Which of the physical sciences does CMI believe in?

A detailed answer to a simple question

D.M. from the UK wrote in, sarcastically asking:

“Which of the physical sciences do you believe in?”

Dr Robert Carter, CMI-US, responds:

Fantastic question! The short answer is, “All of them.” In fact just looking at a list of the people who work for CMI, I see PhDs in physics, nuclear physics, engineering, radiotelescopes and antenna design, geomorphology, molecular biology, plant science, plant nutrition, forestry, physical chemistry, zoology, and marine biology. We also have a medical doctor or two. This does not include the many other highly qualified people at CMI with up to master’s-level degrees. In short, we love science! We also have several theologians and educators on staff, to make for a very well-rounded group.

However, that was not really what you were asking. Instead, what you meant to do was ask why we reject naturalism as an overarching philosophical framework for our science. In fact, you equivocated. Essentially, unless I am very much mistaking the tone of the question, you assumed we reject ‘science’ where in fact what we reject is a certain philosophical approach to science. Your approach, in the end, does not work, for it is filled with fatal flaws; Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels, as it were. See also Who’s really pushing ‘bad science’?

It was the Christian worldview that gave birth to modern science. That is clear from history. That worldview was later hijacked. We went from a methodological approach to knowledge, based on our understanding of the character and nature of our Creator, to methodological naturalism, which cuts God completely out of the equation. But what we are left with is a method with no reason for its existence. In the Christian worldview, there is a reason for why things are the way they are. Under naturalism, they just are, and there is really no reason to expect things to always behave the same way throughout all time and across the universe. This method cannot actually do what it wants to do—explain the universe without invoking design or a designer.

As I explained in another article:

Naturalism cannot explain origins. It fails on multiple fronts. In fact, this failure was the subject of a major book and documentary project of CMI called Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels. Evolution cannot explain the source of the big bang, the reason why the universe expanded so fast (during the “inflationary period” the size is claimed to have increased millions of times over in one quintillionth of a femtosecond–for no known physical reason), the reason why the expansion slowed to the current rate, how stars form from clouds of gas, why Jupiter has half the rotational kinetic energy in the solar system, why Uranus is lying on its side, how life arose from random chemicals, how complex life arose from bacteria, how sexual reproduction came about, where the human mind came from, etc., etc. See also 15 Questions for Evolutionists.

D. replied (note: links to articles on Creation.com have been added to his message):

Thanks for your reply on “in which physical sciences do you believe?” My interest is not in how you become increasingly convoluted in trying to fit all the well proven facts across every branch of science that the earth is indubitably billions of years old, but how you cope with the weekly discoveries across the world. Eg last week that archaeologists have found evidence of man in Australia some 65,000 years ago. Or that when Arabia was green and fertile, tools have been found thought to be over 250,000 years ago.

You can’t believe in palaeontology or geology when these figures come out? I do appreciate that it must cause difficulties for you when the Bible is continually shown to be just a nice collection of fairy stories? Dinosaurs and men in the Ark? All together? Farcical…

Robert Carter responded:

David, you have done nothing to further the discussion except hurl elephants with a strong dose of invective. Every point you made has an answer. In fact, I suspect you already know how we would answer each of your new charges, but I took the liberty of adding hyperlinks to your second message. Thank you for the opportunity. We decided to turn these into a weekend feedback article.

Robert

First published: 24 November 2018
Re-featured on homepage: 22 April 2023