Discerning Truth: The Creationist Position on Science and Refuting Straw-Man Arguments

Biblical Science Institute

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Hi folks, Jason Lyle here with Discerning Truth. Previously we've been looking at biblical issues and we saw that Genesis really is important in terms of its literal history to the

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Christian worldview. It's not just a side issue like a lot of Christians assume that it is.

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It's not an issue that we should just kind of say, well let's not worry about that because that could cause some people to stumble.

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If you don't deal with it, it causes people to stumble because every Christian doctrine, directly or indirectly, goes back to a literal historical

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Genesis. It's why we need a savior. It's why we understand death to be the penalty for sin and so on.

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Today I'd like to switch gears a little bit and talk about some of the science issues because the major attacks on Genesis are allegedly scientific in nature and I want to show you that's not the case.

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But I kind of want to lay some groundwork today before we get into a lot of the detailed nuances because I found that a lot of the arguments that evolutionists will make against creationists turn out to be strawman arguments where they misrepresent our position.

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So I wanted to cover what is the creationist position on science? How do we understand science?

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And what about the claims that secularists make when they say things like, well creationists, they hate science, they don't believe in science.

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Granted not all secularists say that, but I've heard secularists make that claim and that strikes me as very peculiar because I'm a scientist and I enjoy science very much and I'm a creationist of course.

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There are those who say, well creationists don't do science or in some cases they don't do real science, which students of logic will recognize as the no true

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Scotsman fallacy, something we hopefully will get to on a future webcast.

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So it's always helpful to define our terms when we analyze these claims. Science, well there's a number of different dictionary definitions, but generally it's the method, it's a systematic way of acquiring knowledge, the scientific method.

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And it can either refer to the method itself or it can refer to the body of knowledge that has been acquired by that scientific method.

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And so when students study science in school, when they study biology and geology, they're learning about the body of facts, the body of knowledge that has been acquired through hypothesis, experimentation, falsification and so on, the scientific method.

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And so when you're doing it in school, at least as a secondary education, you're mainly learning about the method.

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Students are taught the scientific method and often schools will have a science fair where students get to employ the scientific method to test some particular claim about which laundry detergent works better or what have you.

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And that's perfectly fine, but most often it's the body of knowledge acquired by that method.

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Now the ironic thing about those people who come to me and tell me that, well you're a creationist so you must not believe in science, you must hate science.

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The ironic thing is most of those people themselves haven't really studied very much in terms of science, at least not beyond high school.

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Whereas I did go out and get a PhD in science and so I'm thinking, you know, if I hate science

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I sure wasted a lot of my life on it. Between college and graduate school I spent 11 years, 11 years after high school, focused on studying science and in particular my specialty field of astrophysics.

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And by the way I love all the different sciences, the Lord gave me a special passion for astronomy and physics and I minored in mathematics as well.

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I did it because I love it, not because I hate it, not because I had to. And so I thought

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I'd talk a little bit about what that involves because the fact is most of the leading creationists that you see out there are

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PhD scientists and maybe we'll get to some of the specifics later on. But they've all gone through the same process that I have.

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They've gone through an undergraduate education. Now a lot of people watching this probably have a college degree and that's very common and that's great.

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And in college you generally spend four years learning a particular subject in detail. Some folks go to a trade school where they get a very specific subject and it's concentrated and they can do it maybe in two years and that's fine.

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I did four years of undergraduate work at Ohio Wesleyan University and it's like you'd expect, classroom work where you learn how to solve problems and so on.

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In physics especially, in astronomy you're learning kind of what's out there. You're learning the body of knowledge that's been acquired through science.

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In physics you're learning a lot about how to do science. And so it's a little more focused on the method.

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Actually a lot more focused on the method really. And I double majored in physics and astronomy and then I minored in math as well because I like that in addition.

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And I would have majored in everything else if I had the time because I find it all very interesting. Even lab work, you'll do some lab work.

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I did an electronics lab that I very much enjoyed where I learned how to build circuits and things like that.

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And even after that class I remember building a little amplifier just because I can and it's neat.

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It's neat to do that kind of stuff. In another lab I built a device that allowed me to measure the speed of light.

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These are the kinds of things that you do as an undergraduate. And to be honest with you, when

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I graduated, of course I enjoyed the experience very much, when I graduated I didn't really know a whole lot about what grad school would be like.

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I just knew that I enjoyed science and I wanted to continue my education. I wanted to learn, you know, give me more.

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This is great, give me more. And so I thought I'd talk a little bit about what that involves. Grad school, the first year or two, and it depends on the field, obviously

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I can only speak with experience to my own field of astrophysics, but the first year or two, kind of like undergraduate in that you're taking classes, the classes are more advanced, they're more difficult, the learning curve is steeper, but that's because when you're in college you're not only learning the information, you're learning how to learn information.

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And so your ability to learn, I think, actually increases if you go to school for some period of time.

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And so at graduate school, you know, in two years of graduate school you might actually learn more information than you learned in four years of undergraduate education, that's just the way it works.

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The field is difficult. And in addition, in that first year or two, especially the first year, say the first two semesters, you have to have some money, so you have to get a job, and usually students will take a teaching position at the university where they're studying.

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In astronomy it's often the case that if you do really well in college, graduate school will waive the tuition so you don't have to pay for the school, which is nice.

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I had a tuition waiver so that was nice. But I still had to pay for my apartment and I had to eat, had to get groceries, and so you have to take some kind of work.

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And so most students will take either a teaching position, a TA, or a research position, an

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RA. And it's generally most common to start out as a TA for two semesters and then switch over to an

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RA and continue RA throughout the rest of your career. And I actually did three semesters of teaching because I just loved it.

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I taught a lab and it was a blast. And I wanted to get more experience teaching because I thought that at some point

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I would be teaching something and I'm glad I did. So for the first year or two, you're taking classes and you're either grading papers as a teaching assistant or you're teaching a lab as a teaching assistant.

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And then after that, not so much class work. You do have to take a comprehensive exam where you demonstrate.

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It's a cumulative exam based on all the classes that you've taken and perhaps one or two that you haven't.

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And there's so many questions you have to answer and it's intense.

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But in any case, I passed that and then beyond that, then it's research from there on out.

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You might take a class or two every now and then. I did. I took one on general relativity because I just like that topic and one or two others that I took.

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But generally after that first year or two, you're doing research 100 % of the time. You come in, you sit down by your computer or whatever you're doing.

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If you're an experimentalist, you're designing, you're setting up your lasers or whatever.

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But you spend years researching a particular topic for which the answer is not known.

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And so at that level, you're basically doing the same thing that scientists do, but you're doing it as a science student.

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And so you don't have the experience. And instead you have an academic advisor who kind of guides the way.

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I had a great advisor and he was very helpful to me, kind of guiding me. You know, try this, try that.

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And so you try stuff and you do these experiments. My particular subfield was dealing with the sun and the surface of the sun and how fluids move on the solar photosphere.

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But at this point, whatever you're doing in grad school, it's very focused. You're focusing on a very specialized, very narrow field hoping to discover something that's new.

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That's the goal, is to discover something new about the universe using the method of science.

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In terms of the details of what I did, I wrote computer software that would allow me to analyze data retrieved from the

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SOHO spacecraft, which is a spacecraft that's designed to look at the sun and record motions on the sun.

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Every minute it records some details. And then you can get those images and process them and work with them and analyze them and try to learn something about how things move on the sun and how those motions interact with the magnetic field.

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The sun is very magnetically active and so it's fascinating. It's interesting stuff. It's difficult.

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It's tedious at times. One of the things I had to do before I could even get to analyzing the data is

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I had to go through each frame. So think of a movie. You get this movie of the sun and you have to look at each frame in the movie and make sure there's no blemishes on it.

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Because there are artifacts, things like cosmic rays, will occasionally strike the SOHO spacecraft's detection instrument and you'll get this blemish on the image.

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It's not true to the sun and so you have to remove that. Otherwise your data, when you analyze it, will be spurious.

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You could write a computer program to remove some of those, but there's nothing better than the human brain at being able to reason and see what should be there and what shouldn't.

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So I've looked at many thousands of images of the sun, just looking for blemishes in them and removing those images from the data set and averaging the surrounding images and so on.

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So it's very tedious, but if you like science, it's fun. It's not well paying at that point because, again, you're still a student and so I think the salary

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I had when I was a research assistant, I think it was $14 ,000 per year. And over half of that went right into my rent and so that was just gone and the rest you'd use for groceries and things like that.

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So it doesn't pay well. You're doing what a professional scientist would do, but you're doing it for very little money.

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And so what's my point in that? My point is it's not something you would do if you detested science.

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It just doesn't make any sense to get paid virtually nothing to do very difficult work if you don't really enjoy scientific discovery.

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And I'll admit, there were days when I was like, man, I'm just banging my head against a wall today. But then when you finally do make that discovery, oh, it's so worth it.

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Because you've learned something new about the universe, something that is unknown to all other human beings.

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It's known only to you and God, this little secret that you have. And that's cool. And you've used science to discover that.

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It's a powerful tool and it's something that I respect and something that I very much enjoy. In order to obtain your

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PhD, you have to basically demonstrate mastery over a particular specialty field in science and you basically have to make a new discovery or several new discoveries in that specialty field.

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You have to discover something significant about the universe that no one else has known and you have to demonstrate that it's true by the scientific method.

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And if you're wondering that one of the particular discoveries that I made was the detection of giant cell boundaries.

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Giant cells are these enormous overturning cells on the sun. They have been predicted to exist, but you can't directly see them because there's other scales of motion on the sun that overwhelm the very slow and yet large giant cells.

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And I detected that super granules, which is another overturning cell on the sun, tend to line up vertically in a north -south fashion.

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They're aligned with the sun's rotation poles and that's weird. And we found that that was evidence that they're collecting in the boundaries between the giant cells and that's what's causing that alignment.

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I discovered a few other things too. The reason for the disk -centered convergence artifact that we see in SOHO data, but that's not as interesting.

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In any case, those are the kinds of discoveries you'd have to make and you have to demonstrate that you really have discovered that through scientific means.

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And when you do this, you then write up a technical document, a thesis or dissertation, and then you have to defend that before six or so faculty.

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Folks who have PhDs in that field, in my case in astrophysics and solar astrophysics in particular, and what they try to do is they try to find, they try to poke holes in what you've discovered to see if you really know what you're talking about.

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And so they'll say, well, okay, have you considered this? I read this. Did you, you know, did you consider this? I don't see error bars here.

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Why did you leave those off? And so on. And you have to be able to defend that. And it's kind of intimidating. But in any case, the goal of the

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PhD program is to equip students to train them to think and rationally investigate evidence and correctly interpret data.

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And your faculty is there to help you, but they're also not going to pass you if you don't know how to do that. And so a

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PhD program should weed out people who are not able to follow the scientific method.

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And there are some things about the scientific method that are counterintuitive. There are certain mistakes in science that students tend to make if they have not gone through a

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PhD program, like the confirmation bias, for example. And we'll maybe talk about that in a future webcast.

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But the idea is to rid you of those sort of errors in reasoning that are so common to human thinking.

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And so it's a very different kind of program than, say, engineering, where you're learning to build things. And that's a, that's very impressive, but it's a different skill set.

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And I say that because sometimes I've seen at conferences, I've seen engineers get up and try to do science and they haven't done it very well.

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Of course, sometimes they do do it well, but it's a different skill set. And not everybody can do it.

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Not everybody has the passion to do that. That's fine. But I hope that, that this eliminates this silly idea that creation, creation scientists in particular, are against science.

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We would not have spent that amount of time. I mean, 11 years of your life, it could be a little more, a little less, depending on what field you're in.

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But you wouldn't spend that much time and getting paid very little money to do something that you hate or that you don't believe in.

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We like science. So another reason why secularists would sometimes say, well, creationists don't believe in science is because we reject neo -Darwinian evolution.

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The idea that all life is descended from a common ancestor that diversified through mutations over millions and millions of years.

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And I reject deep time as well. The idea that the earth's 4 .5 billion years old. So see there, you're rejecting science.

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But am I? And people will say, oh, but you know, we know from science that the world's, the earth's 4 .5

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billion years old. Do you really? Because I would argue that you can't, you can't conclude that just from the evidence.

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I'll grant that you can make certain assumptions and then apply those assumptions to the evidence that you see and come to the conclusion that the world's billions of years old.

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I'll grant that. But I disagree with those starting assumptions. And so you see the whole issue of creation versus evolution.

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Ironically, it's not so much about the evidence. The evidence is relevant, but the fact is I'm very aware of the evidence that is used in support of evolution.

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And I don't think it actually supports evolution. And so that's the issue before us. I'm not rejecting anything that is known to be true from science.

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Things that you can demonstrate to be true in a laboratory, there's nothing I would reject about that. If you want to see, you know, if the claim is made that, you know, hydrogen, when you, when you burn it with oxygen, it will, it will form water vapor.

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That's testable today in the present. You can test that in a lab, sure enough, that's what will happen. And I would not disagree with that.

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But when you talk about how things came to be, well, that's different, isn't it? You're talking about the past and I'm going to disagree, not with the evidence, but with the way that you've interpreted the evidence, because you have a philosophical framework that affects how you understand the evidence.

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Now I have one too. That's not the issue. The issue is our philosophical frameworks are different. And so the debate really is about what worldview is the, what is the best worldview through which to interpret the evidence.

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We are all driven by a philosophy, a way of thinking that affects how we understand things.

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Most people have not thought through their own philosophy carefully. And that's the issue. Secularists do have a philosophy when they come to the data.

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Now, some people will say that they don't, they'll say, oh, I don't believe that. I don't believe, I don't have beliefs when I come to the evidence.

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So I believe we ought to interpret the evidence neutrally. But that is a belief about how to interpret the evidence.

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It's just a very bad one because it's self -refuting. The idea that we, the philosophy that we should come to the evidence with no philosophy is itself a philosophy, and it's a very bad one because it's immediately self -refuting.

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It's a philosophy that denies philosophy. A third claim is that, well, creationists don't believe in science because they just say

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God did it. Sometimes you'll even see that as one word, lowercase g, God did it. That's what creationists say.

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You ask them any science question, they'll say, well, God did it. Well, that's not true. That's not true. It's the claim that's made.

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You don't bother to examine the evidence or to learn how the earth really formed or how galaxies really formed because you just read your

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Bible and say God did it. You start with the answer. So why do science? Well, first of all, whenever answering a science question,

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I would never answer it, just God did it because that doesn't give me any specific information.

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Now, don't get me wrong. I believe God created the heaven and the earth and that he upholds everything by the word of his power.

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But that goes without saying. The question is how? What are the mechanisms that God uses to rule his universe?

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That's the question that science attempts to answer. What are the patterns that we find in nature that have been imposed on the universe by its creator?

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So I think there are three problems with this claim that creationists just say God did it.

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And by the way, I'll grant there might be some folks who profess creation who say that, but it's certainly not the mainstream position.

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I've never seen a PhD creation scientist say, well, here's my research. Just God did it.

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That is not true to our position. And so when people make that claim, it's dishonest really.

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And there are three problems with this. First of all, when you ask about how the earth formed, how galaxies came to exist or any question about the past, you're not really asking a science question.

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You're asking a history question because science in its operational sense, operational science is the study of the predictable way that the universe operates today.

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Things like the laws of motion and gravity that Newton discovered or the physics that Einstein discovered, how things, how clocks and rulers are affected by motion and so on and so forth.

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The kind of science that makes computers work and that puts people on the moon is testable and repeatable in the present.

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Is the past testable and repeatable in the present? Well, no, because it's gone. We don't have access to the past anymore.

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But say, oh, but I have this fossil. I'm holding a piece of the past. Not really. You're holding a piece of the present.

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Otherwise, you wouldn't have it. Now, I'll grant that whatever organism is responsible for that fossil lived in the past, but it's gone now.

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All it's left are its remains. Its remains are in the present though. Otherwise, you wouldn't have them. Now, I'm not saying that you can't use the tools of science to make a guess about the past, because I think you can.

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And there's some value in that. Don't get me wrong. But ultimately, when you're asking about the past, you're asking a history question.

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And the best way to answer a history question is to consult a history book if the event was part of recorded history.

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And the good news is creation is part of recorded history. We have an eyewitness to the creation of the universe.

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God himself provided those details in Genesis about how he created. And he revealed them to men.

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He recorded that information for our benefit. And so we have the birth certificate of the universe.

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And that's great. And evolutionists say, well, you just read a history book to find out what happened in history.

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Oh, yeah. That's right. Now, we can use the tools of science to try and make guesses about some of the details that the

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Bible omits. If I were to ask when we're on what day of creation were bacteria created, the

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Bible doesn't directly state that. It's something that I'm going to have to make a guess based on the historical information the

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Bible gives me. And I can take a look at the scientific data and try to make an educated guess about that. But it's not something that will be directly testable in the present, nor is evolution directly testable in the present.

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Even if you could, by the way, if you could put chemicals together in a laboratory and just by chance they formed life, you could say, see, life can form by chance.

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That wouldn't prove that life did come about that way. It would only prove that life can come about that way.

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But the fact is that even that hasn't been demonstrated. And that would seem to be a necessary first step in order for evolution in the

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Darwinian sense to be scientifically feasible. Nor do we see one basic kind of organism ever giving rise through reproduction to another kind of organism.

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Animals reproduce according to their kind, which is what we'd expect scripturally. Now you can get variation within a kind, that's fine.

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But you don't see one kind changing into another. And again, even if you did, that wouldn't prove that it has happened in the past, that animals in the past came about that way.

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There's a second reason why the God did it claim that evolutionists make sometimes is ironic.

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And that's because if you present evidence that really cannot be made sense of in an evolutionary worldview, how will secularists often respond?

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Well, evolution did it somehow because we're here, right? And so I think it's interesting because a lot of times when the evidence is presented and it just doesn't fit into an evolutionary framework, they'll say, well, evolution did it somehow.

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And it's interesting because that's kind of what they're accusing us of doing. And yeah, they're doing basically the same thing.

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But I would argue that's not what we're doing. There are certain biological structures that evolutionists, honest ones, will admit they don't know how that came to be.

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And so you ask, well, can you explain this? Well, no, we can't, but evolution must have done it somehow because here it is.

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And the alternative, we don't like that. The alternative would be creation. We can't accept that, can't allow a divine foot in the door.

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No, sir. And so the fact is, it turns out to be not the creation view that really stifles science, but it's the evolutionary view that does.

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Because if you really believed the universe was chance, why would you bother studying purpose and things that you believe have no purpose?

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Indeed, there were many organs in the human body that were once considered vestigial organs, useless leftovers of evolution.

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And people didn't bother to find out what they did, or at least it took a long time because people thought, well, they don't do anything.

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They're just a useless leftover. Things like your pituitary gland, your thyroid gland, these glands that they didn't know what they did, so there must be useless leftovers of evolution.

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Or your tonsils, or your appendix. Some people still think, you know, well, your tonsils, you don't use those. So you get infected, just remove them.

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They don't do that as much these days. Now, you can live without your tonsils or your appendix, but they are useful.

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Your appendix is, for example, it's part of your immune system. It prevents bacteria from getting in where it shouldn't be, and so on.

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These things do have a purpose. You can live without them. You can live without your left arm, but that doesn't mean it's a useless leftover.

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But evolutionary thinking can stifle science because you assume that something has no purpose, why would you bother studying it?

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Whereas in the creation worldview, I'm motivated to study creation because I know there's a mind behind it.

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And so I expect to find purpose in the things that have been designed in biological organisms. I expect to find patterns in space because I know

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God has imposed order on his creation. Creationist thinking doesn't stifle science, it motivates science.

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And third, the reason why this God -did -it claim really won't work against informed creationists is because informed creationists do not see

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God as a substitution for rational inquiry, but rather as the foundation for rational inquiry.

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I expect to be able to do science and to get answers and to learn something about the universe because God, the same

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God who made the universe, made my mind and made my senses able to probe that creation. And so I expect to be able to learn something about the universe.

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But if it's just chance, why would you expect that, you see? So I would never just say, well, you know,

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God did it. God is behind everything, but I accept dual causality. I know that God has means by which he accomplishes his purpose.

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And so the question is not did God do it or not, the question is how? What is the mechanism that God uses to uphold his creation, for example?

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What are the patterns that God has built in his creation? And creationists do propose specific scientific models that detail the way we think

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God upholds his creation, and we test those against observations. So we're doing science when we do that.

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And yes, we make models about the past, and those aren't directly testable by science, but we can make guesses about the past using scientific tools, as secularists do.

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It's just we have a better starting point because we start with a history book that's demonstrated itself to be the

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Word of God, whereas secularists dismiss that history and start from a philosophical guesswork, really, instead of history.

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So the fact is both creationists and evolutionists have a worldview framework that they're reluctant to give up, and through which they interpret scientific evidence.

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There is no evidence I reject. Anything you can demonstrate in a lab, I accept. But evolution in the

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Darwinian sense is not something anyone has been able to demonstrate in a laboratory. It would have made headline news if it ever happened, but it hasn't.

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We don't see life coming from non -life. We don't see one kind becoming another. The kinds of changes we do see in a laboratory, or in the natural world, are the kinds of changes creationists would expect, changes within kinds.

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And then following from this, there's another claim that some secularists make against creationists.

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They'll say, well, creationists just believe in a sort of God of the Gaps idea. And the

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God of the Gaps idea is the idea that a Christian will argue for the existence of God based on something that science cannot explain.

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So an example of a God of the Gaps argument would be something like this. We don't even know what holds an electron together.

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Scientists have not discovered why the charge in an electron, which is mutually repulsive, it's all negative charge, why that doesn't just disperse and blow itself out into space.

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And we don't know the answer to that, ultimately. And so you say, see, therefore God. That's not a good argument.

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Now, I will concede that there are some Christians who have made that kind of argument. There are Christians who believe in God of the

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Gaps, but my point is, this is not a mainstream creationist position. Creation scientists don't argue that way as a whole.

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We don't. Because ignorance of something is not proof of anything. Ignorance means you don't know, so you can't say anything about it.

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Now, I do think the existence of an electron proves the existence of God, but not because we don't understand something about it.

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There are lots of things we don't understand in the universe, and that doesn't by itself prove the existence of God.

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I would argue the opposite, that it's because we do understand some things about the universe that God must exist.

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God makes knowledge possible. And I'll deal with that in more detail. I've written about that, of course, but we'll deal with that in more detail in an upcoming webcast.

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Some people think the argument from irreducible complexity is a

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God of the Gaps type argument. Now, irreducible complexity is when you have a system of interdependent parts, parts that all rely upon each other in order to make the whole function.

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So you might argue a computer is irreducibly complex, because if I start pulling out circuits on the computer, it's not going to work anymore.

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It all requires everything. There are probably some that are not as necessary, but if you start pulling parts, it's not going to work.

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We know that certain cells, certain structures in the cell of living organisms are essential, and if you pull out one part, the cell fails.

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And you have the DNA, the instructions that contains the instructions to make the cell.

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You have the enzymes that read those instructions, they transform them into RNA, the

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RNA is read by the ribosomes, ribosomes produce the enzymes that read the DNA, and so on. And if you remove any one part of that system, the cell dies.

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And so that would seem to be an irreducibly complex system, something that can't be reduced, because you pull a part out and it fails.

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And there are a number of examples of irreducible complexity. Some people would say that's an argument for God of the

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Gaps, because you're saying we don't know how this could have evolved, therefore God. But that is not the argument.

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The argument is not, well, we don't know how this could have come together. The argument is, we know it couldn't have come together that way, because you remove one part and the system fails.

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And so the last few steps that would be necessary to get the structure to operate, if they're not already in place, the structure doesn't operate.

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Take your blood clotting mechanism, for example. We understand that. Well, biologists who are experts on that issue understand it's very complicated.

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The chemical pathway that takes place that causes your blood to clot, so that when you get a scrape, you don't bleed out. It forms a little scab, gives the time for your skin to heal.

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It's amazingly well designed. And if you look at the number of processes that have to be right for your blood clotting mechanism to work, and if they're off just a little bit, then either your blood doesn't clot, and the first cut you get, you bleed out.

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Or your blood clots while it's still in your bloodstream, and you have a heart attack and die. That's not good.

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You see, any one of these fails, the whole fails. It's not what we don't understand about blood clotting, it's what we do understand about blood clotting that would argue against an evolutionary scenario.

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Darwin admitted as much, by the way. Back in Darwin's time, people didn't know nearly as much about the inner workings of biology as they do today.

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Today we understand that cells, these individual cells of your body, are unbelievably complicated little machines, with machines in them that work together in concert so that the entire cell is able to survive.

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Darwin didn't know that, and he thought his theory would break down if it could be demonstrated that you could have a system with these interdependent parts, any one of which removed, causes the causes the whole to fail.

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So it's not an argument from ignorance. It's an argument from knowledge. It's not God of the gaps. This way of thinking, the idea that we don't know, we can't explain something, therefore

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God, which I would not embrace, nor would any PhD creation scientist that I've ever met, that we would not embrace that method.

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But it's related to the idea of causality, because you see, consistent

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Christians embrace dual causality. We don't believe there's just one cause for everything that happens.

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We believe in multiple causes, and there are distal causes, where the cause is kind of further back, and there's the proximate cause, which is the immediate cause.

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And so we believe that God ultimately is responsible for everything that happens, but that doesn't mean that we just say

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God did it for everything, because we want to deal with the proximate cause as well. If you want to say, how do planets orbit the sun?

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Why is it that planets orbit the sun? There was a time when the answer to that was not known in a scientific sense.

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Theologically, we knew God caused the planets to orbit the sun. I still believe that. But you see,

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Isaac Newton came along and realized that gravity is what causes the planets to orbit the sun. But Isaac Newton didn't become an atheist when he discovered that, because he didn't see that as a replacement for God's power.

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He saw it as an example of God's power. You see, gravity is not a replacement for God causing the planets to orbit.

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Gravity is the way that God causes the planets to orbit. Gravity is simply the name we give to the systematic, predictable way that God causes things to move in his universe, in terms of masses and their attractive force upon each other.

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And likewise, what holds an atom together? Well, the electromagnetic forces. That's true. God is ultimately responsible for those forces.

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So God is the distal cause. The electromagnetic forces are the proximate cause, as it were.

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So that's something, I think it's really important, because a lot of people think that the more things you can explain in science, the less need there is for God.

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And I would argue that the opposite is true. The more things you can explain scientifically, the more you have to believe in the biblical

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God. Because science is predicated on the notion that the universe is upheld by a logical mind who has imposed order on creation that science seeks to uncover.

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So laws of nature are not a replacement for God's power. They are an example of God's power.

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They are God's power. They're just the name we give to it. And the fact that we can assign equations to many of these laws of nature tells us something about the mind of God.

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It tells us that God thinks mathematically. God is logical. He doesn't change with time.

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He's the same everywhere, and therefore laws of nature don't just arbitrarily change with time, and they apply equally everywhere in the universe.

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So you see, God of the gaps is an argument based on ignorance, whereas my argument is based on knowledge.

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It's what we do know about the universe that confirms the biblical God. The fact the universe obeys laws implies a law giver.

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Those laws are unchanging. They don't arbitrarily change with time or with space, because God is the same everywhere.

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He's omnipresent. He's sovereign over the universe, and he's beyond time and therefore does not change. Some people think that miracles are the best evidence for God.

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Now, I will concede that miracles are evidence for God in the sense that the Bible, for example, predicted that certain signs would accompany the

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Messiah, and when Jesus came, he fulfilled those signs. He performed signs and wonders. I get that.

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And God, as God, he can override laws of nature. There's no doubt about that. They're his laws.

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He can temporarily suspend them and do something different. But I would argue it's not the occasional miracle that is the best evidence of God, but rather the lack of occasional miracles.

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The fact that the universe normally operates in a very law -like fashion, that's something that you would not expect if it's just chance.

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If the universe is just an accident, why would it obey nice, neat little equations like E equals mc squared?

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That's awfully convenient. Why does the universe obey math at all? That's what I want to know. Why can it be described in the language of mathematics?

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And it's kind of interesting, because there was a Nobel Prize winner who wrote a wonderful article on that, on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, from his secular perspective.

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And he didn't really come up with an answer. It was just sort of miraculous from his point of view that the universe happens to be mathematical, and let's just enjoy it and not worry about it.

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But you see, from a Christian worldview, it makes sense that the universe operates in a law -like fashion most of the time, because God has promised us a certain degree of stability in nature.

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In passages like Genesis 8 .22, God promises the seasons, the day and night cycle, will continue in the future as they have in the past.

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And so there's certain patterns in nature we can rely upon. God allows some things to change, but he holds enough things constant, such that we can develop, we can formulate laws that describe these patterns that we find in nature.

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So it's not the suspension of laws of nature, it's the existence of laws of nature that are really spectacular evidence for the biblical

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God. And it has to be the biblical God, who's beyond time, who is sovereign over the universe, who has revealed himself to mankind, and so on.

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This is good science. It really is. But you notice it's a presupposition that we take to science.

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We suppose that there are patterns to be found in nature, which I would argue makes no sense if the universe were just an accident.

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Why would you expect to find patterns in an accident? If there's no rationality behind it, why expect to find rational patterns?

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But the fact is, all scientists do presuppose that there are patterns in nature, that the laws of nature work the same in all parts of the universe.

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Astronomers assume that. When we look at data from photons that have come from the

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Andromeda galaxy, we assume that the laws of nature work the same there as they do here. That's not a conclusion that we draw from looking at the data.

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It's something we've already presupposed before we look at the data. Otherwise, you would have no way of knowing that those photons actually came from the

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Andromeda galaxy, because maybe the laws of nature out beyond Earth are different. Maybe those photons actually came from the

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Earth, and they went and changed color and bounced around in space, and then came back in through our telescope, and we're actually seeing a distorted picture of Earth.

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Nobody assumes that. When we look at these wonderful images, and we collect data from light from distant stars or distant galaxies, we assume the laws of nature work the same there as they do here, and that is a

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Christian presupposition. It's based on biblical creation, and I would argue has no rational basis apart from biblical creation.

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How could you possibly know that? So the bottom line is creationists do not argue for the biblical

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God on the basis of what we don't know, but rather on the basis of what we do know.

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The fact that we can do science, the fact that there are laws of nature, these are all things that are consistent with biblical creation, not random chance.

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So I think to summarize what we've covered today, creationists are very pro -science.

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A lot of us who are in creation apologetics have gone into this field because we enjoy science so much.

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We see it as revealing something about the mind of God, which I think it does, and we've seen how science has been perverted, misused to try and persuade people of a secular worldview, and that's absurd because science is predicated upon the biblical worldview.

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I've written a book on that topic called The Ultimate Proof of Creation, and it's something that we'll come back to in more detail in the future.

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But we creation scientists would argue that science makes sense because science is about uncovering patterns in nature, patterns that have been imposed on creation by the creator.

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We expect to find those. We expect to find a certain level of consistency because God is internally consistent.

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He's logical, and therefore the patterns that we find in nature will be logical. They won't violate laws of logic.

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They won't be contradictory. We embrace the scientific method, which was invented by a creationist anyway, by the way, and we embrace it because of our faith in the biblical

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God. We expect that repeated experiments will generate, will allow us to discover trends, patterns in nature, because God doesn't change over time, and so there's a temporal consistency between past and future.

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And so we embrace all the evidence from astronomy, biology, geology, and so on. There's no evidence we would reject.

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We reject some of the conclusions that evolutionists have drawn based on, not on the evidence, but on their presuppositions, the philosophical framework through which they interpret the evidence that they see.

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And we don't claim that they're doing anything wrong with the evidence other than the conclusions that they draw from it based on erroneous presuppositions.

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And so if we're going to debate this issue, it's going to be a worldview debate. It's going to be a debate not over specific details of evidence, although those are relevant, they should come into it, but it's the philosophical framework through which the evidence is interpreted.

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Should we presuppose that the Bible's the word of God, that God really did create the way he says he did, that he upholds nature the way he says he did, in which case science would make sense?

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Or should we presuppose that the universe is just chance, that it came about all by itself as sort of a cosmic accident?

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If there's a God, he hasn't revealed himself, we don't know what he's like, well then the scientific method wouldn't make any sense at all.

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Why would you trust in a method designed to find patterns in nature that aren't there? We creation scientists don't reject anything that can be demonstrated scientifically to be true in the present.

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And there are many creation scientists who have made remarkable discoveries precisely because they embrace science and they do science, and they do that because they love the

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Lord, and to do science is to think God's thoughts after him, as Johannes Kepler put it so eloquently.

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We don't answer science questions with a God did it, not because he didn't do it, but because we believe in dual causality.

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Science is about uncovering the specific way in which God upholds his creation. God is responsible for this universe and for upholding it, and then science is about uncovering the details of how he upholds the universe today.

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Mainstream creation scientists do not use God -of -the -gaps type arguments. We're not basing our belief in God based on ignorance.

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It's not what we don't know about the universe that confirms the existence of the biblical God, it's what we do know. Science is possible, and yet that would only make sense, science would only make sense as a reasonable procedure for testing certain truth claims if there's a

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God who upholds the universe in a consistent way, and a God who has revealed himself so we know that he upholds his universe in a consistent way, a

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God who has made our mind with the capacity to be rational. Our mind's not just a chemical accident. All of the things that the biblical worldview provides are the things that would be necessary in order to make sense of science, and so both creationists and evolutionists do science.

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There are evolutionists who've done, who've made remarkable discoveries in science, and there are many creationists who've made remarkable discoveries in science.

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We both do science pretty much the same way, but when it comes to interpreting past events, our philosophical framework causes us to draw different conclusions from the very same data, from the same evidence.

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The question, therefore, is which philosophical framework is best. The creationist philosophical framework makes science possible.

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The secular philosophical framework, if it were true, would undermine science. It would give us no reason whatsoever to trust that science is a logical, reasonable method for answering certain kinds of truth claims, and so you see that's why

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I'm not worried about some particular piece of scientific evidence disproving the biblical worldview, because science itself would only make sense if the biblical worldview is true, and I have written an article on this topic.

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It's called Evolution Versus Science. I'd encourage you to check it out on our website, biblicalscienceinstitute .com.