I have no idea why the hyped debate between Nye and Ham was worth anyone's serious attention. They’re both boring and obviously wrong.

Creation science isn't science, and it isn't theology.  None of the great religious thinkers of the Christian tradition could take it seriously.

But the idea that we know evolutionary natural science as it is now understood by various "new atheists" can explain it all is equally ridiculous.  That's scientism—an account of the whole that speculatively goes beyond what we really know through science.  Scientism always gets its comprehensive explanatory power through denying some of what we can see with our own eyes.

Evolution happened, well sure.  And of course what biologists think in response to the latest studies should be taught in biology class.  As soon as I say that, I want to add that "creation science" isn't a powerful enough force to undermine scientific progress in our country.

In my opinion, the main obstacle to the flourishing of scientific inquiry in our country is our reduction of education to techno-vocationalism and the disparaging of theoretical inquiry for its own sake.  It's not the fault of the  "creation scientists" that there are so few American theoretical physicists. The same techno-spirit that works against pure theory in science opposes the study of philosophy and theology (and literature and poetry, which are often really empirical) for their own sakes.

If Americans were also more about the study of philosophy and theology in light of the great books of the West, then more people would be on to the fact that both Nye and Ham don't know much, just as those who propose neuroscientific accounts for what philosophers, theologians, poets, and other great thinkers and artists know don't know much.

A very scientific book that everyone should read is Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos.  He calls for a theory of evolution that accounts for the "discontinuities" introduced into the Cosmos with the emergence of man.

He gives us this thought:  The theory of evolution as our scientists now understand it was perfectly true until the emergence of the being with capacity for complex language or speech.  Since then, we notice, natural evolution has in many ways been displaced by what some call "conscious and volitional evolution," evolution not with the species but the particular conscious and creative human being in mind.  I would say, for example, that the evolutionary account of the behavior of the cute social mammals (such as us and the dolphins) doesn't account for why we've become, in principle, transhumanists and the dolphins remain perfectly content with what nature has given them.  And then there's the issue that there aren't any dolphin poets, philosophers, priests, physicists, presidents, preachers, or pianists.

And Percy asks: "How can an immanent theory of evolution mounted from the transcending posture of science account for the appearance in the Cosmos of a triumphant, godlike, murderous alien, the only alien in the Cosmos....?"

If you can answer that question, you can put back together the truth about human experience expressed by what philosophy professors call Continental existentialism with the truth expressed in what's sometimes called Anglo-American empiricism.  That would be the comprehensive science I could believe in.  It would be one, if you think about, that would have plenty of room for “special creation” as a real possibility.  It certainly provides a plausible explanation for the natural fact that we can’t experience ourselves, despite our best efforts, as fully at home in the Cosmos.

A beginning of this scientific effort, of course, is noticing that evolutionary science, as it’s now understood, can’t even account for the scientist, the knower.  The truth is that because, by nature, we wonder, we also wander.  The knower can’t fully integrate himself into his account of the Cosmos, and so the more he knows about the Cosmos, the more he experiences himself, mysteriously, as an alien or displaced person.  Putting wondering (Aristotle) and wandering (Jesus) together, of course, was the great project of Thomas Aquinas, who managed, in his way, to be both an existentialist and a naturalist.  He gives us a natural explanation of most of the particular experiences that Pascal and Heidegger truthfully describe.