Editor’s Note: Less and More

Representing Answers magazine at AiG conferences allows me to chat with our subscribers and potential readers. Last year, I explained to a gentleman that Answers is a worldview magazine that reveals how all matters of life—good and evil—breadcrumb their way back to the first chapters of Genesis. I also extolled the joy of sharing perspectives on scientific discoveries. “Because science is always changing,” I said, “there is always something new to write about.”

Sarah Eshleman
Editor in Chief

“Well, our science doesn’t change,” he responded. “God’s Word is our science.”

When I started working at Answers in Genesis, I recall hearing our geneticist, Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, mention that, as a scientist, he is always trying to prove his research hypotheses wrong. Observational science is, by nature, a self-correcting pursuit. As a recent issue of Scientific American put it, “This is the nature of the razor-thin path of scientific reality: there are a limited number of ways to be right but an infinite number of ways to be wrong.”

As finite creatures, we try and fail and learn. That’s why we have solid city infrastructures. Why we know which substances will cure or kill us. Why technology is getting smaller and smarter. Why (very wealthy) lay people are traveling to space. Why we now know, contrary to earlier assumption, that cicadas ingest food during their short lifespan.

To the gentleman at the conference, I should have gently countered that it is not observational science but historical science—our belief about the universe’s origin—that remains fixed. We start every scientific pursuit with a worldview built on God’s Word. The book of Genesis tells us that God created everything in six days, including all the original kinds of creatures, plants, and humans as well as materials and systems. When Adam and Eve sinned, death and suffering corrupted creation. Through the global flood, God destroyed the entire world but saved Noah’s family and the animal kinds on the ark to replenish the earth.

Somehow, the more we learn, the less we know for sure. I mean, we’re still wondering if eggs are good or bad for us, as Joel Ebert points out in “Trust the Experts?”. But when we look to Scripture, we can know the most important thing for sure: that God fulfilled his promise to send his son, Jesus, to offer salvation. In this truth, we can boldly explore God’s creation, standing in wonder of all we know—and all we have yet to uncover.