Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Even in Christian and creationist circles the statement is repeated that the Bible is not a book of science,
rather it is only some imaginary book of faith. Some creationists are trying to get into the public schools
and to move the courts to require that creation also be taught in the public schools. However, they wish to
prove that creation is science, apart from the Bible, just from nature alone rather than to demonstrate how
truly religious and pagan the mega-evolutionary picture of science really is. In the public schools today,
the big issue is that anything Christian cannot be science... [1986:6]
Rather than de-biblicize creationism, science should be re-biblicized, according to Lang.
“The main purpose of science is to ‘subdue’ the earth,” as Genesis mandates. “The main
controls should be the moral ones,” as defined biblically. And, “Research should first of
all be based on God’s infinity-.rather than, on falsifiability or testability” (1986:7).
Lang, who promotes “Creation evangelism,” emphasizes, rather than denies, the
connection between biblical and scientific creationism. In a 1985 lecture to the San
Fernando Valley BSA chapter, Lang said that of the perhaps five thousand people he
knew who converted from evolution to creationism, not more than three or four said they
converted because of the scientific evidence. Rather, they first converted to Christianity
(fundamentalism), and only then discovered that evolution must not be scientific. So,
asks Lang, why waste so much time on merely scientific evidence, if people are
converted, for religious reasons, to biblical creationism first?
John Whitcomb, Morris’s Genesis Flood co-author, has expressed concern about
a purely “scientific” creationism. He warns that science must not be considered on a par
with biblical truth. In this respect he implies that Morris and his followers, in claiming
that science alone can prove the truth of creationism, risk doing just that. Whitcomb has
explicitly denied the “Double-Revelation” theory in various books and publications on
astronomy and earth history written since The Genesis Flood, notably The Origin of the
Solar System: Biblical Inerrancy and the Double-Revelation Theory (1975; originally
published in 1963 and based on a 1962 Moody Bible Inst. lecture). The Double-
Revelation holds that God’s truth is revealed equally in His “two books”—Nature and the
Bible, and that the theologian must yield to the scientist in the interpretation of nature.
Whitcomb rejects the approach that science and religion deal with different realms of
truth, and insists that biblical truth must always be accorded primacy, in whatever realm.
Absolute primacy must be given to the Bible, even when scientific theories contradict the
Bible. God does reveal Himself in nature, but many truths remain outside of scientific
investigation, especially one-time supernatural acts of creation. The Bible is God’s
“special revelation”; nature is His “general revelation,” which, due to the Fall and the
corruption of sin, is inherently inferior.
The most serious creationist opposition to the ICR-style divorce of “scientific”
from “biblical” creationism comes from strongly Calvinist groups such as Christian
Reconstructionists and others who similarly emphasize presuppositional apologetics and
post-millennialist eschatology, discussed later. One of the sharpest attack has come from
John Robbins, head of the Trinity Foundation in Maryland. The Trinity Foundation
promotes the teachings of Gordon H. Clark, a Calvinist philosophy professor. Clark
declares that empirical science can prove nothing, and that truth can be derived only from
the Bible. Such biblical truth, according to Clark, has exactly the same absolute status as
proof in pure logic. Clark’s The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God (1964) was
published by Craig Press; in The Biblical Doctrine of Man (1984), he addresses evolution
directly. The Bible, which is inerrant, “definitely asserts” the special creation of Adam