Christians should desire to be thoughtful and we naturally desire to be accepted as reasonable by our secularist neighbors.  But the Bill Nye – Ken Ham debate, and the media commentary that followed, argues that in order to remain faithful to God’s Word and bear a faithful testimony to the Jesus of the Bible, we have to stand courageously in the face of unfair ridicule, bearing the scandal of a Savior who was also unfairly despised by the world.

I was one of the thousands whose internet browsers were humming on February 4 with the video feed coming from the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky.  I watched with affectionate support of an earnest brother seeking to promote biblical doctrine and with an ear open to the critique of an attractive secularist personality.  I did not expect real ground to be gained in the debate between evolution and biblical creation.  My interest was mainly devoted to insights that this debate would shed on the relationship of biblical Christianity to a cultural dominated by hostile secularism.  In this respect, I found the debate to be instructive, and would like to highlight three points that I thought were of interest.

1.  Competing Worldviews, not Science. It was glaringly obvious that Ham and Nye view the data before them through the lenses of two differing worldviews.  While this is obvious to Christians (Ken Ham freely admitted this), secularists are oblivious to the presuppositions which determine their doctrines.  This is why the only approach that can be reasonably fruitful in debates like this is one that subjects the underlying assumptions to critique.  Ken Ham did a little of this, but I would have liked much more.  For instance, Nye admits that he believes that matter originated (apparently) from nothing.  Ham might have pointed out that Nye and his supporters therefore claim to advance a rational position that is grounded on a blatant irrationality.  Only the biblical doctrines of God and Creation provide the order in which the secularist’s treasured reason can exist.  As R. Albert Mohler commented: “the argument was never really about ice rods and sediment layers.  It was about the most basic of all intellectual presuppositions: How do we know anything at all?  On what basis do we grant intellectual authority?… Is there a Creator, and can we know him?”….

2.  The Secularist Strategy of Ridicule.  It was evident that Bill Nye knows very little about actual biblical Christianity, probably because of his cultural isolation from actual Bible-believing people.  For instance, Nye ridiculed a Bible with which he is so unfamiliar that he criticized Ham for arguing from the Old Testament, apparently thinking that Christians should only accept the New Testament. .….

3.  The Christian Temptation of Accommodation.  While I was interested in the atheistic critique of Bill Nye, I found the evangelical Christian response to Ken Ham to be even more informative.  From evolutionist Peter Enns to fundamentalist Pat Robertson, Christians showed embarrassment over Ham’s gall in publicly reading the biblical account of Creation as if it is literally true.

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