Creationism - National Center for Science Education

This book is the result of a purpose to find out what facts have been discovered by scientists to support the
theory of evolution of organic life. I have tried to distinguish between the facts which they present and
their deductions from those facts.
The highly respected Canadian geologist and paleontologist Sir John William
Dawson, in The Bible Confirmed y Science (1932), insisted that the Bible adheres to the
Baconian ideal of sticking to fact and avoiding prior hypotheses.
A remarkable point in Biblical references to nature, is that we find no definite explanation anywhere of
natural things. The writers of the Bible do not go beyond the description of what they actually see around
them, and the correct way in which they describe what they do see is beyond praise.
The writers of the Bible must have been divinely guided, for unlike all other ancient
people, they scrupulously avoided all mythological notions.
George McCready Price, founder of twentieth-century Flood Geology and youngearth
“scientific” creationism, repeatedly stressed the need to return to the methods of
true Baconian inductive science. He praised Bacon and Newton in God’s Two Books
(1911), subtitled “Plain Facts About Evolution, Geology, and the Bible.” He actually
dedicated his next book, The Fundamentals of Geology (1913), to “Lord Francis Bacon
and Sir Isaac Newton, men who realized most clearly the true objects of NATURAL
SCIENCE, the methods by which it should be pursued...” and continued to trumpet the
praises Bacon and Newton in many successive works.
“Modern science,” says Harold W. Clark in Genes and Genesis (1940), began “in
a truly inductive manner.” Newton made his great discoveries by building upon the facts
accumulated by his predecessors. “The particular value of the discoveries of these great
men lay in the fact that they were singularly free from speculative hypotheses”
(1940:112). Had Newton’s successors followed his example of pursuing science
“without a hypothesis,” current scientific study might today be far more advanced than
what it is. Instead, laments Clark, those who followed Newton embarked on a fruitless
quest for a purely materialistic science. Evolutionary theory became so interwoven with
observation and mathematical calculation that science turned into a “confused mass of
fact and hypothesis.”
The century following the death of Newton is marked by the entrance of speculative methods of science
study… In every field of science objective studies were mingled with speculative and philosophical
interpretation. Men turned away from the Biblical account of creation and the Flood... (1940:112, 113)
In Genesis versus Evolution (1961:59), Dudley Whitney, an agricultural scientist
and editor, says this: “Reason positively demands a decision in favor of divine creation,
which is only another way of saying that common-sense science positively proves the
fact of God.”
Thomas Barnes, a physics professor and former Dean of Graduate Study and
Research at the Institute for Creation Research, has written a creation-science textbook,
Physics of the Future: A Classical Unification of Physics (1983). In it he asserts that
“Our business, as Newton said, is with the sensible causes of the phenomena.” Harold
Slusher, who wrote the Foreword to Whitney’s book, also wrote a Foreword to a more
recent book by Barnes, Space Medium: The Key to Unified Physics (1986). Slusher, like
Barnes, was on the faculty at the University of Texas at El Paso, and was also a professor
at ICR. Slusher compares Barnes’s work favorably to Newton’s Principia.