Is Science Enough?

I used to be able to come to your website to obtain scientific information, but I find it is not so easily navigable these days.

I have many atheist friends who hate Christians, and I do not find your position defensible to them, although they would respond to clear scientific analysis.

I think you weaken your cause when you base your technique on the inerrancy of scripture. Because I know Jesus Christ, I don't disagree with you on the Bible.

I would like to respectfully request that you return to your more scientific format, which seemed to have an influence on the scientific world.

—M.D., U.S.A.

I used to be able to come to your website to obtain scientific information, but I find it is not so easily navigable these days.

Thank you for contacting AiG and for letting us know your concerns about the website. If you are having difficulty finding the information you’re looking for, we certainly ask that you let us know how we can improve the website or what areas specifically are causing you difficulty. We, the webteam, want to make the website as intuitive and accessible as possible. Although we have limited resources, we do read and evaluate the comments that we receive. In fact, we are currently revamping the Answers section of our site based on feedback we’ve received, and you can expect a brand-new version later this year that is much easier to navigate.

I have many atheist friends who hate Christians, and I do not find your position defensible to them, although they would respond to clear scientific analysis.

But can scientific analysis alone save them? I spent much of my life as an agnostic on the good days and an atheist on the bad. I, like your friends, was certain that I did not need a god of any kind to exist—though I was secretly terrified that there might be some sort of after-life accountability. Many times I lambasted those who depended upon the “false comfort” of religion and felt my superiority over them—any religion would do, since I saw no difference in any of them. I studied them like a child studies an ant under the burning beams of a magnifying glass. I had analytical truth; they only had belief.

For much of that time, I was tossed around with the winds of prevailing thought, swept along by the most “important” discoveries of the day. I threw in my lot with whatever big bang model was the most popular (when I wanted to be an astronomer), kept up on the Out-of-Africa debate (when I wanted to discover the secrets of human origins), and dabbled with Post-modern gender studies (when I wanted to be a literary critic). If it were trendy or new or exciting, I would latch on without a second thought.

The problem, however, was that even in “buying into” evolutionism, the story never quite seemed to fit. All the “scientific analysis” I was receiving from some of the foremost anthropologists in the country felt somehow hollow. It wasn’t that they weren’t brilliant—they most certainly are—it was something deeper than just fossils or dates or analyses. It was something at the core of the philosophy. It was’t the science, per se, that acted as a wedge of doubt (though the hypothetico-deductive science doesn’t add up either); it was the problem I had with the presuppositions.

Even when I began to doubt the stories I’d been told all along and even when I began looking into alternative ideas from websites such as this one, it wasn’t enough. I came to believe in some sort of higher being—much like the recent conversion of Anthony Flew—but I thank God He didn’t leave me there. Though I believed in an intelligent creator, I was still left like “a wave driven and tossed by the wind” (James 1:6), yearning for a rock that I could cling to.

Please do not misunderstand what I am saying. Scientific analysis was important in leading me to Christ, but I needed to know that I could trust something in this world as indisputable, factual, and reliable. The debunking of Darwin’s myths softened my antagonism but left me without moorings; knowing that I could trust the promises in God’s Word, however, drove me to my knees.

While the scientific aspects of creation and the Flood are important—and something we are striving to promote—they can never be more important than revealing God’s love through Jesus Christ. AiG wants not only to be a voice for the fact that science can and does support the accuracy of the account in Genesis, we also want to show that God’s Word can be trusted throughout—from Creation to the Cross to Consummation. Our focus, as a parachurch organization, is more than just scientific creationism; it is to “[enable] Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively.”

I think you weaken your cause when you base your technique on the inerrancy of scripture. Because I know Jesus Christ, I don’t disagree with you on the Bible.

What’s the alternative—basing our technique on the inerrancy of “science”? You see, something needs to be the ultimate authority to which we turn for answers. The Bible, written by the Creator who cannot lie (and is therefore inerrant), provides the only reasonable basis for anything—logic, thought, scientific analysis, etc.

Alternatively, how can just focusing on science be enough? After all, if anyone depends on scientific analysis first in order to believe the Bible, then what happens if some contrary interpretation of the evidence pops up? For example, many people had their faith shaken because of the “discovery” of Piltdown Man and because of Haekel’s embryo drawings. How many left the church or became apostates because they thought this evidence was irrefutable? I would also venture to say that when these two lines of evidence were shown to be fraudulent, many of the same people who left the church did not return, simply because they had no foundation for trusting God’s Word first (and, likely, other now-defunct evolutionary myths caught their eye).

In a similar manner, what if some of the theories that creationist scientists currently employ are later abandoned because of new evidence? If my faith is based on my trust in catastrophic plate tectonics or time dilation, then what happens if those theories are discarded while new theories are being developed? Is my faith based on more than just a theory about the past?

In a nutshell, the question is this: why should anyone accept our theories about the history of the earth if they don’t first see that the Bible is a reliable, historically accurate framework upon which we can build these theories? We can poke holes in the latest “ape-men” all day, but that doesn’t show our readers that they can trust what they read in Genesis as being “God breathed.” We can expose the problems with the big bang, but that doesn’t prove that a real Adam brought death into the world 6,000 years ago. And we can give a hundred reasons why the earth must be “young,” but that doesn’t reveal to anyone that Jesus Christ really came to earth, died for our sins, and can reconcile us to a perfect relationship to our Creator like the Bible says.

Scientific evidence alone may give your friends a reason for doubting what they hear in school, on TV, or read in books. It can even tear down the walls of what evolutionists tell us is “irrevocable” and “irrefutable” (and whatever ir- word you can think of), but it can never lead us to salvation. After all, “[s]alvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Only when we trust those words as being the perfect Word of God can we trust other parts of Scripture that tell us that we need Christ to restore us from the Fall.

You wouldn’t kill a weed by cutting off a leaf; you’d kill it by pulling it up from the root. (This is one reason why the book of Genesis is so fervently attacked, by the way.) In the same way, the reason that we focus a great deal of attention on biblical inerrancy is because we don’t just want to attack the symptoms of a corrupted worldview (i.e., by showing scientifically that evolution and millions of years are really bankrupt ideas), we want to attack the root of the issue, which is a lack of belief in the reality that God’s Word is truth. Once you pull the weed up by its root—to continue the analogy—you can use the same soil to plant a biblical worldview, and in a biblical worldview, all the scientific evidence is explained by what God said.

Evidence is always filtered through presuppositions. Many evolutionists deny that prior beliefs play a role in how data is interpreted, but we all have certain beliefs that are foundational to how we view the world. If this were not the case and if data spoke for itself, then what need would we have for explanations of data? What need would we have for someone, say Richard Dawkins, to write book after book to tell us how we should interpret the evidence? For being so “elegantly simple,” evolution sure needs quite a few expositors of “truth.”

The data you give your friends will always be interpreted through the beliefs that they have. Evolutionism, at its core, is an appeal to authority. The evidence, to them, proves evolution because the sources that they read and choose to believe say that it does. And those who wrote those articles believe evolution because their professors told them that the evidence supports evolution or because the sources that they chose to believe supported it. And this goes all the way back to Darwin—and beyond; the so-called “mountains of evidence in numerous fields” that evolutionists often cite is nothing more than a paper tiger—literally.

To combat this, you have to get down to what is authoritative: God’s Word or human beliefs? I can quote several studies that helped prove to me that the earth is only thousands of years old. Would I really have believed any of them if I hadn’t first seen that the problem was not the data, but that the problem was how I interpreted the evidence? You will often find that evolutionists love to equivocate with terms. After all, the word evolution can mean a hundred different things—from change within a species (e.g., beak size) to chemical sludge becoming living sludge to ape-like beings turning into man. Just getting your friends to see that not all definitions of evolution are created equal (or true) is a large part of the battle—and this goes back to the beliefs they bring to the table.

I would like to respectfully request that you return to your more scientific format, which seemed to have an influence on the scientific world.

I want you to know that I do not disagree with you completely, even if much of my response has been defending our teaching of biblical inerrancy and building a biblical worldview as being foundational. As I said, the scientific analysis on this site and other young-earth sites did help open my eyes—so, scientific evidence for creation is certainly one of my passions. As such, I’m excited that this week AiG has unveiled a great new creation science resource called Answers Research Journal. ARJ is designed to focus on scientific, historical, and theological evidence for the young-earth/global-Flood model—and you will see quite a bit of original research in the days to come that will be great for witnessing. This resource will join our free in-depth articles that I hope you are already using (and all the back issues of Answers are also available free online as well), the free videos in our Video on Demand section that have a plethora of scientific data, and also the excellent products in our online bookstore.

But as we’ve demonstrated, science won’t convince; science won’t save. What is more important is for people to realize that they already have a source of truth that they trust for their presuppositions—and for some, it’s the wrong source. And we want others to see that there’s no better source than the eyewitness account of the Creator of the Universe—the account He specifically and lovingly gave humankind to guide us back to Himself. However, it is also important that we provide you (and all our readers) with the tools you need to witness effectively to those who doubt God’s Word. Some may look for scientific evidence to start them in the right direction, and I hope that the addition of ARJ will help you reach out to them and lead them to Christ. More importantly, though, I hope that you will consider how important the accuracy and sufficiency of Scripture is in showing the world that God can be trusted and that His Word is the only solid foundation.

In Christ,

John, AiG–U.S. webteam