5. What if anything would ever change your mind?
Ham: Well the answer to that question is, I'm a Christian. And as a Christian, I can't prove it to you, but God has definitely shown me very clearly through his Word and shown himself in the person of Jesus Christ. The Bible is the Word of God. I admit that that's where I start from. I can challenge people that you can go and test that, and you can make predictions based on that; you can check the prophecies in the Bible, you can check the statements in Genesis, you can check that and I did a little bit of that tonight, but I can’t ultimately prove that to you. All I can do is to say to someone, look if the Bible really is what it claims to be, if it really is the Word of God and that's what it claims, then check it out. The Bible says if you come to God believing that He is, He will reveal himself to you and you will know; as Christian’s we can say we know. And so, as far as the word of God is concerned, no one's ever going to convince me that the word of God is not true.
But I do want to make a distinction here, and for Bill’s sake: we build models based upon the Bible. And those models are always subject to change. The fact of Noah's flood is not subject to change, but the model of how the flood occurred is subject to change. Because we observe in the current world, and we are able to come up with many different ways that this could have happened, or that could have happened, and that is scientific discovery. That's part of what it's all about.
So, The bottom line is that as a Christian I have a foundation, but as a Christian I would ask Bill a question, "What would change your mind?” I mean, you said , even if you came to faith, you’d never give up on believing in billions of years, if I heard you correctly, you said something like that recently, so that would be my question for Bill.
Nye: We would need just one piece of evidence, we would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another; we would need evidence that the universe is not expanding, we need evidence that the stars appear to be far away, but they're not. We would need evidence that rock layers can somehow form in just four thousand years instead of the extraordinary number. We need evidence that somehow that you can reset the atomic clock and keep the neutrons from becoming protons. Bring out any of those things, and you would change me immediately.
The question I have for you though, fundamentally, in front of the washing??, Mr. Ham, it's What can you prove? What you have done tonight has spent all of the time coming up with explanations about the past. What can you really predict? What can you really prove in a conventional scientific-- or in a conventional, “I have an idea that makes a prediction, and it comes out the way I see it.” This is this very troubling to me.
