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Creation isn’t ‘science’?

CMI receives many emails from skeptics. While we respond to every email that follows our submission rules, we thought that a fuller answer to this particular message would be edifying for our readers, and would help to equip others to answer similar arguments. Vince A. writes:

Wikipedia.orgNational-Academy-Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences building, in Washington, D.C.
Tammy Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) is where Darwinian Evolution defeated Christian-Creationism (Intelligent Design) in a federal court. Creation Science is not real science, according to The National Academy of Sciences.

Lita Sanders, CMI-US, responds:

Dear Vince,

Thank you for writing in, but there was no need to inform us that the National Academy of Sciences has defined creation science as a pseudoscience. This is nothing new. But, if true, I guess we will have to tell Raymond Damadian, inventor of MRI, that he is not a real scientist. Also, John Sanford, the Ph.D. geneticist who invented the gene gun, sure fooled me. And we will have to let John Hartnett, who co-developed the world’s most precise clock, know that he is, according to the National Academy of Sciences, not a real scientist.

One wonders how a body like the National Academy of Sciences can dictate to us that the men and women who hold Ph.D.s in biology, chemistry, zoology, geology, and more on our creation scientists list are not real scientists, despite the fact that they went to the same universities as ‘real’ scientists, did the same work as ‘real’ scientists, and are otherwise indistinguishable from ‘real’ scientists.

And if being a creationist disqualifies you from being a scientist, I’m afraid we will have to reappraise those who are no longer with us. After all, if the 21st century has taught us anything, it has shown us that living a few centuries ago is no justification for holding inexcusable beliefs! So Newton, Mendel, Bacon, Galileo, Steno, and Pasteur—scientists famous enough to be referred to by one name—are not scientists!

Can we agree that anyone defining ‘science’ to mean ‘adherence to a belief’ is silly and destructive to true science? This is because, historically speaking, scientific orthodoxy has been wrong more often than it has been right. 100 years ago, eugenics was ‘good science’. Not too long before that, humoral theory ruled medicine. 500 years ago, geocentrism. Who knows what we will discover tomorrow?

We rightly discount the views of the people who used Aristotelian philosophy to oppose heliocentrism, because, by all accounts, they were wrong. At the same time, we rightly vilify those leaders in the evolution movement who once taught eugenics, because it is a horrific ideology. But both geocentrism and eugenics used to be scientific orthodoxy to the people of the day. People who were willing to challenge that orthodoxy using good scientific methods advanced science. If we freeze science by defining a particular theory as necessary to be a scientist, that idea, by definition, cannot be challenged by scientists. Imagine if that had happened with geocentrism!

Thus, we reject efforts like this. They are counterproductive and contrary to the very nature of science, which is to challenge ‘orthodoxy’. We will continue to defy Darwinism, naturalism, and belief in long ages, and we will seek to find more and better ways to be a goad under the saddle of the gatekeepers and power controllers in high places. We are called to do this through the Bible, and we are motivated to do this because of what science is telling us. So now that we have explained our reasons, why not join us?

Sincerely,

Lita Sanders

Published: 25 May 2019

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Busting Myths
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Evolution's Achilles' Heels
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