Was Bill Nye's Creation Debate The New Scopes Monkey Trial?

For years, scientists have been turning down offers to go head-to-head with Creationists over the theory of evolution. Their standard argument is that any high-profile debate over whether the Earth could be just 6,000 years old would put the Bible on par with actual science—a premise most evolution enthusiasts are understandably loathe to accept. Bill Nye defied that logic Tuesday night, venturing on to creationism’s home turf for a high-profile debate against Creationist leader Ken Ham, the executive director of Kentucky’s Creation Museum.

For Creationists, the debate was the moment they have been yearning for, a chance to make their case to the secular swath of the nation. Even before Nye and Ham took the stage, conservative Christian leaders had dubbed the event “Scopes II,” heralding it as the biggest Creation vs. Evolution debate since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, a national courtroom drama that pitted one of the country’s most famous lawyers, Clarence Darrow, against a former Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, and ultimately precipitated a decades-long push toward allowing evolution to be taught in public schools.

Tuesday night’s debate definitely lacked the gravitas of the Scopes. Any doubt as to whether the Creation Museum event was primarily a PR stunt was put to rest in the opening minutes of the livestream, when an advertisement featuring a cartoon camel, a dinosaur, and a flying monkey popped up to invite viewers back home to visit Ham’s $27 million, 60,000 square-foot mecca of Young Earth Creationism in Petersburg, KY.

Despite much controversy and fanfare, the Creation Museum has reported declining visitation numbers over the past several years, and plans to build a sister theme park, centered around a massive Noah’s Ark replica, could reportedly collapse unless investors purchase about $29 million worth of unrated bonds. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Ham invited the nation’s most recognizable science buff to join him in a debate moderated by CNN. Nye himself has never been one to shy away from cameras, and has used the Creation Museum to boost his blossoming reputation as a selfie-snapping defender of science.

But to the extent that the Nye-Ham face-off has brought the creation vs. evolution debate back into the national spotlight, the Scopes comparison may not be quite as far from the mark. After dominating debate over the role of religion in public education for the better part of the 20th century, creationism has faded a bit from the country’s ongoing culture wars, crowded out by other hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage.

While a majority of Americans believe in the theory of evolution, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that fully one-third of Americans believe that humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. More surprisingly, a Pew survey released late last year found that 48 percent of Republican voters don’t believe in evolution, up from 39 percent in 2009.

Ham gave these creationists a voice Tuesday night, arguing that creationism is a viable model for explaining the origins of life on Earth. "Science has been hijacked by secularists," he began, going on to argue that textbooks have been "indoctrinated" with Darwinian theories. Ham’s argument, which he expounded on throughout the two-hour-plus debate, is that there is a fundamental difference between the science that we can observe, and scientific theories that posit what has happened in the past.

"When we're talking about origins, we're talking about the past," Ham said. "We weren't there. You can't observe that. Whether it's molecules-to-man evolution or whether it's a creation account. I mean, you're talking about the past. We like to call that origins or historical science, knowledge concerning the past. Here at the Creation Museum, we make no apology about the fact that our origins or historical science actually is based on the Biblical account of origins." In short, Ham is saying that scientific theories will never be able to prove with full accuracy what happened before humans existed—but if you believe the Bible is historical truth, then the answers are laid out in the Book in Genesis.

Children, Ham added, should be “taught the right foundation, that there's a God who created them, who loves them, who died on the cross for them, and that they're special, they're made in the image of God.”

Nye put up a lively fight, sprinkling his performance with characteristic nonsequitors—including a widely-tweeted question about “traditional fish sex”—and props, such as a chunk of Kentucky limestone that he pointed out couldn’t have existed if “Mr. Ham’s flood” had really happened only 4,000 years ago. (Ham and other Creationists often use the Biblical flood in Noah’s Ark to explain fossils and other geological phenomena that scientists have used to determine the age of the Earth.)

“If we accept Mr. Ham’s point of view … that the Bible serves as a science text and he and his followers will interpret that for you, I want you to consider what that means,” Nye said. “It means that Mr. Ham’s word is to be more respected than what you can observe in nature, what you can find in your backyard in Kentucky.”

In the end, though, Creationists won the debate before it even began, gaining a national soapbox from which to espouse their views and rally believers against evolution. “This event is going to make money to support creationism,” University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne wrote on his blog Why Evolution Is True. “The proceeds, except, I suspect, minus whatever fee Nye gets, will go to support the Creation Museum, and Ham as well as other creationist organizations are selling DVDs of the video. Even if Nye somehow ‘wins’ the debate, the dosh will still go to support what he hates: peddling lies about science to kids.”