I’ve said it many times before: creationism is just wrong, and one group that should be fighting it hardest is Christians. They are letting a vocal minority usurp their religion, and if they don’t speak up they run the risk of letting those people speak for them.  (Source: Bad Astronomy Blog)

Seriously?  No, really – seriously?! The group that should be fighting creationism the hardest is Christians?  I disagree—vehemently.  The folks who should be supporting creationism most ardently are Christians – despite the claim made above, I don’t believe that creationists are even remotely in the minority of Christian faith (though I suppose I could be wrong – a lot could have changed while I wasn’t paying attention). 

Now, while I wouldn’t say that the Bible should necessarily be interpreted literally (there’s a lot of metaphor, poetry, and storytelling in there where literal interpretation would actually cause understanding to break down), I do believe that it is inerrant.  I also believe in a literal six-day creation cycle – the original texts are quite clear on this point.  The Hebrew is very specific about the intended meaning. There is no cultural context would force a different interpretation of the events described in the first chapter of Genesis.  There’s no poetry, no storytelling, no figurative speech contained in those first few pages.

Scientific claims run counter to the Biblical explanation of the universe and mankind’s origins.  It’s been a continual source of contention for decades—and it always will be.  But the folks over at Answers in Genesis provide solid apologetical responses to the claims of secular science, answers that, despite secular science’s claims to contrary, are well-thought out, answers that take science facts, data, and evidence into consideration, and yes, answers that are even rational and logical.

I know how antagonistic secular science is toward all concept of creation and intelligent design—and I’m even fine with that.  You can please everyone, and people who ardently believe a certain ideal become very angry and hateful toward people who believe differently than them (and sadly, this also applies to many Christians).  I respect the belief that Christians should be on the front lines opposing creationism; it’s an opinion, but nothing more.  But those Christians who celebrate Darwin Day are, I believe, grossly and dangerously in error.  I believe that a Christian can believe in evolution and the Big Bang and still be a Christian, but I believe that their beliefs with regard to origins theory are very, very wrong. 

Call me a goofy whacko, if you will (oh, you already have?), but you simply can’t tell me all this around us came about by accident, not even by citing the 2nd law of thermodynamics at me.  I recognize the value of science and acknowledge its importance.  But I don’t believe that traditional secular science has a prayer (I just love irony) of explaining the origins of this universe or of mankind.  It’s simply too limited and conducted by a creature that is itself far too limited to explain or understand something that big and complex.

I know I’m probably going to take a beating for writing this, but here goes, anyway.

I suppose you could say that I’m a pressuppositionalist – I tend to follow an apologetic approach that believes it is impossible to find meaning in anything where man himself is at the center of the pursuit for truth and understanding.  I carry with me a certain set of core beliefs and assumptions that guide and govern, not only those things that I do, but also the way I fit together all knowledge into a cohesive whole.

It’s interesting – when the evolutionist looks around him and witnesses nature, he sees millions of years of natural selection at work when I look around me, I can’t but believe that something had to have put all this in place.  This belief is based purely in logic and observation – I just find it impossible to think that chaos at the beginning of time could have somehow found its way into some sense of organization that just naturally progressed over billions and billions of years to what we have now.  That, to me, requires a much greater leap of faith than believing in an intelligent creator.  From everything I’ve seen and witnessed and studied, the natural state of the universe at large tends toward entropy.  Everything that currently exists is moving steadily toward a state of decay and decline, not the other way around.  This has ever been the way of things.  So I find it much easier to believe that everything started in a state of perfect order that somehow began a downward spiral toward chaos.

Both of these viewpoints are based on a set of presuppositions.  For the evolutionist, there is no God, no creator, no intelligent designer, merely a long process of natural selection, with new species adapting to their environments until we have the diversity that we see today.  And natural selection makes some amount of sense, since it is directly observable in the world around us – the strongest of the herd survive while the slowest, sickest, and least able to adapt die off, thus strengthening the species as a whole.  I just have trouble believing that natural selection could ever have, ultimately, brought humanity into existence from a single-celled bacterium – and I have yet to see compelling evidence that states such.  For the creationist (or the IDist), there must have been something intelligent and powerful to have set all this in place, that there is no way for something like this universe in which we live to have come about by chance or some evolutionary process.

Consider this – what if the all that scientific data that has been collected on the origins of the universe and the evolutions of the species can’t be trusted?  Secular scientists place a lot of faith in rationality.  They place man at the very center of rationality itself by presupposing that systematic, scientific study will eventually unlock all the secrets of the universe – or at least that’s the goal and hope – and this methodology does and has worked in a great many areas of study and research.  But what if scientific study as it relates to these two macroscopic issues has been placed in the wrong context?  What if, by placing man at the center, by assuming that if we only ask the right questions and study things in as unbiased a manner as possible, what if in doing science in this manner, we are getting it wrong?  What if this basic assumption in secular science has led to a great many misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the data we have?

I believe that faith and science can, indeed, complement each other.  When framed in the context of an intelligent designer, the scientific data that seems to lend itself so strongly for evolution yields a very different picture.  And contrary to popular belief, scientists who believe in intelligent design are still scientists who work within the constraints of their field.  The data I’ve seen on sites like Answers in Genesis is the same data I’ve seen shown on secular science sites, with the same explanations of what it means.  The difference is that Christian scientists provide alternative solutions for why some of that data might be misleading.  It is unfortunate, in a way, that many of these explanations can never be verified, as they are the result of unreproducible events.  Similarly, neither can secular scientists prove their claims about the origins of the universe for the exact same reason.  Despite objections from the secular community, Christian scientists are able to provide a complete, unified response for their conclusions based on their presuppositions.  And theirs is a response that makes much more logical, rational sense to me than the origins answers that secular science sometimes provides.

And this is where faith bonds with science.  We believe, based on a record given in the Bible, that the Earth looked a certain way during its beginning.  Framing scientific data into this context provides an explanation why, for instance, carbon dating may not be as accurate as is generally assumed by the secular scientific community.  Because none of these events that various groups believe in – Creation, Big Bang, Great Flood, evolution – can actually be reproduced and examined first-hand, certain things must, by necessity, be taken with a certain measure of faith.  This does not stop scientific study itself, nor should it.  Mankind is, by his very nature, curious and so there is a great deal of worth to be derived from such pursuits.  But the scientific community, no matter what camp, should bear in mind that personal presuppositions are going to greatly influence the way the collected data is interpreted.

So does secular rationality actually fail when faced with its own presuppositions?  We can only wait and see, but I would posit that, yes, it does.  Mankind is a limited, finite creature, and as such our abilities to know and understand will always be subject to that limitation.  If science, by itself, reveals anything to us with regard to the origins of everything that is, it will be that we can never know everything and that some ‘secrets’, like how the universe began or where mankind came from, will never be answered by science alone.

But don’t mind me – those’re just my presuppositions talking.