I haven’t been back to this thread in a while before I was pinged this morning. I’m certainly no fan of the pseudo science of the young earth creationists. At the same time I’m not invested in a few of Tyson’s opinions.
However, there is an assertion by the young earth types that is particularly troublesome and that is some imaginary divide between “observational” and “historical” science. That is particularly nonsensical. I’m hard pressed to think of any science devoid of observations. If you’re out looking for gold, you use your current observations to reconstruct the past. Maybe you want to pan so you go to where others have found it and search in the portions of the stream were others have had luck. I’d guess we’ll agree that that meets your definition of observational science.
Let’s say you are tired of panning for meger rewards and want to go after the mother lode. Now, no one was around to see the formation of quartz veins and gold has been found in a number of host rock. You will have to engage in a bit of forensic science if you want a good result. Maybe you find a piece of granite with a tiny vein of quartz in it. You’ll want to know just how a vein of quartz got there in the first place because your observation has been that not all granite has quartz veins. If you follow this inquiry long enough, you get to areas no one has observed - the formation of veins in the rock through the precipitation of silica and gold from heated water into cracks or joints in the host rock. So you go looking for such veins. Perhaps you see similar veins in slate. Now you’ve got another host rock to explore.
If you use this “historical” science, you are far, far more likely to be successful. You also are building a picture of past, often long past events. The reading of the fossil record begins with observation in much the same way as does the geology of ore deposits. Forensics are at the heart of science because we need to reconstruct the past to understand the present.