How Important Is Evolution to Science?

Some museum exhibits may claim that evolution is the foundation to all of science. Those who deny evolution may be compared to those who deny the well-established theory of gravity.

However, this “apples and alligators” comparison conveniently ignores the fact that gravity is a phenomenon that can be directly observed by experimentation, whereas particles-to-people evolution occurring over millions of years falls outside the domain of such inquiry. It is a story about the unobserved past.

Additionally, evolution is not foundational to modern science. Dr. Marc Kirschner, a prominent evolutionist, likes to invoke the much-quoted declaration of famed twentieth-century biologist Theodesius Dobzhansky that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (the title of a 1973 essay). In reply, Kirschner points out that the evidence is quite to the contrary:

In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry and physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all. (Marc Kirschner, quoted in Peter Dizikes, "Missing Links,” Boston Globe, October 23, 2005, www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/23/missing_links/.)

Furthermore, Dr. Jason Lisle, a creationist astrophysicist, makes this significant observation:

It is because a logical God created and ordered the universe that I, and other creationists, expect to be able to understand aspects of that universe through logic, careful observation and experimentation.

Why should there be laws of nature if there is no lawgiver? If our minds have been designed, and if the universe has been constructed by God, as the Bible teaches, then of course we should be able to study nature. Science is possible because the Bible is true.

The great founders of science knew this to be true and based their work on their knowledge that God was the Creator. Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, James Joule, Louis Pasteur, Robert Boyle, and Johann Kepler (to name but a few) accepted the Bible as the Word of God and used it as the foundation for their scientific work.