My recent ‘sparring partner’ (for lack of a better description) has been busy lately. On top of a number of posts that criticise both non-Christians (or non-believers, as he prefers to call them) and other Christians for having differing interpretations of scripture, TA has maintained the double-standard over gay rights – but those are not the subjects I am looking to confront today. We are instead dealing with yet another creationism post.
I consider creationism to be an insidious idea. It defies the evidence of multiple fields to insist that the Biblical creation story must be taken as literal truth, and that the evidence we have accumulated is all one big fabrication. To make things worse, creationists will often use pseudo-scientific ideas (read: nonsense) to mislead the average layperson into believing them. They undermine efforts to educate, by introducing these inaccuracies and dressing them up in important-sounding ways, and if creationism is allowed to gain a proper hold in an education system, it will weaken genuine efforts to learn about the world around us. I have zero problem with anyone who takes creationism as a matter of faith (along with intelligent design), but that is where creationism belongs – it does not belong in science lessons.
This is the secular world’s fallback position- natural explanations. But there is a problem with those natural explanations. There is no way to verify if they are correct or not. Heeren points out something about these ‘natural laws which all believers should think about if they have not already.
TA has a problem – he confuses ‘secular’ with ‘science’, and I don’t think he understands what secular means either. Secular means ‘not connected with religious or spiritual matters’, whilst science is the ‘intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.’ If God exists, and science can’t prove God’s existence, this doesn’t mean science is actively trying to disprove God – it just means science can only pass comment on what is observable. It is not a system that tries to undermine any faith – it is only trying to expand our understanding of the world around us.
TA also says there’s no way to verify if natural explanations for things are correct. This is frankly, an inaccurate statement. We know (for example) that atoms exist. We can test for their behaviour. We know the processes behind how storms form, for how plants grow, why certain animals do certain things, and how stars are powered. If not for science, we would not have the computers, cars, planes, medical drugs and procedures that we have come to rely on, and our technology is based upon our observations of structure and behaviour.
We have to ask- what makes origins different from anything else in the world? The answer is that it isn’t different. What is different is that the secular scientist does not want to acknowledge God or admit that he exists. That is the crux of the issue. Science shows that God exists and it is the human factor not the field of research who says differently.
The claim ‘science shows that God exists’ would seem to jar quite hard with what we know of the age of the earth and universe, especially in comparison with the creation story. If we are to take the Bible literally, then all of the observations about the universe and the earth are incorrect – all of that research, all of those theories, all of that evidence is wrong – all because of one book.
Yet, this is only if we take one narrow-minded interpretation of the Bible. Whilst some of you may think from what you’ve read of this blog that I am anti-religion, I’m not. I am against creationism, for it perverts genuine scientific study, but I believe a more open-minded, less literal interpretation of the Bible can be reconciled with science.
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