Mom leaves little Billy alone for just a few moments in the kitchen–someone has come to the door, maybe, or the laundry needs to be stuffed into the dryer. When she comes back, the lid is askew on the cookie jar. There are bits of cookie on the counter.
“Billy, did you eat these cookies?”
If you were ever a child, you know that you’re probably going to lie like the dickens in this situation. She didn’t see you eat the cookies, so you don’t have to get in trouble, right? “No, I didn’t!”
“Then who did?”
Again, mom didn’t see it happen. In your toddler mind, you pick out any explanation that seems logical (which, granted, your knowledge of the world is pretty damn limited). Think fast. “A bird ate it.”
“A bird! How did a bird get in here?”
Uh. “It flew in the window.” Good, good. There’s an open window there. Totally believable.
“How did it get through the screen?”
DAMN. DAMN. Forgot the screen. “It took it off! With its beak!”
“And then put it back on again?”
“Yes.” Short but sweet. Don’t offer up too much information.
“How did the bird get the lid off the jar?”
Uh. “With . . . its claws?” Birds have claws, right? Grippy things kind of like fingers, which you absolutely did not use to take off the lid of the cookie jar, because the bird did it.
“So, you’re telling me that a bird flew over to the window, took the screen off the window, came in, ate the cookies, flew back out the window, put the screen back, and then flew away.”
“Uh-huh!”
At this point, the kid probably thinks he’s in the clear. He answered all the questions she threw at him with explanations that, really, almost make sense. I suppose a bird could possibly, maybe, take a very loose, lightweight screen off of a window. It could fly in and claw the lid off of a cookie jar. It’s not even out of the realm of extremely remote possibility that it could even put the screen back. The kiddo thinks he’s done well.
Of course, the story ignores things that a toddler just doesn’t have a grasp on, like the fact that random, untrained birds don’t have any way of understanding that they even could remove a screen, or what a screen is, or even what a window is; that the bird isn’t going to know that cookies are kept in the jar; that the likelihood of it accomplishing the task with precision and stealth in a short amount of time is nonexistent, even if it could and would do so in the first place. These facts aren’t part of a toddler’s worldview, so they don’t factor into the scenario. Couple the insanity of the idea with the clear evidence that Mom sees as she looks down at her son–chocolate smears on the hands, cookie crumbs around the mouth, and tiny little shoeprints all over the chair, still standing by the counter, that he used to climb up to reach the jar–and the toddler is, not shockingly to us, found out quite quickly.
Interestingly, he will stand by his story even through punishment; after all, the story was born out of a need to promote and protect his own agenda, which is not getting in trouble because he ate the cookies.
Listening to creation “scientist” Ken Ham debate actual scientist Bill Nye was like listening to a toddler lie to his mother. First–and Ham admitted this upfront–he started with the conclusion: God exists and God created the universe. Then, he had to protect that conclusion by altering the rest of the facts to fit his conclusion. Ken Ham didn’t even realize he was saying ludicrous things; because, for example, methods of dating the Earth don’t fit his conclusion that God created it, he just said that all of the ways of dating the Earth are “flawed” and based on “assumptions.”
One of those so-called assumptions is that scientists assume that, since they have observed how radioactive elements decay again and again and again and again and again (and again and again), and found it to be consistent, and since there’s no rational reason for the laws of nature to have randomly turned on a dime, they can trust that radioactive decay worked the same way a few thousand years ago as it currently has been observed to work. With no fluctuations in the half-life and no reason, when getting down to the subparticular roots of these atoms, to think that there ever have been fluctuations in the way that half-life works, scientists hold that this method of dating can be considered accurate.
Ken Ham says, well, we didn’t WITNESS IT LIVE AND IN PERSON, so. We can’t know if maybe half-lives worked totally differently back then. We just can’t know. (He conveniently forgets that we didn’t SEE anybody write the Bible. It’s A-OK to make assumptions about that, but not about something that can actually be tested.)
I don’t know about radioactive dating enough to know if it is, in fact, something we actually can know exactly, but I do know that this is an idiotic line of reasoning. By that reasoning, I could say that I can’t prove my parents weren’t hippopotamuses before I was born, because I wasn’t there and I don’t know and maybe they could have just suddenly changed into human beings before they had me. You could come to me with a stack of photos of my pre-parent parents, saying look, they’re not hippopotamuses; but how do I know they aren’t? How do I know they don’t just look like people in the photos, but are actually hippopotamuses? Never mind that hippopotamuses just don’t turn into people and that’s not a rational thing to consider.
Mom?
How do I know the bird didn’t fly in the window and eat the cookies? Ken Ham can’t see the crumbs around his mouth, and so, my assertion that he ate the cookies is based on an “assumption.” I just assumed he did it because he was in the kitchen and there’s no bird there now. I assumed he did because I’ve never seen a bird take off a window screen, but it could totally happen, right? Because he rejects any science that doesn’t fit his preconceived conclusion, because he can’t see the damning evidence for what it is, he can’t see that his arguments for creationism are just as insane-sounding as a toddler making up a story.
You could see, nakedly, that he missed significant points that Bill Nye made. The point about predictability, for example–Nye deftly made this point several times, and Ham didn’t even seem to register it beyond, “Yeah, well, the Bible made a prediction and it came true.” What Ham fails to see about prediction in science is that it demonstrates a deep understanding of the truth of the subject at hand.
If I observe something long enough that I can make predictions about its being or behavior with a sterling success rate, I have unlocked a fundamental truth about that something. I can predict, for example, that mixing lemon juice with baking soda will create a product of water and a metal salt (along with a by-product of carbon dioxide). I know this because of chemistry research done by people a long time ago who mixed acids with bases and observed the reactions. Every time they mixed an acid and a base, they unerringly got a metal salt and water. It never does not do this. It’s so true that you can literally bet on it and win every time, hence the value of predictability.
Further, there’s no reason for nature to ever have treated this reaction differently. No chemical or physical evidence that a major change would have occurred, or will in the future occur, at the molecular level. Nevertheless, this is the kind of evidence that Ken Ham finds shaky and “assumptive,” because he wasn’t there thousands of years ago to verify that everything hasn’t changed on a molecular level since then. This is a stupid thing to assert, and an astoundingly-stupid thing to assert when your counterargument is, “Well, but we absolutely can believe, without question or doubt, this book written in a totally other language during a time when most people ‘knew’ the Earth was flat and disease was caused by bad humours and demons. I mean, these are eye-witnesses [which isn't even true if you take the Bible literally].”
Another thing that flew over Ham’s head: that his whole observational vs. “historical” science is based on a massive misconception of what scientists do. One thing I would have loved to have seen would be Bill Nye explaining the scientific method. News flash to Ham: there is no “well, this was something that one scientist thought up awhile ago, we’re just going to keep assuming it’s true!” or “Well, since it’s like this NOW, we’re just gonna assume that it was the same back THEN.” There are no assumptions, only observations–unless you want to get laughed out of science.
For a science teacher, he has shockingly little clue how scientists do anything that isn’t based in very small slices of working on modern technology.
The most disturbing thing about the debate was Ken Ham’s repeated statement that if you come to God believing that He is whatever, He will reveal Himself to you. Does he not realize he basically said, “If you decide to believe in God then you will see that it is true, which you already knew because you believed it was true”? I mean.. put another way . . . you can only see the evidence that God is the creator of life and Earth if you already believe that he is the creator. Because that evidence doesn’t exist to rational people who have the ability to weigh good and bad information.
Note to Ken Ham: Any scientist that starts with a conclusion has already failed. Odd how everything supports what you think when you already thought it to start with, innit?
Mom will see the bird who ate the cookies if she already believes the bird ate the cookies–because, of course, she will eventually see any bird out in the yard. She will tell herself that the toddler was right about there being a bird and let her brain fill in the rest. If she doesn’t believe, she will come to the rational conclusion that of course she is going to see another bird in her life because birds are every-damn-where and the logical explanation is still that the kid scarfed down the cookies.
Ken Ham is asking people to believe without rationality or evidence; then, of course, it will all make sense after you believe it. Because, like Ken Ham, you will skew everything to fit your conclusion and reject anything that doesn’t. And you will ignore eloquent explanations of phrases like “survival of the fittest” and say dumb-ass things like, “It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s survival of the survivors” and say exactly what your opponent just said but acting as though you’re saying something totally different because you can’t let anything disrupt your argument, especially not truth or the fact that your opponent was 100% right about everything.
And he wants to start his debate by you deciding to agree with him. Only after you agree, he’ll present his conclusions–with which you’ll undoubtedly agree. And you won’t notice when the explanations start to go down rabbit-holes of increasing weirdness, contorting evidence to fit the conclusion rather than examining the evidence to see what it tells us. You won’t blink when simple, reasonable, rational ideas–such as the fact that radioactive decay probably hasn’t undergone radical changes in how it works, like uh, ever–are discarded or denigrated in favor of anything that supports the conclusion.
Because you already believe.
“Mommy, before I tell you what happened–can we just agree that I did not eat the cookies?” If that doesn’t make your bullshit-meter go off, I don’t know what would.
