I watched and found it easy enough to do so. Neither threw any major bombs at each other. It was, for the most part, respectful and respectable. I felt like Nye really didn't know what to say for much of the debate. I was hopeful when early on he promised to try to collapse Ham's distinction between observational and historical science. His CSI analogy seemed to suggest he was going to spend time there, but then he just sort of left that off. It's also painfully clear that he hasn't taken the time to understand the position he was bothering to critique. He charged that Ham wanted to say that the laws of nature used to be different, that Ham was interpreting a book written three thousand years ago and translated dozens of times, etc. Not very impressive. He did offer a few points of evidence that a traditional YEC would have to account for (e.g., large boulders on top of small ones which seems to contradict Ham's hydrodynamic model of rock placement, more tree rings in some living trees than a 6,000 year old earth would allow, more layers of snow ice than a 6,000 year old earth would allow, etc.), but then he also pulled out several examples that were laughable or showed that he hadn't spent much time in the literature in question (e.g., the starlight problem, the number of species on the earth post-flood, etc.). It certainly isn't his job to give those answers, but at the same time, if you are going to argue that a model is not viable then good scholarship demands you consider it on its strongest terms. In that, Nye failed spectacularly.
Ham, on the other hand, did not capitalize on Nye's ignorance of the nuances of his model. Rather than offering a series of very quick bullet point responses to the few evidences that Nye presented--which a good debater like Craig would have done--he sort of lazily restated over and over his point about operational vs. historical science. But in restating it, he never deeply defended it or drove it home. He just kept saying the same thing over and over again, seemingly unsure how to make his case any clearer, so time that could have been spent developing his case was wasted. At the same time, he let Nye get by with a range of logical fallacies. During one five minute section (starting at 1:45:20 in
this video), he offered an argument from incredulity, an ad hominem, a straw man, begged the question, and an ad populum in very quick succession. And yet, Ham did not call him on any of them, which bothered me a great deal. Nye's logical errors don't make him necessarily wrong, of course, but they certainly mean that he isn't reasoning correctly, and that Ham failed to point that out was very much a failure on his own part. And finally, while I appreciate Ham's repeated statement that you cannot prove the age of the earth scientifically, I do think he was oversimplifying the matter, insofar as certain YEC creation models
should make predictions on what we actually can and do find today. That is, there should be more than just general evidence for YEC. So Ham thinks that there was a global flood, so some of that evidence should have been offered. If Ham is right about the difficulties associated with radiometric dating, then that is a testable claim and he should have been able to offer some evidence of that (he did offer one point there that, unfortunately, was not really developed).
So all in all, I think both debaters did a fair, though not exceptional, job at defending their own positions. Both were good speakers, cordial to one another, and were clear in what they did present. While there was obvious disagreement as to the conclusion, there was little by way of formal differences throughout the discussion. To me, at bottom, it felt much more like two speakers presenting two series of papers at different conferences unrelated on the same subject from different view points and then meshed together. As such, I found it overall educational. Someone who does not understand the basics of some YEC thinking could learn something if they watched it (they won't be convinced). Someone who doesn't understand the basics of secular evolutionary thinking could learn something if they watched it (they won't be convinced).
So . . . a snoozer? Perhaps. But interesting? Sure, if you are into this sort of thing.
