Creationism - National Center for Science Education

“Each creation command in Genesis correlates with a cientific puzzle or gap.” Genesis
contains a “step-by-step ccount of changes that God made in the geologic and biologic
forms on the earth” to fulfill God’s plan, but it does not describe how these changes
occurred. Other than he specific acts of creation declared by Genesis, these hanges may
have occurred via evolution.
The question is not creation versus evolution. The real question, the truly vital issue is Creator versus nocreator.
We owe our existence either to the creative acts of God or to random chance. [1983:13]
Science is moving ever closer to the “unchanging biblical pattern,” Wiester says;
the theory of punctuated equilibrium especially brings science “remarkably close to the
biblical view.” His unashamed espousal of a God-of-the-gaps view is curious, since such
a view is generally felt to be antamount to conceding the superiority of science over
eligion. This bothers Wiester not at all. The truth of reation and of Christianity for him
is “presuppositional” and thus not subject to falsification by science.
Christianity presupposes God is true. Thus Christians should not expect science to prove God or to give
answers to the meaning and purpose of life. To expect science to answer such questions would make God
and phenemona subject to the limitations of the human mind. We should expect, however, that as science
accurately explores the wondrous mysteries of God’s creation, ultimately the weight of evidence will be in
harmony with Scripture. The results and phenomena of creation which are all around us will force us to
face the reality of creation. [1983:36]
Science does not support the “chance,” “mechanistic” origin of life, and the lack
of transitional forms in the fossil record (such as in the transition to multi-cellular forms)
refutes Darwinian evolution. The public is being “duped” by a “hominid hoax”: the
claim, that is, that humans are descended from fossil hominids.
NOMOTHETIC CREATION AND FINAL VS. SECONDARY CAUSATION
George Fairholme, the Scriptural Geologist, had insisted in 1833 that
contemporary geological theorists erred by addressing only “secondary causes,” and he
criticized Lyell’s uniformitarian theory as a prime example of this unfortunate obsession
by theoretical scientists with secondary causes. This criticism illustrates a major
difference in outlook between creationists and proponents of modern, positivist science. 23
By Darwin’s time, many scientists, such as Lyell, were already “proto-positivists”who
concentrated on secondary causes in their scientific explanations. Geology was the first
science to largely abandon theologically-based explanations and rely on positivist
explanations (except in theoretical works and works intended for the public) (Gillespie
1979:11). Even Edward Hitchcock, the distinguished Amherst College geologist and
harmonizer of the Bible with science, though he defended biblical special creation,
explained that the geological record was the result of secondary causes (1851).
Until Darwin’s time, science was based on a markedly religious conception, and
this religious basis was inextricably woven into the fabric of science. Darwin, argues
23 This is an aspect of Bacon not emulated by creationists. Bacon had argued that it was through study of
these secondary causes that his new method of science could result in the mastery of nature for the benefit
of man, rather than the medieval tradition of study of nature primarily for the moral lessons it was held to
provide (Toulmin and Goodfield 1965:107-109).