"Science is pretty clear about what answers it has and which it doesn't have."
This is extremely debatable.
"Science is pretty clear about what answers it has and which it doesn't have."
This is extremely debatable.
Pendragon, I'll avoid the points that Frostball already addressed, since I agree with him. Pluto, especially, is not an example of changing science but changing terminology, and is a good reason to subscribe to reductionism and avoid the fallacies of linguistic compression.
Science doesn't really seek "positive proofs;" proofs reside in the realm of math. Popper's notion of scientific falsification is much more accurate. It simply states that Science seeks theories that are able to be falsified through experiment, and the theories that are "left standing" are those that have withstood our best attempts at falsifying them. I understand what you're saying about about us laymen having to accept what scientists say without being able to confirm it ourselves, yet when you see things like, eg, a rocket ship to the moon, and understand that such a thing was only made possible via our understanding of physics--gravity, combustion, rocket design, etc.--it's hard to explain how we could accomplish such a thing if scientists DIDN'T actually know what they were talking about. Plus, I think most of us would anticipate that if we got into the relevant scientific fields, we could confirm most of what science claims it knows.Originally Posted by Pendragon
Again, it goes back to what I was saying about the differences in faiths. If I put my faith in science/scientists even if I haven't confirmed what they've said for myself, I do so for several reasons: 1) Science has consistently taken what it's claimed to know and done remarkable things with that knowledge. 2) The scientific method itself offers a means for TESTING claims, and scientists spend a lot of time trying to falsify the hypotheses of other scientists. 3) Science has no obvious agenda for claiming it knows things it doesn't, because other scientists can get famous simply by proving them wrong, and such a thing would humiliate those claiming to know thing they didn't. I guess this is just a long way of saying that I see science as having a built-in system that prevents the kind of liberal hogwash spouting that's so prevalent in pseudo-sciences and gurus and, yes, religion. You ask a scientist how they know something and they can typically back it up with heaps of confirmable facts, tests, experiments, etc.; ask a religious guru how they know something and they, well, can't.
The problem, though, is that religion doesn't STAY personal. People's religious beliefs inevitably affect others, whether that's in something as simple as one believer shunning non-believers, or something as large as religious institutions trying to get Creationism taught in schools alongside evolution. If people had "religious experiences" and accepted this as proof of a personal God in their life and that was it, I'd have no problem. The problem begins when it doesn't end there, when you get people who promote their religion's versions of history or science over ACTUAL history or science, or their religion's morality over ACTUAL morality. I mean, I'm sympathetic to, say, Blake or Stevens' ideas on religion, where religion is more about art, the creator "God" within man that allows us to have transcendental experiences with nature and life and others, the parts that speak to the eternal aspects of our humanity. However, I, like Blake, feels compelled to rage against the OT lawgiver God, who's really a product of man's attempt to control his fellow man via religion. That's the line, I think, that I've drawn with religion between its positive and negative qualities.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
Vota, similar with Pendragon, I'll avoid the points Frostball has covered since I'd just be restating the same thing. You very much need to learn the difference between a scientific "theory" and the more colloquial notion of "theory," because Frost is right that "theory" is the end-point of science. Theories never graduate to laws or facts. I also think you need to do more research into evolution, since most of your points ("cat-dog") reveal your ignorance of the matter and sounds like you're getting your information from equally ignorant Creationist websites.
Most scientists would claim that every aspect of consciousness we can study is linked with brain activity, and because the brain is a physical thing that requires both matter and spacetime to function, there's no reason to think consciousness can exist outside of either.
One thing to understand is that gravity itself is really just the relationship between matter and spacetime: matter tells spacetime how to curve, spacetime tells gravity how to move, as John Archibald Wheeler put it. Gravity is how we describe this relationship. However, in quantum fields there is no fixed matter or spacetime, merely fluctuations. So any gravity on this level would be in a similar state of flux. General relativity doesn't "communicate" with QM because GR is describing how matter/spacetime functions on a macro level, and as you get further down its laws break down into quantum chaos. What this tells us is that GR is only a partial description of reality at a certain level. We're still looking for more fundamental theories, yes, but right now we have these two theories that work quite well at two different levels. My own speculation is that looking for "quantum gravity" is going about things the wrong way; it would make more sense to look for something on the quantum level that could eventually scale up to gravity as we know it, just like how we know particles can scale up to, say, molecules.
I'm well aware that science was born out of philosophy and even promoted/patronized by religion early on. It's equally true to say that it's grown into its own distinct entity; though I'm very much of the mind that the right philosophy is still relevant in science. As for science asking fundamental questions, most of those fundamental questions are wrong questions. They reveal more about our flawed thinking than they do about the failures of science.
I almost entirely agree, except with the "our senses are subjective" part. The correct word is "relative," not "subjective." Our senses are feeding us information from reality that interacts without brains in particular ways. If the information was completely inaccurate we probably wouldn't have so much sense correspondence. IE, If my eyes are wrong about there being a wall 6 feet away from me, I probably wouldn't be able to walk over to it, touch it, smell it, taste it (ew), etc. Whatever the limitations and failures of our senses, they're really all we have in our attempt at mapping the territory of reality. So it's fine to be aware of our senses' limitations and the subjective components in perception, but we must also keep in mind that this is all we have, so it's imperative to try and understand precisely what those limitations and subjectivities are.
Most atheists I know of say they see no (compelling) evidence for God, and therefor do not believe one exists; yet, equally, most atheists and scientists I know would be open to evidence/proof of such a God. Lawrence Krauss once humorously quipped that if one night he walked out and the stars had rearranged themselves to spell out "God was here," that he'd have to seriously reconsider the possibility of God's existnece. I've often said that if another Jesus appeared and was performing miracles in a way that baffled modern medical science, then I'd have to reconsider my position. The problem, however, is that no evidence like this exists, and all of the evidence that DOES exist points away from such things. EG, the lack of correlation between prayer having positive affects on patients in various major studies on intercessory prayer. If God exists, and if prayer did what it was claimed to do, then those studies should've turned up some correlation. Likewise, there are plenty of things in The Bible that play by modern science's rules of falsification and provability, but you don't see anyone going around replicating such experiments.
So, I don't think it's a matter of atheists or scientists saying "we know God doesn't exist and we can prove it," but rather most saying that there's no compelling evidence for his existence, and that the evidence that IS out there seems to point away from God. Obviously, this isn't enough for proof, but, again, you could say the same thing about any mythological characters. We can't "PROVE" Santa or Easter Bunnies or fairies or Bigfoot doesn't exist, all we can say is that there's no good evidence.
And your flipping is wrong. Again, scientists know more than most precisely what we do and do not know. They're working on the parts that we do not know as we speak. And no scientists would say "theories" are behind what they do not know; that's preposterous. Theories are our attempts to explain what is going on in reality.
The issues you mentioned have nothing to do with quantum fields being able to create matter and spacetime.
That isn't an insult, I've seen that exact response more times than I care to count. Of course "many" scientists doctors and philosophers believe in a higher power; what does this have to do with anything? Even great minds can have flaws. In fact, the reason I promote the website Lesswrong so much (as you may have noticed through my links) is because it addresses the flaws WE KNOW occur in our brains' cognition. Besides this, it's also a fact that there is much less belief amongst scientists than other people, and much, much less belief amongst top scientists. Finally, no, it isn't "just as feasible that God created everything." Firstly, we don't even know God exists; secondly, assuming he does, we know nothing about him; thirdly, amongst the things we wouldn't know is how he could create anything "out of nothing;" fourthly, we have no idea how such an anthropomorphic being could exist outside the bounds of matter and spacetime. Basically, there's no even remotely falsifiable/testable model for God existing or creating anything. This is not the case with quantum fields. We know they exist; we know how they function; we know that within that functioning there exists the potential to create matter and unvierses. That we don't know EVERYTHING about them seems rather trivial in light of us knowing NOTHING about God, even down to whether or not he exists. To state that it's "equally feasible" that something we know nothing about could've created everything VS something that we know a great deal about is just plain wrong.
Errr, Wikipedia itself says there are two meanings of the word atheism: the first deals with the "rejection of believe in deities," and the second deals with "the position that there are no deities." Something like Dictionary.com lists both as well. I rather like the model that uses a/theism to deal with BELIEVE and a/gnosticism to deal with KNOWLEDGE. So an "agnostic athiest" says "I don't believe in God, but do not claim to know he doesn't exist," while a "gnostic atheist" says "I don't believe in God and would claim to know he doesn't exist." I consider myself in the former "agnostic atheist" camp. But, as I've said before, agnostics themselves can range all the way from "pretty sure God exists" to "pretty sure God doesn't exist." Really, I wish people could just express their level of belief/disbelief in probabilities. Like, I'd say I'm about 99% God doesn't exist, and I preserve that extra 1% only on the basis that there is still, indeed, a lot we don't know, and it's possible, though I see no reason to think it likely, that God might exist out there in that 1% of what's unknown.
How so? Scientists are usually quick to admit what they know and what they don't.
Last edited by MorpheusSandman; 02-15-2014 at 05:21 AM.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
What you are saying is God is not quantifiable. There is no mathematical equation for God.
I don't need God to be quantifiable, I accept His existence based on personal experience.
I just wanted to point out that science does not negate God, nor does God negate science.
I see, however, that short of me saying, "OMG you're right! Science explains everything! God is not needed" you will continue to demean everything I say.
I have no problem with you or your beliefs. You seem to have one with mine. I have no quarrel with any of you.
God bless
Pen
Some of us laugh
Some of us cry
Some of us smoke
Some of us lie
But it's all just the way
that we cope with our lives...
No, this isn't what I said. I was pointing out that science doesn't work on proofs but on falsifiability.
What in the world in my post "demeaned everything you said?"
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
Nope, observations are the end point of science. Without observations theories are just that - theories - without any basis in reality.
Then agin, I might accept that "theories with overwhelming evidence in their favour" are end-points in science. Although, even then, they are not *final* end points. For instance, Newtonian mechanics looked like a final end point before certain observations were made that Newtonian mechanics could not explain and Einsteinian mechanics could. But Newtonian mechanic sis a sorta end point - in non-relativistic and non-quantum realms.
String theory is not an end point in physics - observations are needed. Nobel prizes are awarded only when the observations are in - like Higgs came up with the theory of the Higgs boson in the 1960s, but only gets the Noble prize now after the observations have confirmed its existence.
In this case I think there are enough observations - at the very least we observe our own consciousness for sure! Also our consciousness is always obsrved to "come along with our body". There is no observational evidence at all for consciousness floating around free of bodies - no angels, spirits, or whatever. Consciousness always seems to need an active human brain. What's lacking here is an adequate theory - just how does consciousness emerge from brain activity?Most scientists would claim that every aspect of consciousness we can study is linked with brain activity, and because the brain is a physical thing that requires both matter and spacetime to function, there's no reason to think consciousness can exist outside of either.
Dawkins pulled him up on that one, suggesting aliens with a sense of humour would be a far more likely explanation. Conjurers with space ships and a bunch of mirrors. Krauss had to agree...Lawrence Krauss once humorously quipped that if one night he walked out and the stars had rearranged themselves to spell out "God was here," that he'd have to seriously reconsider the possibility of God's existnece.
Many scientists, doctors and philosophers don't have great minds! I'm reading C.P. Snows excellent novel "the search", a wonderful account of what a life in science is actually like, and one character makes the point that "It's too easy, any duffer can do it." Dawkins make the same point in his autobiography, although he then goes on to show how he isn't a dullard. Science certainly has great minds (Einstein, Darwin...) but everyday science is not difficult, and dullards get to occupy most professorial roles. So the universities are full of rather mediocre minds, hard working dullards. Sometimes their dull minds turn to religion... And as for doctors and philosophers, most aren't even good enough to be dull scientists.Of course "many" scientists doctors and philosophers believe in a higher power; what does this have to do with anything? Even great minds can have flaws.
The critical element is whether a choice was made to get our universe going. If there was a choice then there was enough consciousness to make that choice. That is all one needs, a choice.
The brain, or more correctly, our bodies, modify our awareness. Some of us are color blind. Others are not. That would be how our individual bodies produce part of our awareness. Our memories, on the other hand, I don't think are completely generated by our brains, nor stored there.
The typical psychic phenomena: out of body experiences, remote viewing, near death experiences, intuition, whatever gives someone an experience that should not occur at all if our consciousness were limited to what our brains could produce.
If you can find a copy of Bohm and Hiley's "The Undivided Universe", we could go over chapter 13 which provides a critique of many worlds.
If there is some agent making a choice that was responsible for the expansion of our universe or even evolutionary change, then that agent could be viewed as a God. It doesn't matter whether that God looks like quantum fluctuations or something else. It made a choice. Atheistic metaphysics assumes there are no Gods. It cannot tolerate any such agents.
The sun is not a perpetual energy source.
The question is could it have happened by chance without any agent (aka "God") making a choice? What are the odds? A atheistic position relies on chance and determinism. It does not rely on choices by agents. Since we are here, we happened. What are the odds that we are here totally by chance?
I reject a lot of man-made Gods, but I am not an atheist because I really don't know what's out there. However, an atheistic position as distinct from an agnostic position, is that all of these agents must be rejected. It is way too extreme for me to accept.
The various religions acknowledge the existence of consciousness(es) that they can relate to and have cultural traditions that show their members how to establish such relationships.
This is why science and religion are not in opposition to each other. Science tries to get information about the universe; religion tries to build relationships with their various Gods. There is no opposition between these two. There is, however, opposition between theistic religion and atheism because atheists don't believe such relationships can be established.
Bohm and Hiley differentiate many worlds as presented by Everett from the one presented by people like Deutsch. The original position Everett took is linked to many minds. They point out hidden assumptions in these two divergent views showing that many worlds fails to fulfill its own claims that it wins some Occam's Razor contest for fewest assumptions. They also look at the Born probabilities from a way that might be more favorable to your position.
That's what I remember at the moment.
If you can get hold of the book, perhaps it would be interesting to read this together. At least then we would have a text to refer back to when we have disagreements on what many worlds claims.
Last edited by YesNo; 02-15-2014 at 12:21 PM.
One of the examples Sam Harris mentioned in "Free Will" is whether we want to grant a fly enough free will to make a choice. For some odd reason, he seems to think we want to reserve free will only to our own species. Basically, is a fly consciousness enough to choose to get out of the the way when I try to swat it?
I can't speak for others who think we have adequate free will, but I have no problem with the fly having enough free will to choose to fly away and hence enough consciousness to do so.
There is research on slime mold making a choice based on patterns it left (external memory): http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...s-slime-molds/ Not only does slime mold not have an active human brain, it doesn't have a brain at all.
("cat-dog")-poor choice on my part, but considering how long many animals and specifically insects have been around on this planet, you would think there would be examples of species that have evolved into a new species vs. adaptations within the species. From what I have seen, it appears that The Theory of Evolution has ALOT of inference going on, which bugs me. I admit I am just getting started on my understanding of evolution, but I'm seeing alot of conflicting information. It's much the same with science vs. religion and whether God exists and how we got here etc. I'm trying to formulate beliefs and opinions, but its difficult sifting through all the information, and from what I have seen, I'm not convinced by either side.
Granted, I believe in science. I believe in technology. I believe that science, mathematics, physics, biology, cosmology etc, is making constant progress, and if we don't destroy ourselves with these advancements, then we are in for some interesting revelations in the future.
I mostly have a problem with people that poo-poo religious beliefs. I recently watched a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Hamm, and I couldn't help thinking that throughout the whole debate neither side really effectively refuted the other side, but that Nye attempted to make creationists look essentially stupid or as lacking a background in science, when in fact Hamm made it quite clear that his side was all for science and that he understood science very well.
Its things like that, that get me irritable with Atheists and some scientists. Not everyone that is not up on the cutting edge of science is ignorant when it comes to the topic of creation or the existence of God, because scientists do not have these answers, and until science can irrefutably, observably prove what they have to say about it, then anything they have to say is not the final word nor any more true than what a religious person has to say about it. We know the sun exists. It shines everyday. This is observable and repeatable. No such claims by scientists can be made concerning the creation of the universe and God. They have some pretty good theories, but The Big Bang isn't actually observable in the sense of seeing it actually happen, or what was going on before it happened, its all theory atm.
This is why I find it almost inconceivable to make the claim that there is no God vs. saying you aren't sure because there isn't enough compelling evidence. There is a difference between an atheist and an agnostic, and it seems many atheists are trying to skirt around the fact they do not believe in God or gods, which is to say that they maintain a certainty of viewpoint on the non-existence of supernatural entities or forces until new evidence sheds lights on the subject, vs. saying they aren't sure and so claim that they are undecided, which would be the stance of the agnostic. There is a significant difference, and it just seems to me that the former is both arrogant and ignorant. The latter may be ignorant, but I would posit not arrogant because the very belief of the possibility of something superceding human authority is not arrogant in and of itself.
If someone put a gun to my head right now and asked me, given all that I know and have experienced, which would I choose, a future without science, or a future without religion, I would choose without religion, BUT that doesn't mean I would be happy about making such a choice or even that I think that would be good for me or the world in the long run. Mainly because who the **** am I to be the judge of that, let alone anyone else?
That's kinda where I stand with all this stuff.
P.S. I would be totally willing to swear off any thoughts about religion if science can irrefutably prove there is no God and can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt how the universe came into existence. I would also admit that legitimate alien contact would very probably cause a massive reduction in my interest in the religious and spiritual, if not my complete separation from it.
It is interesting when I think about it, that if God was proven to exist and/or manifested itself, provided it wasn't a higher level ET pulling one on us, I would still not eschew science because its too useful to live without. I certainly couldn't type this if it wasn't for science and I certainly am not for religion OVER science.
Last edited by Vota; 02-16-2014 at 01:45 AM.
These are usually what theories ARE, so that's what I meant. However, even without observation there are means of favoring certain theories and interpretations over others (Occam's Razor being one, Bayes another, Solomonoff another). For any given set of observations there's always multiple theories one could concoct to explain them, and often it's not always feasible to test between them.
As for the former, most would cite NDEs and OBEs as evidence for out-of-body consciousness, though I'd contend that brain activity can still account for such experiences. As for the latter, I suspect that consciousness is not "one thing" but rather a great many things. The problem is that we've yet to reduce the one word to its constituent parts and understand that X brain activity corresponds to Y aspect of consciousness. I also suspect that consciousness is a spectrum rather than a binary thing, so animals with lesser intelligence have a degree of consciousness, the same way that children are generally less aware than adults.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
That's the critical element TO YOU. Not everyone shares your biased concern about "choice" in relation to cosmology.
Evidence?
There's absolutely nothing about these things that "should not occur if consciousness was limited to our brains." Dreams, especially lucid dreaming, allow us to imagine ourselves outside our bodies somewhere else besides in our beds sleeping; yet I've heard very few people theorize that dreaming is happening anywhere but inside the mind of the dreamer. NDEs and OBEs are much the same; the conscious brain shuts down so other parts reconstruct the scene based on its memories and imaginations of it and puts the experiencer "there." There's nothing about any of this that's beyond the ability of the brain and, what's more, rigorous studies of these phenomena have failed to confirm any genuine out-of-body consciousness by, eg, having the NDEer correctly noting details about the space they couldn't otherwise have known. One such researcher placed a scrolling neon sign high up in an operating room with random messages changing every day. No NDEer has yet identified the message; I wonder why?
Technically you're correct in that the sun will eventually die out itself, but it's perpetual enough to generate the kind of energy over a long enough period of time to generate complexity within its part of the overall system.
As I've explained to you thoroughly before, the odds against us (or anything) being here has nothing to do whether or not chance, determinism, or agents were involved. This is not how probability works.
As I said elsewhere, I find it useful to keep a/theism about belief and a/gnosticism about knowledge, so you can be an "agnostic atheist" and say "I don't believe in any Gods because I see no evidence for them, but I do not state that they certainly don't or can't exist." To me, this 4-way system better reflects how people actually think than the 3-point system of theist/agnostic/atheist.
Except that this is not all religion attempts to do. It also lays down laws, morality, history, and, yes, natural science. The on-going conflict between Creationism and evolution is a direct example of religion conflicting with science.
What you remember isn't enough because you're just stating conclusions. Unless you can present a paraphrase of their arguments, there's nothing I have to respond to. It surprises me you can't remember anymore; it seems as if all you were concerned with was whether or not they agreed with you, but not in WHY they agreed with you. That seems to suggest confirmation bias on your part.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
More the condescending tone of your remarks than anything actually said. You seem to equate belief in God with stupidity. I assure you, I am not stupid, nor crazy. I resent being talked down to.
God bless
Pen
Some of us laugh
Some of us cry
Some of us smoke
Some of us lie
But it's all just the way
that we cope with our lives...
There's no need to choose between science and religion. They are very different human activities and can live in harmony.
If someone put that gun to my head and asked which would I choose, a future without atheism or a future without religion, I would choose a future without atheism. And that is what is at stake here. It is not science vs religion, but atheism vs religion.
Last edited by YesNo; 02-16-2014 at 10:03 PM.
How does a remote viewer know something about a location without physically being there? If the viewer's consciousness is totally generated by a particular brain, the viewer should not know anything about that location.
Now let me draw the conclusion--if our consciousness is limited to our brains no one should ever--not even once--report a successful remote viewing experience. Since they have been reported, an individual's consciousness is not totally generated by the brain.
How does that happen? The earth has been around for about 5 billion years. There is a limited amount of time. Could we get to our present state with only chance or deterministic laws causing the change?
The point is we are here. There are theories that we got here through only chance and deterministic laws, without the aid of any choices made by agents.
What I am asking is provide the odds that we could get to our present state using only chance and determinism in a 5 billion year period. It is a test of an hypothesis. Nothing more.
I am only interested in beliefs. As a belief, is it possible for atheism to allow for agents to make choices? These agents could be at any level from slime mold through humans to more powerful agents that could be perceived as deities.
I maintain that if atheism allows for any such agents, then it is no longer atheism. I suspect that ultimately atheism would have to claim that even we are totally determined and cannot make any choice whatsoever, that is, that no agents exist at all. Since we exist and we make choices, our own existence and behavior is evidence that falsifies atheism.
Don't forget that atheism has itself behaved badly. Check out the Khmer Rouge or North Korea for recent examples.
Confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance are what I think are responsible for the creation of pseudo-science.
I don't know of any specific scientific datum that provides me with any dissonance tension at the moment. That is, I have no problem with current scientific evidence, from quantum mechanics through modern brain scans to big bang cosmology, and so it is unlikely that I would need to present a pseudo-scientific perspective to counter scientific evidence.
However, I don't understand the theories presented in The Undivided Universe which ultimately are Bohm's interpretation for quantum mechanics. You don't have to read this book. It may be difficult for you to get at your library.
Last edited by YesNo; 02-16-2014 at 09:29 PM.
The thing about evolution that a great many don't get is that small changes between one generation turns into huge changes over the course of, say, 1000 generations. You're very rarely going to have speciation within one generation. However, there have been plenty of observed instances. If you're just getting started, I highly recommend either reading a reputable textbook, or reading on a website like TalkOrigins which has a prolific database and a solid FAQ with links to further information.
The Nye/Hamm debate was terrible for both sides. Neither were good debaters and neither did a good job at addressing the others' points. However, debates are, in general, an awful way at really gauging either side of the debate; the format forces participants to truncate arguments that typically require a much more amount of time to properly dig into. However, Nye is hardly alone in thinking Young Earth Creationists are stupid; practically every scientist thinks this. The evidence for an old Earth and evolution are simply so overwhelming that YECs have to either ignore or excuse mountains of data to believe what they do. Nye's points about yearly ice layers, tree rings, and carbon dating can't be answered by YECs, and Hamm's "points" about historic evidence is a non-starter if we consider something like Nye's Crime Scene Investigation (a point I wish he'd pushed further). Hamm TRIED to argue that there was some "controversy" about dating methods, but there's really not. Carbon dating is not perfectly accurate, but neither is it off by large factors that would suggest things were millions of years old if they were only a few thousand.
I do want to stress, though, that it's possible to be religious without buying into the idiocy of YEC. Scientists like Michael Behe and Francis Collins and others are theists, as are many biologists that accept evolution, deny YEC, but still believe in a God of some sort. The mistake that YEC make is in reading the entire Bible literally, and such an approach is not supportable either by what we know via modern science or what we know about The Bible's literary origins. A great many of its books and stories are adapted from myths that already had a long history at the time: Noah being an adaptation of Gilgamesh's flood is one such obvious example. Likewise, origin myths were pervasive in cultures before the OT was written. Change a few elements and you end up with Genesis. The point being that such stories were meant as religiously inspired art, as allegories, no different than, say, Paradise Lost. Believers run into their greatest problems in trying to treat The Bible literally.
You do know it was a Catholic priest that first proposed The Big Bang Theory, right? Anyway, yes, it's true that such a thing is not directly observable; however, such theory do have testable, observable consequences. EG, if there was a Big Bang we'd expect our universe to be expanding, and thanks to astronomical observations and things like redshift, we know this is true. Further, we can model that expansion and "rewind it" backwards to a point where our current models break down. So such things aren't just "a theory" as in "a guess," they're founded on confirmed predictions.
I already addressed this in a previous post towards you. To copy/paste: "I rather like the model that uses a/theism to deal with BELIEVE and a/gnosticism to deal with KNOWLEDGE. So an "agnostic athiest" says "I don't believe in God, but do not claim to know he doesn't exist," while a "gnostic atheist" says "I don't believe in God and would claim to know he doesn't exist." I consider myself in the former "agnostic atheist" camp. But, as I've said before, agnostics themselves can range all the way from "pretty sure God exists" to "pretty sure God doesn't exist." Really, I wish people could just express their level of belief/disbelief in probabilities. Like, I'd say I'm about 99% God doesn't exist, and I preserve that extra 1% only on the basis that there is still, indeed, a lot we don't know, and it's possible, though I see no reason to think it likely, that God might exist out there in that 1% of what's unknown."
You might consider asking yourself how science could irrefutably prove there is no God or how the the universe came into existence. With the former, as long as there's something we don't know, believers can always say that God exists "out there." With the latter, apart from us being able to create a new universe in a lab, I don't see how such a thing is feasible. Like I said, we already know that quantum fields are capable of producing a universe, so why is not logical to just assume they did rather than assuming that God exists and assuming he created quantum fields and assuming that he then created a universe either from the quantum fields or own his own? The former is just so much simpler, hence Occam's Razor.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
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