[Last updated by Duane: 9 March 2010]

According to a recent SMH article, the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board decided to ban the teaching of creationism as part of the science curriculum.

Under policies published in December, the board said it required “teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis.”

The SMH article provides an opportunity to discuss a wide range of issues relating to creationism and science. However I only want to make one simple point about the misconceived relationship between the two.

To put it simply (as the SA board have done), the empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis – watch this – is an integral part of creationism. It’s not anti-science or non-science, but values the scientific method as a way to understand the world in which we live. The two are very much homogenous, in the same way that materialists might view the relationship between evolution and science.

Science is the study of the natural world, which Christians would say is the study of the world God created. While materialists don’t accept a Christian worldview, we all still live in the same world and so we all have access to exactly the same evidence.

In studying this evidence however, materialists must draw conclusions shaped by materialist presuppositions. Appeals to design (implying a designer) are not allowed. The fallacy of this objection is that it presumes that the design argument is an appeal to ignorance. However the inference of design is based on an analogy of what we do know scientifically, not what we don’t. So Christians are not limited by a materialistic paradigm. This doesn’t mean that creationists invoke God-of-the-gaps solutions to problems that the materialist’s paradigm cannot currently resolve. But it means that they approach the evidence with the view that God created and that God’s word provides clues about the world which can inform our presuppositions for understanding the evidence. A practical example of this is the work of PhD physicists Dr. Russell Humphreys and Dr. John Hartnett, who have both proposed models for the universe to rival popular big bang cosmology.

In fact given that modern science had its beginnings in a Christian framework, creationism (or, creation science) is not really such a heresy, is it? For example:

  • The creationist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) fathered modern chemistry and demolished the Aristotelian four-elements theory. He also funded lectures to defend Christianity and sponsored missionaries and Bible translation work.
  • Cell phones depend on electromagnetic radiation theory, which was pioneered by creationist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)
  • Computing machines were invented by Charles Babbage (1791–1871), who was not a biblical creationist but was a creationist in the broad sense. He ‘believed that the study of the works of nature with scientific precision, was a necessary and indispensable preparation to the understanding and interpreting their testimony of the wisdom and goodness of their Divine Author.’
  • The creationist brothers Orville (1871–1948) and Wilbur Wright (1867–1912) invented the airplane after studying God’s design of birds.
  • The theory of planetary orbits was invented by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), famous for claiming that his discoveries were ‘thinking God’s thoughts after him’. Kepler also calculated a creation date of 3992 BC, close to Ussher’s.
  • The theory of gravity and the laws of motion, essential for the moon landings, was discovered by the creationist Isaac Newton (1642/3–1727).
  • Vaccination was discovered by Edward Jenner (1749–1823—note that Darwin published Origin in 1859)
  • Antisepsis by Joseph Lister, creationist.(1827–1912)
  • Anaesthesia by James Young Simpson (1811–1870), who believed that God was the first anaesthetist, citing Genesis 2:21.
  • Germ theory of disease by Louis Pasteur, creationist (1822–1895), who disproved spontaneous generation…
  • Antibiotics, developed without the slightest input of evolution, by the serendipitous discovery by Alexander Fleming (1881–1955), who had previously discovered lysozyme, the ‘body’s own antibiotic’. And Ernst Chain (1906–1979), who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with Fleming (and Howard Florey (1898–1968)) for discovering penicillin, was a devout Orthodox Jew and anti-Darwinian. His biography noted ‘Chain’s dismissal of Darwin’s theory of evolution’, and his belief that ‘evolution was not really a part of science, since it was, for the most part, not amenable to experimentation—and he was, and is, by no means alone in this view’. As an understanding of the development of life, Chain said, ‘a very feeble attempt it is, based on such flimsy assumptions, mainly of morphological-anatomical nature that it can hardly be called a theory.’ And speaking of certain evolutionary examples, he exclaimed, ‘I would rather believe in fairies than in such wild speculation.’
  • Insulin: its vital function was first discovered by the creationist Nicolae Paulescu (1869–1931), who named it ‘pancreine’. He anticipated the discoveries of Frederick Banting and John Macleod, who were awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize for Medicine for their work on insulin.
  • In modern times, we have the outspoken biblical creationist Raymond Damadian (1936–), inventor of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, and Graeme Clark (1935–), the inventor of the Cochlear bionic ear who is a Christian.

http://creation.com/science-creation-and-evolutionism-refutation-of-nas

The way the MSM often portrays creationism gives the impression that “creation science” is a false dichotomy and that somehow creation is a threat to science. In fact, it is often referred to as pseudo-science. Yet many of the creationists work that I study is done by men and women with PhD’s in their field, publishing not only in creationist journals, but secular journals also. They didn’t achieve any of this by disparaging the scientific method. Quite the opposite in fact. Dr. Jonathan Sarfati also notes that:

…Copernicus, as well as Galileo, Kepler and Newton, were all young earth creationists. They never saw their discoveries as a threat to their biblical worldview. But they were a threat to the secular Aristotelian science consensus of their day, which is why the Aristotelians were Galileo’s staunchest foes.

http://creation.com/science-creation-and-evolutionism-refutation-of-nas

Likewise I propose that creationism is being excluded not because it is incompatible with operational science, but because it is a threat to the popular philosophy of the day, materialism.

[And lest you conclude that I am advocating the mandatory teaching of creation in schools (Christian or otherwise), at least read the first link below]

Recommended for further reading:
The Teaching of Creation in Schools
Creation Scientists
Richard Lewontin Quote

[Update: 9 March 2010]

Creation Ministries International published an article today on this very topic.

Excerpt:

From the Board’s statements, even schools which avoid the issue of Genesis history, creation in six days, global Flood and so on cannot even use the ‘ID’ approach. This reasons from the evidence of biology and biochemistry etc. merely to logically deduce, on the basis of empirical observations, that the mechanisms proposed by evolution simply could not have generated the vast complexity of living systems; the inference from observation is that they required an intelligent (unnamed) agent. Even this ultra-low-key approach is now made impossible in SA Christian schools, because it can be said to ‘reflect’ a religious text, albeit very indirectly. So science teachers in Christian schools could not lawfully encourage their students to even reflect on whether the awesome design in the molecular machinery of living cells might suggest that God had a hand in it!

Full article here.

Other related Aristophrenium articles: