Creationism - National Center for Science Education

perversion of science to try to use it against religion. Hitchcock chides theologians and
“Scriptural geologists” who resisted or denounced modern science, and praises
concordists such as Pye Smith, Hugh Miller, and the Bridgewater authors (Buckland,
Sedgwick, Whewell).
The attempt to find modern scientific discoveries anticipated in the Bible,
according to Hitchcock, is misguided. “God might, indeed, have revealed new scientific
as well as religious truth. But there is no evidence that in this way he has anticipated a
single modern discovery” (1851:4). The Bible is intended to explain religious truth, not
to explain the natural world. It describes things in phenomenological language: “as they
appear to the common eye, and not in their real nature”—according to “optical, and not
physical truth”; the Bible also employs many of the “erroneous notions which prevailed
in the earliest ages” (1851:35-6). But Hitchcock does not at all mean to deny that the
Bible is divinely revealed and infallible. When we realize that it uses phenomenological
language, we see that it contradicts no facts of science. Although the domains of science
and religion are different, their truths are the same; when the Bible does speak of the
natural world, it cannot be in error. Hitchcock explains that accusations of scientific
inaccuracy in the Bible are equally misguided.
One remarkable example he discusses concerns the “resurrection bodies”: the
future bodies of the dead after they are resurrected by Christ. Dead bodies decompose,
skeptics argue, thus precluding physical resurrection. This is not a real objection,
counters Hitchcock, because science demonstrates that the individual particles of matter
are indestructible and interchangeable. Thus, our “resurrection bodies” could be
reconstituted to consist of exactly the same kinds and patterns of these elementary
particles, though the original body is long decomposed, and the original particles are long
scattered [1851:8]. The undeniable presence, in the fossil record, of death, long before
Adam’s Fall, also seems to contradict biblical teaching. Hitchcock argues that the entry
of sin caused a new manner of human death: death characterized by fear and decay—
death’s “sting.”
Science could prove the Bible to be fallible, and thus not divinely inspired, says
Hitchcock—but it doesn’t. The apparent fallacies and discrepancies pointed out by
skeptics do not suffice, since the overwhelming and comprehensive evidence of the
Bible’s divine origin is sufficient to counter any such evidence, which must be due
merely to inadequate interpretations. Hitchcock criticizes those who feel that the
discoveries of science threaten the revealed truth of the Bible.
The very men who felt so strong a conviction of the truth of the Bible, that they were ready to go to the
stake in its defence, have trembled and uttered loud notes of warning when the votaries of science have
brought out some new fact, that seemed perhaps at first, or when partially understood, to contravene some
statement of revelation. The effect has been to make sceptical minds look with suspicion, and sometimes
with contempt, upon Christianity itself. It has built up a wall of separation between science and religion,
which is yet hardly broken down. For notwithstanding the instructive history of the past on this subject,
although every supposed discrepancy between philosophy and religion has vanished as soon as both were
thoroughly understood, yet so soon as geology began to develop her marvelous truths, the cry of danger to
religion became again the watchword, and the precursor of a more extended and severe attack upon that
science than any other has been experienced, and the prelude, I am sorry to say, of severe personal charges
of infidelity against many an honest friend of religion. [1851:29]
Geology especially suffers from accusations of this sort, in large part because it is a new
science, and hence particularly suspect. But these critics are ignorant of geology, says