www.answersingenesis.org

[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.

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Or, Why Genesis 1 means exactly what it says: Another response to comments by Sandy Grant

In October 2006 I responded to the position held by Sandy Grant as described in his article “Reading Genesis”, published in the October 2006 edition of Matthias Media’s The Briefing. This was followed by another post in August 2007 after Sandy took the opportunity to clarify his position, believing that I had misrepresented him^[1]. I am quite aware that Sandy’s views are popular among Sydney Anglicans and The Briefing is widely promoted amongst Sydney Anglican churches. In fact during discussions I have had with informed Anglicans on this topic since October 2006, Grant’s article is often cited as an argument against a straight-forward reading of Genesis 1.

However while I believe I dealt with Sandy’s position (and objections) fairly in my previous posts, there were some additional points raised by Sandy in August 2007 that I will address now. In doing so I hope to demonstrate that a straight-forward reading of the early chapters of Genesis^[2] is the most sensible and that the kinds of objections that Sandy raises come from an unnecessary compromised theology that cannot be sustained.

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