Atheists Don't Understand Science!

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:04]Is atheism a religion? No, you idiot.

[00:00:09]Hello everyone. I'm Professor Plink. I respond to various theological and ideological questions and claims from a rationalistic and naturalistic approach in an effort to give and explain the opposite viewpoint and help to balance the conversation.

[00:00:22]Answers in Genesis president and founder and human chimpanzee hybrid Ken Ham has had a bug up his ass about atheists for several years now.

[00:00:32]Ever since he became every non-believer's favorite science illiterate lol cow over a decade ago.

[00:00:38]That happened when he started getting more notable for sinking millions of dollars into building a ridiculous replica of Noah's supposed Ark that doesn't even come close to answering the myriad problems that fable would have to contend with such as how to get two of every animal onto a boat of any size, how those animals could possibly have enough genetic diversity to repopulate the entire planet once they landed and the mere fact of you know, the global flood not being a real thing to begin with.

[00:01:08]And he also started getting more noticeable when he started getting famous for pushing biblical literalism and fundamentalist young earth creationism that even other evangelical apologists view as more than a little kooky.

[00:01:22]The only way you would know how old the universe is is if you were there to see it start and there's only one who was there to see it start is the one who created it and that is God and he recorded for us in his word that he made everything in six [music] days and they're ordinary days. The Hebrew word Yom qualified with the evening morning number means an ordinary day. We know Adam was made on day six [music] and he died when he was 930 years old and it tells us when people had children and when they died and when they were born and so on and you can add up all those dates in the Bible you get about 6,000 you don't [music] get 14 billion. And even though most of the atheist community has left him behind at this point, given that his batshit rhetoric hasn't changed or updated in all the time since he first became internet infamous, and you can only laugh at the mentally deranged for so long before it starts to just get rather sad, he still is over on his YouTube channel churning out young Earth creationist content regularly, and when he occasionally steps a toe outside of his theistic echo chamber and realizes that year after year there are fewer and fewer Christians and an ever-increasing number of non-believers, he just has to throw some more shade at atheism to make himself and the dwindling numbers of those still willing to listen to him feel a little bit better about their constantly receding place in the philosophical landscape.

[00:02:41]And so, apropos of nothing, he'll occasionally put out a video like the one we're going to be checking out today, casting aspersions on atheism just for the hell of it.

[00:02:51]Before getting into something a little bit more substantive and opining on the gulf between science and religion.

[00:02:58]So, let's jump in and see what the old man is ranting at some clouds about today.

[00:03:03]But before we get to that, if you end up liking what you see in this video and would like to help out the channel, make sure to subscribe and click the bell so you'll always be notified when new content comes out. Check out my social media, including my Patreon, Twitter, and Blue Sky, all linked in the description. And of course, like this video, pop in a comment. All that goes a long way towards pleasing the YouTube algorithm. Lively logicians look loosely at lingering lores, leaving legendary lords, lost lands, and lavishly lump-headed lordships. Lifelong learners look locally for legitimate lucid lessons, life's lovely landscapes, and limitless lofty laws limit long-held learned loyalties to lacking lifeless legends. May it keep my channel motoring along. Now, on to today's video. Is atheism a religion? Atheism isn't a belief system. Yes, it [clears throat] is. No, isn't. Now, I know atheists get really emotional when I say that because they say, "We don't believe in God. We don't go to church. We don't believe the Bible. We believe in naturalism, no supernatural. We do not have a religious worldview." Who cares? Before I get into responding to the actual claim he's making, I think an important starting point is to ask the question that Ken doesn't seem to be recognizing is staring him right in the face here.

[00:04:24]What in the blue hell does this have to do with anything that matters?

[00:04:30]Atheists don't believe in your God.

[00:04:33]You want everyone, including atheists, to believe in your God, don't you, Ken?

[00:04:38]Well, in what way does accusing atheism of being a religion aid you in that goal?

[00:04:45]I mean, let's say that you're right and that atheism is a faith, a religion in and of itself.

[00:04:51]It's not, but let's give you that benefit of the doubt. Okay. Now what?

[00:04:57]How does establishing atheism as a religion help you one tiny bit in your goal of converting atheists to Christianity?

[00:05:05]In other words, what the hell does it matter whether or not atheism is a religion?

[00:05:11]The answer is that it doesn't. Not in any way.

[00:05:15]Because, see, this isn't about changing hearts and minds. This isn't about converting atheists. This isn't about Christian apologetics at all. This is just about Ken's grievances with atheism and wanting to strike at it in any way that he can.

[00:05:31]As well as to place atheists in a neat little ideological box in his own mind so that he can write us all off in the same way.

[00:05:39]He knows that atheists generally eschew the notion of having a religion at all, and many atheists are downright anti-theist and anti-religion in general.

[00:05:49]So, if he can attach the religion label to atheism itself, he can basically pawn the atheists and accuse them of kowtowing to the very thing that they claim to hate without even realizing that they're doing it.

[00:06:03]Also, accusing atheism of being a religion is a strategy that helps him attack secularist principles in general by placing them all under the umbrella of the religion of atheism.

[00:06:15]Then, he can just attack that presumed umbrella worldview itself.

[00:06:19]By treating atheism as a comprehensive religion, the apologist can bundle it with other concepts like secular humanism, nihilism, moral relativism, or neo-Darwinism, all the things that can hate.

[00:06:33]And it allows him to attack the overarching presumed atheistic religion.

[00:06:37]If he can point to a flaw in moral relativism, then he can claim that he has sufficiently debunked the entire religion of atheism and all those other things that he dislikes that he puts under the same umbrella.

[00:06:50]This strategy also allows him to attempt to shift the burden of proof.

[00:06:54]If atheism is a faith, a religion in and of itself, then it must be proven just like any other belief system.

[00:07:01]And maybe most calculated part of it all is that by calling atheism a religion, he employs a tu quoque fallacy.

[00:07:09]He argues that atheists also rely on faith, specifically faith in science or materialism or naturalism or whatever he wants to call it today. The argument becomes, "Well, we both have faiths, you just worship human reason while I worship a god."

[00:07:28]Of course, the most ironic aspect of this entire tactic is that by using religion as a derogatory label in order to undermine his opponent's credibility, Kin inadvertently implies that being a religion is a flawed, unscientific, or undesirable state of being to begin with.

[00:07:46]In his zeal to hit us atheists where it hurts, not only does he fail to do so, given that he's wrong in every way that he can be, and that atheism is in no way a religion, but he also smacks down himself by positioning religion as a problem or a foolish thing to cling to in the first place.

[00:08:05]Congratulations, you played yourself. If you look up the meaning of the word religion in dictionaries, you'll see there are different sections, and so they have, you know, various sort of definitions in a way.

[00:08:16]Uh, for instance, the Merriam-Webster's dictionary has this definition: a set or system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and ways of doing things.

[00:08:26]And atheism is certainly not that.

[00:08:29]There are no attitudes, beliefs, or practices that are inherent or required from atheism.

[00:08:35]Just one single lack of a belief. That of lacking a belief in any god.

[00:08:40]And, of course, a lack of a belief is not a belief in and of itself, no matter how much apologists like Ken like to insist that it is.

[00:08:49]So, there's the first definition of religion out the window where atheism is concerned. What else is there? Another section: an interest, cause, belief, or activity that is intensely or passionately held to. I, that's atheism.

[00:09:04]It's a system of beliefs. They hold it with faith, blind faith, I would say, and strong feeling. They're very emotional about it. They're emotional about their rejection of God and the Bible >> [music] >> and saying that everything happens by natural processes, a material universe.

[00:09:21]There's no immaterial. That's all there is. So, this definition is very clearly not atheism, despite Ken's insistence that it is.

[00:09:30]None of the things that he mentioned as beliefs that are inherent part of atheism are actually beliefs that are inherent parts of atheism.

[00:09:38]He cited materialism or the belief in evolution or the belief that there is no supernatural.

[00:09:44]Well, again, with that last one, a lack of a belief is not a belief. So, not believing in the supernatural does not equate to believing that there is no supernatural.

[00:09:55]It's a rather simple turn of phrase that would seem like it means the same thing, but it would help so much if everyone would just recognize that not believing in X is not the same thing as believing that X is false.

[00:10:09]But, the larger point is this.

[00:10:10]None of those things that he mentioned as beliefs that are required to be an atheist are actually beliefs that are required to be an atheist.

[00:10:19]One can be an atheist and not believe in evolution.

[00:10:22]One can be an atheist and believe wholeheartedly in the supernatural.

[00:10:26]One can be an atheist and believe in all sorts of things outside of or beyond the material world.

[00:10:33]There's only one thing required to be an atheist. Not believing in any god.

[00:10:39]Oh, and also, did anyone catch that number at the beginning of this particular definition that he wants to lean into?

[00:10:47]Notice how there's a three there?

[00:10:49]Well, he started off giving us the first definition of religion.

[00:10:53]Why did he then jump straight to number three?

[00:10:57]What happened to the second definition, you may be wondering.

[00:11:00]Well, that's because the second definition makes it even more clear that religion requires a belief in a god.

[00:11:06]Because, by way of his own source that he chose to bring into this, the second definition for religion is commitment or devotion to a god or gods, a system of beliefs or religious observance, the service and worship of a god or multiple gods or of the supernatural.

[00:11:24]So, a secondary definition that most certainly does not befit atheism.

[00:11:30]But, then, even if we look a little closer at that third definition, you know, the one that Ken actually wanted to focus on, the one that most definitely points right to atheism as a religion according to Ken, you'll notice that it gives some examples, some usages of the word per that particular definition. It gives us the examples of "Hockey is a religion in Canada."

[00:11:55]And "Socialism became her religion, linking her to a community."

[00:12:01]You might notice that in both of those examples, the term religion is being used facetiously.

[00:12:07]Certainly, they don't mean that hockey is literally a religion in Canada.

[00:12:12]Nor do they intend to claim that an economic framework like socialism is a literal religion.

[00:12:18]But they're using the term religion almost jokingly, but to showcase how people can have an attachment to something so strongly that it becomes like a religion to them. And they're using the metaphor of religion to express that point.

[00:12:33]So, with this third definition, it would be using the word religion as a metaphor, but not literally.

[00:12:41]So, even with Ken's own dictionary source, the only way to claim atheism as a religion is to ignore the most common usages of the term, and then finagling atheism into the least common, facetious, metaphorical usage of the word. But even that doesn't apply, given that it can only work if he misrepresents atheistic beliefs as if there even are any. Ken, you could not be more wrong if you tried.

[00:13:08]>> And by the way, that is immaterial. The laws of nature, the laws of logic, they're immaterial. Even information is immaterial. How could that be in a universe that's just material? Doesn't make sense at all. It only doesn't make sense if you have the understanding of a third grader, Ken.

[00:13:29]All of those things that you claim as immaterial are just descriptions of how material things work or are byproducts of material existence.

[00:13:40]Look, the laws of nature are not independent things floating around in the universe.

[00:13:46]They are human descriptions of how matter and energy inherently behave.

[00:13:50]Gravity isn't an immaterial ghost that's pushing a rock down. Gravity is just the word that we use to describe what happens when mass warps space-time.

[00:14:01]If you destroy all matter and energy, the law of gravity doesn't float around in an empty void. It ceases to exist because there's no matter left to behave that way.

[00:14:12]Gravity is a description that requires material to exist in order for it to work.

[00:14:19]Logic is a formalized linguistic and cognitive tool evolved by human brains to navigate reality.

[00:14:26]The laws of logic are just the most fundamental abstract descriptions of physical reality.

[00:14:32]A rock cannot be a rock and not a rock at the same time because of the physical structure of matter.

[00:14:38]Not because an immaterial law of non-contradiction exists and is policing the rock's existence.

[00:14:46]Furthermore, the thought of logic requires physical neurons firing in a physical brain. Without the physical substrate, the thought vanishes.

[00:14:55]And as far as information goes, information never exists without a physical medium.

[00:15:01]You cannot show a single piece of information in the universe that exists completely independent of matter or energy.

[00:15:08]In physics, Landauer's principle demonstrates a direct quantifiable link between information processing and thermodynamics.

[00:15:16]Erasing a bit of information in computing always dissipates a specific measurable amount of physical heat.

[00:15:24]As the physicist Rolf Landauer famously declared, "Information is physical.

[00:15:29]It is an arrangement of matter and energy, much like a wave is just an arrangement of water molecules. The wave isn't a magical immaterial entity. It's just what physical water is doing."

[00:15:41]Just because you can't find and poke some big mass that has gravity or logic or information written across the side of it, doesn't mean that those things are not inextricable aspects of a material universe and a material existence.

[00:15:57]And all of this segues us into a much more interesting and I dare say more relevant discussion about science versus religion, or more specifically, science versus Ken's Christian religion.

[00:16:10]So, when it comes to talking about science and the Bible, [music] many people say, "Well, the Bible is really science versus the Bible." I view religions as essentially failed sciences. You see religion on 100 fronts losing the argument [music] with science. Everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.

[00:16:33]But is it really science versus [music] the Bible? Well, it doesn't have to be, but it often is.

[00:16:41]No, science and Christianity or the Bible are not polar opposites.

[00:16:46]There are things in the Bible that are not contradictory of science.

[00:16:50]The existence of major historical figures who have been corroborated by many extra-biblical sources to exist, like King David or Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon or Cyrus the Great of Persia.

[00:17:02]The Bible also regularly cites actual people who really lived. The Bible frequently mentions empires like the Hittites, and archaeologists excavated the massive capital city in modern-day Turkey, revealing that the Hittites were indeed a powerful Bronze Age empire.

[00:17:17]Things like locations, cities, rivers, countries, et cetera, are all in the Bible and they do not contradict science. There's several things in the Bible that are not in conflict with science.

[00:17:29]But there are also many, many claims in the Bible that are directly in opposition to scientific findings.

[00:17:36]And so when and where what we have found in terms of evidence goes against what the Bible claims, then yes, it is science versus the Bible.

[00:17:46]And in those instances, the Bible has been found to be wrong 100% of the time.

[00:17:52]Oh, I know biblical literalists like you Ken will stubbornly insist that no, it's it's science that's always wrong no matter what and no matter how much evidence we have to the contrary.

[00:18:03]But well, you just stupid.

[00:18:09]You're just a stupid, craven, hillbilly piece of Well, when I debated Bill Nye in 2014 at the Creation Museum, Bill Nye portrayed the debate as science versus the Bible.

[00:18:22]Science for me is two things. It's the body of knowledge, the atomic number of rubidium, and it's the process, the means by which we make these discoveries.

[00:18:31]So for me, that's not really that connected with your belief in a spiritual being or a higher power.

[00:18:39]You want us to take your word for what's written in this ancient text to be more compelling than what we see around us. The evidence for a higher power and spirituality is for me separate. So yes, that was an epic, constant mic-dropping event where Bill Nye the Science Guy spent 2 and 1/2 hours dropping the hammer on Ken over and over and over again.

[00:19:07]And it was that, more than anything else, that put Ken Ham in the public radar in a way that he never had been before and made him the theistic lolcow that he remains to this day.

[00:19:19]And even though Bill Nye has gone on and done plenty more things since then and has largely left this rhetorical smackdown as a footnote in his illustrious science communication career, Ken has been continuing to milk it ever since because I suppose any claim to fame, even a claim to fame where you get schooled and dog walked by a clearly superior debate opponent, is better than no claim to fame at all.

[00:19:43]That debate was 12 years ago at this point.

[00:19:47]Back when it first came out, I was just beginning to go through my religious deconstruction and it was at a time when I was still very emotionally attached to my Catholic faith and I very much didn't want to become an atheist.

[00:19:59]And I remember seeing that debate and hating it and really thinking that Bill Nye sucked something awful because he'd done such a top-notch job at eviscerating Ken Ham and Christianity in general and I wasn't ready to recognize that.

[00:20:16]Nowadays, I occasionally go back and rewatch that debate from time to time just to enjoy the thorough dismantling that Bill gave to Ken that made many a theist walk away that night with their heads hung low in shame.

[00:20:28]He's on the side of science, I'm on the side of the Bible, therefore it's science versus religion because he would say Christians have a religion whereas he doesn't, he's atheistic agnostic so he doesn't have a religion. But everyone has a religion. Everyone has a worldview. So really it's religion versus religion, his religion versus my religion. Everyone does indeed have a worldview.

[00:20:50]Frankly, most people have multiple worldviews that are often competing in their minds and people tend to assemble their personal overall worldview piecemeal style with bits from this and bits from that.

[00:21:03]I mean, after all, most Christians who would claim to have a Christian worldview are not young Earth creationists like Ken, and the majority of Christians accept things like the existence of evolution and the ancient age of the Earth and a whole mess of things that are simply not biblical. Up to and including not believing in slavery or the subjugation of women as chattel slaves, even though those aspects of the Christian faith are codified and normalized in the Bible.

[00:21:31]The reality is that everyone picks and chooses what aspects of various worldviews they decide to adopt.

[00:21:37]Some they get from religions. Some they get from the culture they are a part of.

[00:21:42]Some they get from philosophy. Some they get from government. Some they get from laws and legal frameworks. Some they get from their own rationalizations about the world around them and their own personal perspectives.

[00:21:54]But the thing is, worldviews are not synonymous with religions.

[00:22:00]As we went over a bit ago, religions require adherence to attitudes, beliefs, and practices. They require commitment or devotion to a god or gods and are systems of beliefs or religious observance.

[00:22:13]Religions often include worldviews, but they are not the same thing as worldviews. And one can have worldviews that have nothing to do with religions.

[00:22:25]So, having a predominantly science-based worldview does not mean that science is Bill Nye's religion, and that does not equate to one religion versus another religion.

[00:22:35]By framing it this way, Ken's attempting to force an asymmetrical debate about evidence, i.e. what science has proven versus what Christianity defiantly claims without evidence, and instead he's trying to make it look like a symmetrical clash of rival faiths.

[00:22:51]But it's not.

[00:22:53]This is not my faith versus your faith.

[00:22:55]This is here's what we can prove and it contradicts what your holy book claims without any evidence to support it.

[00:23:04]And what I did in the Bill Nye debate, uh which the the secularists really hate, I divided science into two types of science. There's two types of knowledge. Uh there's knowledge gained by observation using your five senses in the present. That builds technology, and we all agree on on that science. As a matter whether you're an atheist or a Christian, we agree on the wonderful science that builds technology. But then there's knowledge about the past when you weren't there, your origins. We weren't there to see the earth formed.

[00:23:31]We weren't there to see humans formed.

[00:23:33]And I illustrated this with Bill Nye by saying, "You and I can go to the Grand Canyon. We can agree here's a canyon. We can agree on how deep the canyon is. We can agree that this layer is called the Coconino Sandstone. We can agree on how thick it is. We can agree on the size of the grains. What we don't agree on is when it was laid down and how fast it took to be laid down cuz we didn't see any of that. That's historical science. That's what we call it." No, Ken. That is your misinterpretation of science and your twisting of it to fit into your rigid insistence on the Bible.

[00:24:07]By splitting science into those two types, you can still claim to be a science-minded, science-interested person who accepts science and even likes science so long as it's the right type of science.

[00:24:21]It's that first kind that you like. But then when it comes to anything science says about the past that you don't like just because it contradicts what your holy book says, you can write that off as historical science, which isn't real science anyway.

[00:24:36]But that's just your division within your own mind.

[00:24:40]There's no separation between science based on direct observation in the exact here and now and science concerning events of the past.

[00:24:49]They both use the scientific method in the same way.

[00:24:53]Ken, when you say things like, "Were you there?" in order to dismiss conclusions about deep time like the Big Bang or the extinction of dinosaurs or the evolution of our species?

[00:25:04]You're confusing direct observation with empirical evidence.

[00:25:08]In science, you do not need to observe a crime as it happens in order to solve it. You just need to observe the evidence that the crime left behind.

[00:25:17]Or would you try to claim that forensic science isn't real science because the forensic scientists weren't there to actually witness the crime as it happens?

[00:25:27]To study the distant past, science relies on specific, highly rigorous methodologies that bridge the gap between then and now.

[00:25:35]We're all familiar with the word prediction, which is foretelling something that will happen in the future, but historical science relies on retrodiction, which is predicting what we should find in the physical record if our theory about the past is correct.

[00:25:51]If evolutionary biology is correct that land vertebrates evolved from fish, scientists retrodicted that there would have been a transitional creature living in the shallow streams roughly 375 million years ago.

[00:26:06]Paleontologists then looked at a geological map, found rock strata of exactly that age in northern Canada, went there, and bingo, they dug up Tiktaalik, a perfect transitional fossil with a fish-like scale and tetrapod-like limbs.

[00:26:22]They didn't need to watch the transition happen with their own eyes. They predicted exactly where the footprint would be found frozen in time.

[00:26:31]If the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, physicists calculated that the universe should still be filled with a faint, uniform leftover heat signature from that initial explosion.

[00:26:42]In 1964, scientists accidentally detected this, the cosmic microwave background radiation.

[00:26:49]This afterglow of the formation of the universe was measured, mapped, and perfectly matched the mathematical predictions.

[00:26:56]Furthermore, science about the past does not just rely on one single retrodiction being confirmed, and then bingo, therefore that hypothesis about the past is accepted as 100% confirmed truth.

[00:27:09]No, science requires a little bit more evidence than that.

[00:27:14]A conclusion about the distant past is considered secure when completely different independent fields of science arrive at exactly the same answer.

[00:27:23]This is called consilience.

[00:27:26]Take the evolutionary relationship between species over hundreds of millions of years.

[00:27:31]Well, genetics researchers looked at the mutations in DNA in order to build an evolutionary family tree.

[00:27:38]Meanwhile, completely separately, paleontology looked at the shapes of bones buried in stone layers in order to build a family tree.

[00:27:46]Simultaneously, geologists use radiometric dating of elements like uranium and potassium to date those stone layers.

[00:27:55]If historical science were just guesswork, then these three incredibly different disciplines would have yielded radically conflicting timelines. They would have gotten different results.

[00:28:06]Instead, they all lined up perfectly, pointing to the exact same historical conclusions.

[00:28:12]Science about the past uses the exact same scientific method to draw conclusions about things humans were not present to witness.

[00:28:21]No different from how we use it to determine things about other galaxies or solar systems that are too far away to directly observe.

[00:28:28]But we can use the gravitational evidence and the gravitational effects from those other star systems to come to conclusions about what we cannot directly see.

[00:28:38]Similarly, we can use the evidence from the past to reach conclusions about the events that we didn't bear witness to.

[00:28:45]So, to try to separate science into here and now science that you personally like because it gives you cars and medicine and computers to put out this anti-science malarkey on and then separate that from back in the day science which you don't like because it showcases how up your holy book is when it says that everything in the universe is only 6,000 years old and humans were made from casting a spell on dirt, well, that's just Stupid!

[00:29:15]>> [screaming] >> YOU'RE SO STUPID!

[00:29:18]STUDENTS NEED TO BE taught how to think correctly about science. So, when it comes to talking about landing man on the moon or making antibiotics or aspirin or whatever, that's observational science. That's great science. But when it comes to talking about how did the universe arise, when did man come about, I mean, you're talking about historical science. You're talking about the past. Students are taught the proper way to think about science. They just aren't taught your way to thinking about it, Ken, because your way of thinking about science is wrong and stupid and rooted in trying to twist science in order to fit your biblical fundamentalism rather than a pro-science view of actually following the evidence where it leads.

[00:30:03]But the scientific method, which all science is based in, is utilized for science about the past exactly the same way it's used for science about modern events.

[00:30:13]Philosophy of science highlights a concept called the asymmetry of overdetermination.

[00:30:18]This is a term that means the past events leave far more clues that are actually needed in order to reconstruct them.

[00:30:26]It's an incredibly easy thing to catch a bad historical hypothesis because the physical world and the evidence that we have is simply too much raw data for a lie to survive.

[00:30:38]If a scientist proposes a false theory about the past, it will immediately be crushed by all the incoming data from other fields that showcase how wrong it is.

[00:30:48]For example, let's take a look at something very near and dear to your heart in particular, Ken.

[00:30:54]If you hypothesize that the Grand Canyon was carved by Noah's flood a few thousand years ago, your hypothesis doesn't just have to explain the water.

[00:31:03]It also has to explain why the delicate fossils are perfectly sorted by evolutionary layers.

[00:31:10]If a chaotic global flood violently drowned the planet, it would have churned up all the living creatures together since they all would have died in the same time in the same place as part of the same global flood.

[00:31:22]Instead, what we actually find is that the fossils in the Grand Canyon are sorted with absolute mathematical precision.

[00:31:30]At the very bottom layer, you find only marine invertebrates like trilobites and brachiopods.

[00:31:36]As you move upward through the higher layers, you find primitive fish, then land plants, then amphibians, and finally reptiles in the top layer.

[00:31:45]You never, under any circumstances, find a mammal, a bird, a dinosaur, or a modern flowering plant in the lower or middle layers of the Grand Canyon.

[00:31:56]But there's not just that.

[00:31:58]Also, why is it that the volcanic basalt layers embedded in the canyon date to millions of years old via radioisotopes?

[00:32:06]Volcanic eruptions happened at various times throughout the canyon's formation.

[00:32:10]And when lava cools, it locks in radioactive isotopes like potassium-argon or uranium-lead, which keep the atomic time based on their decay rates.

[00:32:21]Then, when geologists determine the date of these volcanic layers, the results are perfectly sequential.

[00:32:26]The volcanic rock at the bottom of the canyon dates to over a billion years old, while volcanic rock near the top dates to just a few million years old.

[00:32:35]For the flood model to be true, the radioactive decay rate would have to accelerate by a factor of millions during the year of the flood in order to make these rocks appear old.

[00:32:45]However, accelerating nuclear decay to that degree releases enough thermodynamic heat to literally melt the crust of the earth and boil the oceans away.

[00:32:55]Meaning Noah's Ark would have been vaporized.

[00:32:58]But even further than that, why is the canyon walls showing signs of ancient sand dunes?

[00:33:05]Smack in the middle of the Grand Canyon walls is a bright layer of sandstone, which Ken himself mentioned.

[00:33:12]Proponents of the global flood insist that this layer was deposited rapidly by rushing underwater currents during the flood.

[00:33:19]However, the physical structure of the sandstone proves it was an ancient completely dry desert.

[00:33:25]It features a geological phenomenon called cross-bedding, where the angles of the sand grains perfectly match the slopes created by wind-blown desert dunes, not by underwater currents.

[00:33:37]Furthermore, this layer was packed with fossilized footprints left by early reptiles walking across it.

[00:33:43]These footprints show distinct patterns of animals walking up on dry sand dunes leaving clear impressions on shifting sands.

[00:33:51]You cannot form dry wind-blown sand dunes with land animals casually walking across them in the middle of a global underwater cataclysm.

[00:34:01]See, Ken, this is science. This is how science is done.

[00:34:06]The evidence is examined and conclusions are drawn from that data.

[00:34:11]Your insistence on throwing out those conclusions just because the events that they tell us about happened in the long, long ago is just you wanting to cling to your holy book's clearly false narrative, and you've constructed an easy division in science in order to help you do that.

[00:34:27]I mean, your own holy book only talks about stuff from the long, long ago, after all, so obviously that's all that it could possibly get wrong.

[00:34:35]Your holy book says nothing about modern day, however, so you can accept modern day related science, and that doesn't threaten your theology.

[00:34:42]But you have to deny virtually all science concerning anything from the long, long ago in order to maintain your biblical fundamentalism.

[00:34:51]But that really is the only reason for your attempt to divide science in that way.

[00:34:57]There's no justifiable reason to separate science between the here and now and the way back then.

[00:35:03]Because quite frankly, we don't care about maintaining your belief in the Bible at all costs.

[00:35:09]Now, the Bible is actually a book OF HISTORICAL SCIENCE.

[00:35:14]>> [laughter] >> OH, WAIT, YOU SERIOUS? LET ME LAUGH EVEN HARDER.

[00:35:20]>> [laughter] >> IT'S CUZ IT'S A HISTORY BOOK.

[00:35:23]AND IN Genesis 1 to 11, we have history revealed to us from God concerning the creation and concerning events of the past, the flood, the Tower of Babel, and so on.

[00:35:35]Ken, your favorite book of the Bible, the book of Genesis, is fraught with not just scientific inaccuracies, but scientific impossibilities.

[00:35:45]Light before stars. Genesis states that light was created on day one, but the sun and the moon and the stars weren't created until day four.

[00:35:54]In reality, the sun and older stars are the very sources of the light that illuminates our solar system.

[00:36:01]And stars existed billions of years before the Earth formed.

[00:36:06]Genesis talks about plants before the sun. It places the creation of land plants and vegetation on day three, a full day before the sun.

[00:36:14]But photosynthetic plants can't exist, let alone thrive, without solar radiation of the sun.

[00:36:21]Genesis talks about birds before land animals. It claims that birds and sea creatures were created on day five, while land animals, including reptiles and mammals, were created on day six.

[00:36:32]The fossil record and genetic sequencing conclusively proves the exact opposite sequence. Land reptiles evolved hundreds of millions of years before birds, which are descended from theropod dinosaurs.

[00:36:44]The text states that God created a firmament to separate the waters above the earth from the waters below, effectively holding back a cosmic ocean to create the sky.

[00:36:54]But meteorology, atmospheric physics, and space exploration have thoroughly disproven the existence of any solid dome over the earth.

[00:37:03]The atmosphere is a gaseous envelope held in place by gravity and grading smoothly into the vacuum of space.

[00:37:10]By tracing the genealogies listed in Genesis, Adam to Noah, Noah to Abraham, biblical literalists calculate the creation of the universe having occurred roughly 6,000 years ago.

[00:37:21]But multiple independent lines of evidence, you know, more of that consilience that we talked about earlier, including radiometric dating of meteorites, the cooling rate of the earth, the layers of the geologic column, ice core samples going back 800,000 years, and the expansion rate of the universe via the cosmic microwave background radiation, conclusively prove that the earth is 4.54 billion years old and the universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old.

[00:37:50]Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden being how all the plants and animals came to be. The Tower of Babel being about how different language developed. Every freaking syllable of the Book of Genesis has been conclusively debunked by not just one, not just a handful, but every possible corner of scientific discovery and investigation.

[00:38:13]Ken, this entire and very transparent attempt at discrediting historical science in order to preserve your young earth creationism is little more than epistemological solipsism.

[00:38:25]You presuppose that human reason is inherently flawed and darkened by sin, meaning that human observance, or in other words, science, can't be trusted over the eyewitness testimony of God that you get from your holy book, which is fraught with problems and was not even written by the people it claims to have been written by.

[00:38:46]To you, historical science is just an exercise in human guesswork.

[00:38:51]You're partitioning science into operational or observational science, which are useful things like iPhones and medicine, and then historical science, convincing yourself that the latter is just a secular religion that requires blind faith.

[00:39:06]By dismissing the past as fundamentally unknowable to humans, you feel entirely justified in favoring your interpretation of biblical text over physical data.

[00:39:15]No matter how much evidence we have to showcase that your biblical text is wrong.

[00:39:21]And frankly, not only is it fallacious reasoning, but it's patently obvious that you're just making this division between modern and historical science in order to preserve your biblical literalism. And that, more than anything else, is just sad. Well, I feel sorry for you. So, that was Ken Ham talking about why atheism is just another religion and science isn't really science in all the parts where it contradicts the Bible.

[00:39:51]And honestly, this was nothing but the purest distillation of religious copium.

[00:39:57]Atheism's on the rise. Religion, specifically Christianity, is falling off at an ever-increasing rate. Even here in the United States, which is the only place an organization like Answers in Genesis can gain any kind of a foothold because every other decent country on the planet has laughed young Earth creationists like him out a long time ago.

[00:40:16]So, he takes any swipe at non-believers that he can.

[00:40:20]Including accusing non-believers of being a religion no different from his own.

[00:40:26]I guess the hope is that the same anti-religion tactics will end up being used against atheism. And maybe it'll be successful in casting out the supposed religion of atheism as it has been successful at casting out the religion of Christianity from a lot of aspects of the culture.

[00:40:43]Only that doesn't work because try as he might to get it positioned as such, atheism just simply isn't a religion in any way that counts.

[00:40:52]He even had to finagle and omit aspects of his own dictionary source to try to make a half-hearted argument for atheism being a religion. But even that fell apart when one actually considers what the definitions that he provided actually mean.

[00:41:07]And then he attempted to on the scientific method and claimed that it isn't real science if you weren't there to see it. And that displays a gross misunderstanding of science if we're being kind enough to give him the benefit of the doubt that it is just an actual misunderstanding. And not what it more likely is, an intentional misrepresentation of how science works in a shameless attempt to keep his fundamentalist worldview anything close to valid, which it obviously isn't.

[00:41:35]Because while yeah, seeing a thief steal a wallet is one way to know what happened, another completely valid way to know what happened is examining evidence up to and including footprints, DNA evidence left behind, fingerprints, and finding the stolen wallet on the thief's person leading to the conclusion that the thief stole the wallet. Even if no one actually laid eyes upon him while he was doing it.

[00:42:00]Both ways are science.

[00:42:03]And frankly, the latter can be argued to be even stronger because there's multiple lines of evidence and a convergence of various scientific data and findings leading to that conclusion.

[00:42:15]It's even more reliable than the direct observation, not less.

[00:42:20]And it was just pathetically obvious that the only reason Ken tried to argue the opposite was cuz somewhere, deep down in the atrophied recesses of his brain where some semblance of rationality still flickers, he knows that his big book of is exactly that.

[00:42:38]And it terrifies him to his core.

[00:42:41]But, to be devastatingly blunt, the harsh, unapologetic, verifiable, evidentiary, conclusive scientific truth of reality doesn't really give a about your feelings on the matter.

[00:42:54]And so, that is where we'll end things for today.

[00:42:58]So, thanks for watching, everyone. Don't forget to like this video, comment, and subscribe so you'll always be notified when a new video comes out. Check me out on Twitter, Blue Sky, and Patreon if you'd like to support my work directly.

[00:43:09]My Teespring if you want some Pleeky merchandise. I'll link that below in the description. Special shout-out to my most recent super thankers here on YouTube, Terminal Fling, Dr. Barrow SP, and Michael Martin. And with that said, until next time, I'm Professor Pleeky reminding you to keep striving for greater understanding. It's the best way to get wherever you want to go.