The interbuttz site I frequent the most, Reddit featured countless front page (really popular) posts before, during, and after the debate. How lame was I to not be ready with a blog post reviewing the debate in order to get ALL THE TRAFFIC...I coulda lived like a king!

Anyways, this was a formal debate with a rather weird format. The speakers had 5 minute intros, then 30 minute openings and then 5-10 minute (can't remember which) responses followed by a cross ex section and I think Q&A and then closings.

The format kind of made the debate feel uneven or perplexing, especially the fact that each speaker spent roughly 35 minutes on an opening and then only had at least 10 minutes for a rebuttal. The straightforward 20->15->10/Cross Ex->5->Q&A format is one that I'll always stand by.

But let us move on. Ham went first and had a very well produced ppt but it he just doesn't seem to be a very good debater or have any umf to his presentation. Content-wise he presented nothing new and if anything he simply presented the basic outline of the Creation argument...It appears that that was secondary to Ham's obvious goal, which was to play up whether or not students should be taught Creation over or at least in tandem with evolution. He also, rather creepily, played up the Biblical teachings about sin and hell...his slide show was quite jarring with his welcoming cartoon slide animations going from pictures of animals to tortured souls reaching to the sky with agony as they burn in eternal flames...

Nye on the other hand, seemed more ready for a debate, though in his debates he isn't as animated or colorful as he is on his show. He also brought some interesting arguments and ones that were definitely more germane to the topic at hand.

Nye also was good about addressing specific parts of Ham's arguments in the rebuttal and cross-ex, while Ham was pretty terrible.

One thing I can criticize Nye for is something that only WLC does really well: and that's calling his opponent out when they fail to address an argument they made. For example, a new argument (to me) that Nye made was that Noah's Ark is assumed to have landed near Mount Ararat in modern day Turkey. Now, if the ark carried kangaroos, it's reasonable to think that once they left the ark, they migrated from Turkey all the way to Australia. Such a migration would take a considerable amount of time and would have meant that some of those kangaroos died on the way Down Under and would have left fossils somewhere in between...But ALL the kangaroo fossils are found in Australia...this argument can be repeated for many other animals, too.

SOURCE.

But Ham never addresses it nor does Nye call him out on it...I woulda liked to hear more about this argument.

In sum, Nye was there to be the approachable science educator with a bit of debaters' kick to him while Ham wanted to leech off of Nye's name in order to get more followers and fund his newest project. The format and Ham's presentation certainly backs this up.

This leaves us a pretty lackluster and tedious debate and the crappy format and Ham's poor performance didn't make things any better. Such a bummer.

Chris Hallquist vs Calum Miller on Unbelievable discussing Probability and the Resurrection 2013

This debate ( audio | 1:20m ) took place last week between Chris Hallq and Calum Miller. It was supposed to be on probability and the resurrection, though they didn't really go into the details that the title of the episode implies, sadly.

2.25 Stars: Nothing too insightful seeps out of this debate with a blogging favorite and young English apologist.

Hallq's posts on the show.
Facebook discussion of the show.

I won't lie, I was pretty disappointed with the show. From reading the APF reviews of the past shows of Unbelievable and a few of my own experiences with other eps, it seems like the show has misses that significantly outweigh the hits. This is a bummer considering the show does get great guests and has such interesting topics!

But on to the debate. Or lack of it. I had some hope this would become a more technical debate in that it would talk more about probability. Bayes Theorem was only brought up once and it actually wasn't even defined or explained, at least not directly.

Calum also seemed like the most liberal Christian and though he didn't do terrible or anything, he just wasn't amazing, either. One weird thing is that Calum doesn't like the KCA, the argument WL Craig is famous for popularizing.

As for Hallquist, a great blogger I enjoy following, he suffers from an issue that apparently has plagued him before: his speech is filled with ums and uhs. People have told him about this and I feel bad stacking more criticism on him but it just became too distracting. Also, I think it was contagious, the host even started um-ing and uh-ing more it seemed.

Hallq did make some good points about Mormonism but they didn't so relevant to the topic when they were mentioned, or at least I bet that's how Christians will see it considering how critical they are of Mormonism (unless of course the Republican nom is Mormon, then they seem to be more open towards the religion :P). I was also a little annoyed that even though he was asked to debate probability with a student of Richard Swinburne - the guy who came up with the stat that there is a 97% chance that the resurrection was true - he said he had only read Swinburne's book a while ago.

I was surprised to find out that Hallq and I are the same age and Calum sounded pretty young too. One of the perks of Unbelievable is that it seems more willing to get younger guests on and this has some pros and cons. A pro is that people like Hallq and Ed Turner get to go up against apologists who should pretty much be considered professionals in their field...though in this case Calum doesn't seem to be one nor is he claiming to be one.

Technical 
Good audio quality - it's radio.

Revisions
8-23-2015 Lowered the score, cleaned up some writing.