From: http://www.creationresearch.net

Answered by Diane Eager, John Mackay,

Isn’t the creation evolution debate just science versus religion?  You creationists should stay out of science and education, and keep creationism for religious believers. This answer is by Diane Eager and John Mackay who have both been in involved in science education.

Science originally simply meant “knowledge”, but it now has come to mean empirical knowledge, i.e. knowledge gained by repeatably testable observations of evidence that exists in the present.

As such, science alone cannot be used to find out about the past, because such events cannot be directly observed. They may have left evidence that can be observed in the present, but the same evidence may have been produced by different events as every keen forensic science crime show watcher knows when they hear all the arguments for and against an interpretation of the scientific evidence. Only a historical witness who was there could tell us which event actually happened.  But as Dr David Green expounded at John Mackay when John gave a presentation in the University in Hobart Tasmania; Science accepts no authority: no historical authority and no religious authority.

The modern belief that observations of the present can tell us about the origin and history of the world comes mainly from the writings of Charles Lyell (1797-1875).  He is best known as the “father of modern geology,” but he has had a profound effect on all modern scientific thought with his principle of uniformitarianism.  This principle is usually expressed as “the present is the key to the past”.  This belief has now been applied to all scientific disciplines, not just geology, and results in the assumption that whatever is happening now has usually been happening, and at the same rate, e.g. radioactive dating to find the age of the earth.  As many natural processes we observe in the present world appear to be slow and gradual, it is assumed they have been going on for vast ages in order to produce the world we can observe now.

Lyell did not come to this naturalistic belief on the basis of many years of scientific observations.  He was a lawyer, and he had an agenda, which he expressed in 1830 in a letter to a colleague, as being to “free the science from Moses,” i.e. to reject the authority of the Bible to tell us about the past, especially about origin of the universe, the earth and life.  If the Bible is taken at face value the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago and has undergone a major world wide catastrophe that re-worked the entire surface of the planet at the time of Noah’s flood.  This is the opposite of Lyell’s slow and gradual processes over vast ages.  They cannot both be true.

One of the first people to apply Lyell’s unformitarian vast ages was Charles Darwin.  In fact he was so taken with Lyell’s ideas that he wrote to a friend: “I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brain, and that I never acknowledged this significantly.” (letter to L. Horner, August 29th 1844)  It was Lyell’s unformitarian old age for the earth that allowed Darwin to make his theory of gradual change in living things become the new ‘authorised history’ of the world.  He wrote in his famous book, the Origin of Species: “He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology, … yet does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.”  (Darwin, 1859, Origin, Ch IX, p282)  A vast incomprehensible past, undocumented by any witnesses, allowed Darwin to fill it with his own theories about the origin of life, and of new and different life forms.  This is the opposite of the Bible, which sets out a clearly documented record of the origin and history of life with the authority of a witness who was there.

It was, and still is, the desire to escape the authority of the Creator who was there that has motivated Darwin and Lyell’s successors to re-define science as “explanations about aspects of nature without reference to God”.  (The Science Teacher, November 2003 p34). As a result science is now defined in terms of naturalistic processes alone.  And that further results in only agnostic or atheistic explanations being acceptable as science. Therein lies the real cause of the conflict with creationists.  It’s not science vs religion – but the religion of naturalism versus the religion of the Creator.  Your choice will be made on the basis of faith.  If you choose naturalism just remember it requires greater faith because, by definition, there is no witness who was there in the beginning, and therefore no records of direct observations.

Creation versus evolution is not science versus religion, but how science is interpreted by two different and competing faith based world views.

For more information on the influence of Lyell on Charles Darwin see the Creation Research article The Descent of a Man Download PDF here

A complete course on the origin of life suitable for high school students and adults is available from Evidence Web here

DAWKINS JUNK BACK FLIP occurred in a debate with UK Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks on science and religion, (on BBC Parliament, 18 Sep 2012), when recent discoveries by the ENCODE project came up. The most significant discovery made by this project was that large amounts of so-called “junk DNA” in the human genome have been found to have functions. (See our report here). Dawkins commented: “I have noticed that there are some creationists who are jumping on [the ENCODE results] because they think that’s awkward for Darwinism. Quite the contrary it’s exactly what a Darwinist would hope for, to find usefulness in the living world …” However, in his 2009 book ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’, Dawkins wrote: “… it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes”. In an article on the website Evolution News and Views 20 September 2012 David Klinghoffer commented: “A wonderful man like Rabbi Sacks would probably have to shed his courtliness for a moment to properly call out Dawkins on this blatant, unacknowledged and suspiciously convenient self-contradiction. Ah well, as we knew already, being a Darwinist means never having to say ‘I was wrong’”. A video of the debate can be seen on the Evolution News and Views website.

COMMENT. If Dawkins really believed Darwinists expected to find “usefulness in the living world” he has had plenty of opportunities to say so, especially as his book The Greatest Show on Earth is subtitled The Evidence for Evolution. In 2009, when the book was published, Dawkins presented the lack of usefulness in the genome as evidence for evolution, because no Creator would make such a wasteful system. Now in 2012 he claims the usefulness of the genome is positive evidence for mindless evolution. Now we admit, evolution may be a theory about change, but that does not excuse Dawkins blatantly reversing his story, unless he wants us to conclude that truth doesn’t matter to him and evidence is a trivial inconvenience. (Ref. sceptics, genome, atheism)

ANTARCTIC ICE RECORD revealed by NASA Earth Observatory, 11 October 2012. The recent record decrease in sea ice in Arctic Ocean has received widespread publicity, but at the other end of the world there was also a sea ice record being set. NASA reports: “Two weeks after a new record was set in the Arctic Ocean for the least amount of sea ice coverage in the satellite record, the ice surrounding Antarctica reached its annual winter maximum—and set a record for a new high. Sea ice extended over 19.44 million square kilometers (7.51 million square miles) in 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The previous record of 19.39 million kilometers (7.49 million square miles) was set in 2006”. The article is accompanied by a map of the ice surrounding the Antarctic continent September 26, 2012, “when ice covered more of the Southern Ocean than at any other time in the satellite record”. Satellite images of the Arctic and Antarctic regions have been used since 1979 to monitor the amount of sea ice and over that period there has been a downward trend in Arctic ice, but an upward trend in Antarctic ice. The increase is not evenly distributed around Antarctica with some areas gaining ice and others losing it. Sea ice scientists Claire Parkinson and Donald Cavalieri of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center commented in an article in The Cryosphere, 6, 871-880, 2012: “The strong pattern of decreasing ice coverage in the Bellingshausen/Amundsen Seas region and increasing ice coverage in the Ross Sea region is suggestive of changes in atmospheric circulation”.

COMMENT. Yes you’re right you didn’t hear this report in your local press if you live on 90% of the earth’s surface, even though you were hammered with publicity about the Arctic ice melting! Satellite images of the poles date only from 1979, yet the period from 1979 to the present is supposed to be a time that dangerous man-made global warming is causing catastrophic ice loss. There is no doubt the ice on top of the world has been decreasing, but there is no longer any doubt that the ice down under is growing. Therefore, as the sea ice scientists quoted above acknowledge, the uneven distribution of ice loss is most likely due to changes in “atmospheric circulation”, i.e. wind patterns, and we would also suggest variations in ocean currents. These are natural phenomena, and out of control of human beings, and we need to be humble enough to admit that, and give honour to the Creator who can control them. The lack of reporting is one more indicator that most of the politicians, media moguls etc have already become so dependent on future revenues from Climate Tax and investments, they can’t let the truth about their climate lies be known. (Ref. polar ice, ice-caps, climate)

OLDEST ECHINODERMS FOUND, according to ScienceDaily 10 October 2012 and PLoS ONE, 2012; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0046913. Echinoderms include starfish, sea cucumbers and sea urchins that live on the bottom of the sea. A team of European scientists have studied a well preserved collection of fossilised deep sea echinoderms found off the coast of Florida, they have dated at 114 million years old, making them the oldest fossils of these creatures they have, yet the fossils are identical to those found living today on the deep sea floor. Ben Thuy of University of Göttingen, Germany commented: “We were amazed to see that a 114 million year old deep-sea assemblage was so strikingly similar to the modern equivalents”.

COMMENT. These scientists might be amazed but we are not. If these are the oldest starfish, sea cucumbers and sea urchins, then they are evidence that these creatures have always been starfish, sea cucumbers and sea urchins, showing no sign of having evolved from anything else. The fact they are “strikingly similar to the modern equivalents” show that as far as can be proven these creatures have behaved as the Biblical account in Genesis states God created them to do – reproduce after their kind. It’s not the lack of good evidence that stops people believing creation – it’s the abundance of bad attitude. (Ref. invertebrates, echinoderms, stasis)

Categories: Articole de interes general