Explore

Feedback archiveFeedback 2017

Damaging Christianity by ignoring science?

This week’s feedback answers a claim that creationists are harming Christianity (although we have no evidence that the writer cares) and ignores science. , one of many CMI staffers with an earned science doctorate, responds.

wikipedia.orghuman-brain

Robert B of the USA writes:

You are damaging Christianity deeply. You think science is wrong just where you need it to be—which should light up the warnings in your brain.

The concepts that you list as evidence are areas you don’t understand.

Science primarily does not have opinions. It has data—data that does not give a living ---- [Ed.: mild expletive redacted here and below] what anyone thinks. Soft tissue in dinosaur bones does not prove a young anything—and the scientists working on that material understand that where you don’t.

You would all be well advised to go actually get into a real science program (tho I doubt you could) and learn the material.

===> I did.

Consider—the percentage of scientists who believe the Earth is young is smaller than the percentage of people who would be clinically insane in the same population. ALERT!!

I.e., in order to claim that there is a debate at all, you will have to have more people on ‘your side’ of the debate than the percentage of clinically insane. You don’t.

You have Kurt Wise disease.

You are harming Christianity.


You are damaging Christianity deeply.

What do you care? In any case, it is far more damaging to Christianity to claim, implicitly or explicitly, that Christ Himself was wrong about Genesis. I.e. He clearly affirmed that God created a man and a woman from the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning. But leading theistic evolutionists claim that He was mistaken. More on this in the resources on the top-right.

You think science is wrong just where you need it to be—which should light up the warnings in your brain.

We don’t think ‘science’ is wrong, in the sense of real (operational) science like chemistry and physics. We think that the materialistic philosophy of history masquerading as science is wrong.

In your case, why should you trust what you think are warnings in your brain? After all, it’s just a rearranged monkey brain, and ‘warnings’ are an illusion from brain chemistry that has evolved over millions of years of random mutation and natural selection? See Monkey minds: How evolution undercuts reason and science.

The concepts that you list as evidence are areas you don’t understand.

Typical ipse dixit. What evolutionists really hate is that we do understand them more than they would like!

Science primarily does not have opinions. It has data—data that does not give a living ---- what anyone thinks.

We agree that there is an objective reality that is independent of what anyone thinks. Postmodernism denies this. That is why science developed in a biblical creationist Christian world view during the Middle Ages, but was stillborn in other worldviews.

YouTubeThomas-Sowell
Thomas Sowell

But why should a materialist believe such a thing (and you certainly argue like one)? How do you know that you’re not an isolated ‘Boltzmann brain’ complete with the illusions of your memories and observations? After all, if our universe is just one of a multiverse generated by random quantum fluctuations, then one brain is far more probable than an entire universe full of intelligent brains.1

Also, you have a very naïve view about ‘data’. As the great economist Thomas Sowell pointed out:

Facts do not “speak for themselves.” They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.2

See how this works in How to think (not what to think), and how this is applied to rejecting conspiratorial theorizing.

Soft tissue in dinosaur bones does not prove a young anything—and the scientists working on that material understand that where you don’t.
M. H. SchweitzerT-Rex soft tissue
These photos are from a later (2005) paper by Schweitzer which reported on the discovery of soft tissue, in addition to strengthening the red blood cell identification—see Still Soft and Stretchy
Left: The flexible branching structures in the T. rex bone were justifiably identified as “blood vessels”. Soft tissues like blood vessels should not be there if the bones were 65 million years old.
Right: These microscopic structures were able to be squeezed out of some of the blood vessels, and can be seen to “look like cells” as the researchers said. So once again there is scope for Dr Schweitzer to ask the same question, “How could these cells last for 65 million years?”

The real science shows that there is soft tissue (and protein and DNA) in dino bones. Real science shows how fast these things break down—especially DNA. What real science does NOT show is the millions-of-years dogma. But since the discoverers believed in this dogma, they were extremely sceptical at first, e.g. the pioneer Dr Mary Schweitzer:

When you think about it, the laws of chemistry and biology and everything else that we know say that it should be gone, it should be degraded completely.3
“It was totally shocking,” Schweitzer says. “I didn’t believe it until we’d done it 17 times.”4

We are well aware that she has tried to explain the results away, but most unconvincing from the viewpoint of known chemistry—see Dinosaur soft tissue: In seeming desperation, evolutionists turn to iron to preserve the idea of millions of years.

You would all be well advised to go actually get into a real science program (tho I doubt you could) and learn the material.

Oh really? CMI probably hires more staff with earned doctorates in science—from secular universities at that—than any other Christian ministry; see Creationist qualifications. In most people’s eyes, that would count as a ‘real science program’.

===> I did.

That’s nice, but it doesn’t show.

Consider—the percentage of scientists who believe the Earth is young is smaller than the percentage of people who would be clinically insane in the same population. ALERT!!

I.e., in order to claim that there is a debate at all, you will have to have more people on ‘your side’ of the debate than the percentage of clinically insane. You don’t.

Another example of the illogic of anti-creationism: before it was “data … does not give a living ---- what anyone thinks”, but now you want us to care about what others think! You need to make up your evolved monkey mind. Apparently truth is now decided by majority vote, despite all the times when the majority was wrong; see Can all those scientists be wrong? E.g. we should still believe in the phlogiston theory of combustion and absolute geocentrism.

Kurt-Wise
Kurt Wise

The appeal to percentages rebounds against you. E.g. almost 20% of Americans have a mental illness,5 while only about 6% call themselves atheists,6 and this number is greater than the Kinsey lie that 10% of the population is homosexual (the actual number of self-identified LGBT is ~4%7). So why should we kowtow to these vociferous minorities? We should also note that Jesus rejected majority vote (Matthew 7:13–14, John 6:60–70).

You have Kurt Wise disease.

Is this a new clinical diagnosis? Dr Wise has described an experiment where he chopped out every verse of Scripture that is contradicted by evolution or billions of years, and found that there was nothing left to hold his Bible by two fingers without it falling apart. That should be enough for any professing Christian, because Jesus said, “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35) and explicitly affirmed most of the parts that atheopaths love to mock.

You are harming Christianity.

So try Dr Wise’s experiment with just the ‘red letters’ of Jesus words and see how much is left. I’ve already shown several of them, and consider the following from Christ the Creationist:

Furthermore, Jesus taught that the rest of Genesis was accurate history, including the murder of Abel (Luke 11:51), Noah’s Ark and Flood (Matthew 24:37–39; Luke 17:26–27), Abraham’s life (John 8:56–58), the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:15), including the stern warning, “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17: 28–32). …. And He ought to know; since He was both with God and himself fully God from eternity past (John 1:1), and it was by Him all things were made (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16).

Conclusion

We would not normally respond publicly to intemperate fact-free diatribes. But this can stand in for various types of detractions against creation ministry. One is the alleged harm to Christianity—apparently believing what Christ said is harmful! Another is the general ‘why does it matter?’ type, which sometimes manifests in other ways such as ‘you should be feeding the hungry’. A third is the ‘anti-science’ charge, which fails badly both because the high scientific qualifications of many of CMI’s writers, and because real science supports creation and opposes evolution.

Published: 21 October 2017

References and notes

  1. See Price, P., The universe of the lone brain, Creation 39(4):49–51, 2017. For a semi-popular secular explanation, written by astrophysicists/cosmologists, of fine tuning in general and the Boltzmann Brain paradox in particular, see Lewis, G.F. and Barnes, L.A, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a finely tuned cosmos, ch. 8, Cambridge University Press, 2016. Return to text.
  2. Sowell, T., A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, ch. 1, Basic Books, 1987. Return to text.
  3. Schweitzer, M., Nova Science Now, May 2009, cross.tv/21726. Return to text.
  4. Schweitzer, cited in Science 307:1852, 25 March 2005. Return to text.
  5. Bekiempis, V., Nearly 1 in 5 Americans suffers from mental illness each year, newsweek.com, 28 February 2014. Return to text.
  6. “Nones” on the Rise, pewforum.org, 9 October 2012. Return to text.
  7. Gates, G.J., In US, More Adults Identifying as LGBT, news.gallup.com, 121 January 2017. Return to text.

Helpful Resources

The Genesis Account
by Jonathan Sarfati
US $39.00
Hard cover
From Creation to Salvation
by Lita Cosner Sanders
US $14.00
Soft cover
15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History
by Dr Don Batten, Dr Jonathan D Sarfati
US $4.00
Booklet
Refuting Compromise
by Dr Jonathan Sarfati
US $17.00
Soft cover
Busting Myths
by J Sarfati & G Bates, edited
US $10.00
Soft cover