Why Ken Ham is a Quack

Here are my responses to the use of the Bible to explain the origins of life on Earth.  I know it's been a while since the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, but I've been busy, with a legitimate career and I've only had time now (during my spring break) to finally address this issue.

1. History is a matter of interpretation.  So his notion that the historical record of a written text that has been translated from various languages, re-written, and reformatted from one edition to another only adds to the inconsistency of his beliefs.  Who is to say that the current translation or interpretation of the Biblical story of creation is in any way consistent with the original observations of the author?  Only Ken Ham.  Stratification layers in sediments are far more consistent than the interpretations of scripture - just look at how many different churches have come about as a result of these interpretations of scripture.
2. Ken Ham offers no reason to believe his version of the young Earth story over other stories from different cultures.  This is a vital component to gain credibility that your position carries any weight.  Why should we be compelled to only incorporate his preferred version of the young Earth story instead of the Chinese variant, or the Egyptian, or the Norse, or the Greek/Roman?  He offers nothing in this regard, which in essence tells these viewpoints that they are also wrong simply because he holds his own beliefs to be true over others.  Science cannot revolve simply on individual belief and interpretation - it has to be a consistent body of knowledge that is constantly revised, verified, and re-verified.
3. Ken Ham does not offer any room for doubt.  This is not a scientific practice - in essence, it defies one of the fundamental criteria of science pertaining to changing viewpoints given new evidence as well as the ability to replicate an experiment or observation.  Not a single observation noted in the Genesis story can be replicated under controlled conditions - so how does this substitute for science?  It cannot.  Also, the absence of a null hypothesis automatically undermines the validity of his beliefs since he cannot come up with a viable criteria that would convince him that his current views are incorrect.  The ivory tower from which he proclaims that the genesis story represents a valid, literal, and scientific observation offers no room for questioning the original observer or their observations.
4. Ken Ham loses all credibility as an objective individual and as an analytic thinker by deferring all his misunderstandings to a book that actually doesn't answer the question to begin with.  Just because you are personally incapable of answering a question does not mean the act of forcing scripture to answer the question is rational.  This is a form of propaganda and his constant reference to a non-scientific text for scientific answers makes him lose lots of credibility.
5. Ken Ham is unwilling to live with open question about the origins of humanity.  Science will never be able to bring back all of the extinct species that have lived on this Earth.  If that is a criteria for validating his position, then the validating position for his should be to have his notion of God physically visit Earth and convince all of humanity that Ken Ham's personal beliefs are the one true interpretation that matters (this will never happen).
6. Ken Ham is more interested in convincing you that he's right than getting you to convince yourself that the merits of the arguments presented by both sides consistently point towards his point of view.  This indicates that the merits of his argument are groundless.  He cannot talk about a boat that he's never seen before but seems to take the Bible's word for it and even makes the attempt to justify futuristic designs for a ship that has never been found nor had ever been constructed for the purpose of carrying so many animals.
7. Ken Ham did not successfully nullify any of the fossilized evidence nor did he argue against the stratification layers, tree-ring data, or ice core data that suggest the Earth's relative age.  He essentially danced around the observational data and said that it doesn't equal history or it is unreliable (as if the Bible is...?).  Just because we didn't directly observe the fossil at it's time of existence doesn't mean it didn't exist.  The fact that there exist groups who claim that scientists planted these fossils to stay in business or to keep their jobs is pretty outrageous.
8. Ken Ham does not address the concern that the Bible was written before the technology existed to critique it's contents.  Ken Ham is the victim of his own argument here since he points towards the scientific evidence and claims that we cannot know what we have never directly observed, when he points to this anecdotal story (which he was not present to directly observe).  This is the equivalent of taking one of Aesop's fables literally - since children are not able to directly observe (or remember) their own birth, how can we know how we were created from our own mothers?  A stork flew through a window and delivered me to my mother...  That's written in a book somewhere, it must be true.

People like Ken Ham are dangerous to America's scientific integrity and our competitiveness in a global market.  The Ken Ham's of the world offer no solutions to real problems like HIV, malaria, schistosomiasis, or cancer, they simply point to a book and say that all the answers to humanity's unanswerable questions lie in this text that was written thousands of years ago.