I was very surprised that Nye never went into the philosophy of science behind how we can know about things that have happened without direct observation. It seemed incredibly important and central, because Ham can always just go back to "God made them seem older."
As I remember it being taught, the idea is that if you come across a boot print, you have no way to observe how it was made, and to say it with certainty (Ham's argument). However, what you can do is to look at the depth of the print, the details of the different shapes in the print, the size of the print, and from there, you can observe in the world around you for someone with that boot print, or for a brand with that boot. Once discovered, and if the boot print fits, you can figure out an approximate weight based on the resistance of the ground (muddy, frozen dirt, etc.), and then you can begin to offer an explanation that goes something like, "A 250 pound person wearing X name brand boot walked through here, and stepped here to make this print."
That is a reasonable (hence Nye's "Reasonable Man" argument) conclusion based on all evidence available. Since the boot print serves no other fundamental reason to existence, it is simply a byproduct of what has happened, it is reasonable to assume that it was a dude wearing a boot walking through. Now, true, you cannot explicitly know it, but the more information you gather, you increase your certainty, and if one day someone comes along that says "Actually, that wasn't a boot, that was an alien" and then can pull out an alien with feet that look like that, that weigh the same, and you have more insurmountable proof, science will reject the previous theory (dude with a boot) in favor of the greater evidence provided (as Nye emphasized), unless you're Ham. Although in this case, I think we'd be more interested in the alien than the blueprint. But regardless, the point is there.
This type of introduction of the philosophy of science would have added far more context to the reason why he emphasized cosmic radiation. Just as we could reasonable assume it is a boot print, we can reasonable assume it is a byproduct of that Big Bang. That's why, as Nye said, it was so appealing when someone just went "Maybe there was a big bang...", because then all the pieces snapped into place.
It just bothered me the way that Ham was stuck upon the idea that science can only be done on that which is directly observable. Nye was trying to get back at that by referring to CSI, and the way they use clues from the now to explain the past, but Ham was able to simply refute it as they are studying the present without Nye going at him for it. I am a social scientist (political science), so I work with research on a daily basis that measures things that cannot be directly observable. There are statistical methods, like LISREL, all for trying to get at things you cannot observe.
Either way, good on Bill. I think he stopped trying to debate Ham about half-way through and started focusing more on making the case for funding proper education. Good on him.
I would have enjoyed seeing Hitchens up there.
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