Understanding Science

You’ll likely get all sorts of answers. However, typically, the more scientifically educated the person is, the less certain and dogmatic their answer will be. The average person (and let’s face it, the majority of people aren’t scientists) will likely be far more dogmatic in asserting what they believe that science is.

Why? Because common responses from the layperson are statements such as, “Science is how we can know things,” “Science is about facts,” or “Science proves things.” But astute scientists will almost never say that science can prove anything without a doubt, because they understand the limitations of what even experimental science, or what is often called operational science, can show.

Our Youth Outreach Coordinator Patricia Engler pointed this out to me in a conversation regarding her science education:

One of the first things I learned in my science classes was never to write prove on a lab report, even if we read words like that in the media.

She even supplied me with a consolidated quote from her science textbook, which stated,

[We] can never prove that a hypothesis is true. . . . Testing a hypothesis in different ways with different sorts of data can increase our confidence in it tremendously (or strongly suggest that it is incorrect), but no amount of experimental testing can prove a hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt.1

Confidence in Science

Now there are reasons for the average person’s (and scientists, for that matter) trust in science. Experimental science involves repeatable, observable testing of phenomena in specific conditions with results that we can observe in real time.

An easily understood example is boiling water. To discover at what temperature water boils, one can simply put water in a pot and heat it up. When the water starts to boil, use a thermometer to check the temperature.

Now there are qualifiers of course. Is the pot at sea level? Higher, lower? Is the water pure, salty, . . . ? But the principle is that under the same conditions, experimental science done according to the scientific method reveals the same results. And this is the kind of science that people understand “proves” things.

A Different Type of Science

But any forensic scientist will tell you there is another type of science that they deal with on a daily basis that simply doesn’t work that way. Their work certainly does take advantage of the fantastic tool that is operational science, but they also have to use historical science as well. Why? Because by definition they are attempting to find out about a past event that cannot be repeated over and over again, and they weren’t there to see it happen.

That is why you commonly hear a detective or Crime Scene Investigation team discuss attempts to hypothetically re-create the crime. There is no way to repeat the actual event. The same is true of historical science, sometimes called origins science.

There are still facts to collect, data to analyze, and experiments to do regarding the surroundings of the crime and the objects within it (which may fall under operational science), but those facts can be interpreted in a variety of ways, as I’ll demonstrate.

The Sad Story of Sam and Marilyn Sheppard

In 1955, Dr. Sam Sheppard was convicted of murdering his wife Marilyn, and as a result spent over 10 years in prison. From the outset a year earlier, the controversial case received extensive and prolonged nationwide media coverage in the US and around the world. The prosecution brought seemingly devastating evidence to support their case, including (among many other things) motive (he was having an ongoing affair), a proposed (but never found) scalpel as a murder weapon (something a doctor would readily have), and the blood found on him.

The police had collected the data, detectives had deliberated over the facts and presented a powerful case to the prosecutor, and he then interpreted those facts and communicated them in a very concise manner as evidence that clearly showed Sam was guilty of this heinous act. And after a four-day trial, the jury found Sheppard guilty of second-degree murder, and he was sent to prison for life. The problem was, he was innocent of the crime.

Lives Devastated by the Wrong Interpretation of Facts

Aside from Marilyn’s death, the grief of her family, and the devastation over losing his wife, Sam endured years of captivity for something he didn’t do, all the while being looked upon with scorn by the general public and seen as the vilest and most depraved sort of person imaginable. On top of that, his mother took her own life very shortly after his conviction, and eleven days later, his father died of a bleeding gastric ulcer and stomach cancer. Sheppard attended both funerals in handcuffs. Sam and many other lives were completely devastated by the events surrounding his wife’s death.

However, due to arguments made on behalf of his council over the years regarding lack of due process, in October 1966 a retrial began. Although the prosecutor presented essentially the same case as was offered twelve years earlier, this time the defense brought more clarity to the events and was able to reinterpret certain conclusions the prosecutor had made previously and exposed some unwarranted assumptions on their part. And this time, after deliberating for only 12 hours, the jury returned a “not guilty” verdict.

Same Facts, Different Story

Many have analyzed this tragic tale and deliberated how the life-altering mistake could have occurred by professional investigators with “cold, hard facts.” One of the best answers, in my opinion, comes from the clear-headed Dr. Gabriel Weston, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and star of the four-part BBC series Catching History’s Criminals: The Forensics Story, which detailed the Sheppard case in Episode 2 of the program, “Traces of Guilt.”

Weston defines the difference between operational and historical science in the following dialog from the series:

The Sheppard case reminds us that there are two kinds of forensic science: some is definitely science (soil analysis, murder scene objects). But some like Paul Kirk’s investigation is really about opinion and interpretation.

And without proper safeguards, it can borrow the authority of science and disguise these opinions as hard scientific fact. . . . Science continues to deliver new techniques for the capture of evidence, but machines and chemical analysis don’t interpret evidence; people do, and they can get it wrong.2

Same Facts, Different History

Now today, with the advent of so many popular crime dramas, most people understand and agree that interpreting facts in a murder trial (such as the Sheppard case) can be legitimately done in various ways, all of which may be completely wrong because there is no way to corroborate their interpretation with 100% accuracy.

And they can also easily grasp that this isn’t the same method of science that concludes what temperature water boils, what the chemical composition of water is (i.e., H₂O), or what the triple point temperature of water is (0.01 °C). All can be discovered through repeatable, observable, operational scientific experiments where results have never been observed to differ.

However, many of those same people often don’t apply the same rationale to historical science and ultimately origins—the origin of the universe, earth, life, and its diversity.

Bible-believing creationists have consistently maintained that there is no conflict between facts that we see in the present as they relate to the history we see in the Bible. In other words, there is no conflict between science and the Bible. Rather, the conflict is between the long-age, evolutionary interpretation of those very same facts we all observe. The real conflict is between biblical history versus the story of evolution.

For example, when we observe soft tissue in dinosaur bones (an undisputed fact now in the scientific community), we maintain that it supports biblical history because those creatures obviously died out just a short time ago.

When we observe trees extending through tens of metres of sedimentary rock, we say it supports the history in the Bible where it describes a global flood, which would bury objects rapidly.

When we observe incredible, mind-blowingly complex coded language systems such as DNA regulating the construction, maintenance, and functionality of all living things, we maintain that it supports the idea of the omnipotent Creator of the Bible using his ultimate intelligence to create and sustain life.

We would also say that evolutionary interpretations of those same facts are wrong. There is no mysterious way soft tissue could have lasted for millions of years.

Trees getting buried slowly over thousands of years makes no sense because fossils needed to be buried rapidly, or they would have rotted and disintegrated long before they ever became permineralized.

Coded language systems have only ever been observed from an intelligent mind, so believing they came about by random chance processes makes no sense of DNA’s existence.

No Such Thing as Historical Science?

You will often hear evolutionary apologists attempt to blunt the point regarding operational versus historical science by claiming that biblical creationists are making up a dichotomy in science that simply doesn’t exist. They have accused us several times of fabricating the category of origins science in an attempt to obfuscate what they claim is the better interpretation of facts, by claiming theirs is the only logical interpretation possible.

However, several evolutionists who understand the true nature of science have already made the point for us. Perhaps many a naturalistic keyboard warrior should argue with the likes of evolutionary giant Ernst Mayr, who said,

Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place.

Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.3

And further confirmation comes from E. O. Wilson, an evolutionary biologist so influential he has been dubbed “The New Darwin,” “Darwin’s natural heir,” or “the Darwin of the 21st century” by his colleagues.

If a moving automobile were an organism, functional biology would explain how it is constructed and operates, while evolutionary biology would reconstruct its origin and history—how it came to be made and its journey thus far.4

And the link between origins research and forensics has been noticed by evolutionists as well, with one evolutionary researcher commenting in Nature magazine, “Research into evolution is a bit like forensic detective work. Because it’s impossible to carry out million-year experiments, we instead look at what evolution has produced and try to figure out what happened and why.5

Time to Re-examine Your Foundation

For those of you, like me, who grew up drowning in a sea of evolutionary presuppositions and interpretations, perhaps it’s time to re-examine your thinking about origins at a foundational level. Don’t be fooled into automatically dismissing God’s Word by those who tell you science has disproven the Bible.

It’s like those pictures you’ve seen that can be interpreted different ways. Have you seen the picture of the duck, or is it a rabbit? Have you seen the picture of the old lady, or is it a picture of a young lady? They are made up of the exact same lines drawn on paper! Yet the interpretation of what you see come from the influence of the person who introduces you to the picture before you have made your own mind up.

God’s Word has been a comfort to millions of people over thousands of years in helping them examine meaning and purpose in a life that is often full of trials and tribulation, and it has shown them answers to the big questions in life surrounding the past, present, and future—the future even beyond this life.

Remember how bleak Sam Sheppard’s life became because of the mistaken interpretation of facts, the same facts everyone was looking at during the first trial when he was accused, and the same as in the second trial when he was acquitted? Don’t let someone convince you of an interpretation of facts that points to a life devoid of ultimate meaning, hope, or understanding.

There are answers to your questions, and they are much more compelling than the one-sided evolutionary interpretations most people have heard. Perhaps a more biblical way of putting it is this:

The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. (Proverbs 18:17)