Ham's whole distinction between "observational science" and "historical science" is a false dichotomy. As Nye pointed out, all observational science is historical science to a degree, since information never travels instantaneously. But I'm sure that point was lost on most of the followers of Ham.
The way I would have attacked this idea would be to first ask why the distinction exists. Ham doesn't explicitly say why "historical science" is less reliable than "observational science", but the implicit reason (as I understand it) is that god, being omnipotent, could have acted in the past to make things look older than they really are. When he created the earth 6000 years ago, he could have also created galaxies that really are billions of light years away, and then put light beams out there at 6000 light years away coming from the direction of those galaxies, so that it looks like light has actually been traveling from them. In Ham's view, "observational science" is more legitimate because we can run experiments in the present that aren't subject to this possible error (the god created things like that 6000 years ago to fuck with us problem). However, if god is omnipotent, isn't it just as likely that he can fuck with our experiments in the present as well? This makes "observational science" every bit as prone to the same error as "historical science".
tl;dr
As soon as you accept that there is a god that is willing to fuck with nature in the past, invalidating our scientific tools of understanding the past, you must accept that this god could be still fucking with nature in the present, and therefore we can't understand the present with scientific tools either.
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