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by Steve Risner

Skeptic: Noun. A person inclined to question or doubt all accepted opinions.

I am a skeptic. I always have been. I realize the secularist will immediately say this cannot be true because I am a Christian. But my life is what it is and my belief in the Bible and the scientific argument for creation is based very much on the fact that I doubt everything I hear. In fact, and I think this is probably a weakness more than a strength though maybe it’s neutral, any time I read in the Bible stories of miraculous events, my first reaction is to rationalize it and find a naturalistic reason. When I hear people today talk about healings or divine acts of miraculous provision or something, my first action is to doubt it and try to see if I can find a natural reason for the event. I actually don’t like this, but I can’t help but do it. But being a skeptic (a healthy one) is what drives me to learn, to investigate, and to gather all the information I can. This caused me to try for years to meld what I believed in the Bible and what I was taught both at a high school and college level concerning evolution. But that doesn’t work.

The truth is, science is what it is today because of men and women like myself who studied nature, because they love God and want to seek His purposes and seek out how He did something or how His creation works. Before someone gets all riled up, I’m not suggesting I’m one of the great minds that founded a branch of science. I am simply saying that, although many atheists have charged me with being a science denier (some have gone so far as to insinuate that I’m daft and stupid), it’s my love for science and my love for knowledge that causes me to research, study, and learn all I can about something in nature.

I contend it is near impossible to adequately study the creation without having knowledge of and a relationship with the Creator. This cannot be stressed enough. Isaac Newton was brilliant. Some suggest he was as intelligent as or even more intelligent than Einstein. Newton actually wrote more on theology than he did on scientific subjects. This is not to take away from his exceptionally significant scientific contributions, but the man, a genius, was more interested in the Creator than he was the creation.

Few atheists realize that while they’re berating creationists for being anti-science, they are actually insulting the founders of nearly every branch of science in existence today, including biology. Kepler, a very significant figure in astronomy, once said that science is “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” It was the love of the Creator that drove him to study planetary motion as well as dabbling in physics and mathematics.

Einstein, brilliant as he was, was not a Christian, although it seems rather clear he knew something beyond nature must exist. He said, "Everyone who is seriously interested in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe - a spirit vastly superior to man, and one in the face of which our modest powers must feel humble."

In today’s world of science, the naturalist has hijacked honest investigation and inquiry. “Science” is what is used to prop up religious and philosophical ideas (the Big Bang theory and Darwinism) rather than honestly looking at the world around us. Science has very real limits on what it can tell us. Science is exceptionally useful, but it has boundaries. Pascal, the inventor of the barometer, said "Faith tells us what the senses cannot, but it is not contrary to their findings. It simply transcends, without contradicting them."

Returning to Isaac Newton, he had very good reason to believe in his Creator as he looked to the heavens and to call atheism “senseless.” He said, "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being... Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance." And chance is truly all Big Bang and Darwinism have when asked to account for the 3 dozen perfectly balanced features of our universe that make its existence and the existence of life possible. “We just got lucky, I guess,” is as far as they can take us.

When questioned as to how these (and a very long list of others you can read here) great scientists were “science deniers” or just plain stupid, they will often say something along the lines of, “They were ignorant.” They didn’t know about the theory of evolution so they sort of get a pass. But this is not only insulting to these great thinkers in the history of science, it’s insulting to great thinkers of today like Damadien, who invented the MRI or Sir John Eccles, a pioneer in the function of the brain and Nobel Prize winner. Although I don’t believe Eccles had it all correct, he was certainly right when he said, “We need to discredit the belief held by many scientists that science will ultimately deliver the final truth… Unfortunately, may scientists and interpreters of science don’t understand the limits of the discipline. They claim much more for it than they should. They argue that someday science will explain values, beauty, love, friendship, aesthetics, and literary quality. They say: ‘All of these will eventually be explicable in terms of brain performance. We only have to know more about the brain.’ That view is nothing more than a superstition that confuses both the public and many scientists.” He further states elsewhere, “I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition… We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.” Darwinism is about reductionism.

Those seem like exceptionally powerful words from a fairly heavy hitter in science, especially when he’s allegedly too stupid to be a scientist because he’s a Christian who believes God is the only way to answer many of science’s questions.

But this is one of the biggest problems with science today as we know it. It excludes certain answers to questions (and even some questions) before they are even considered, simply because they are not naturalistic in their scope. Think that’s a bit over the top, that science hasn’t made this claim? Hewlett and Peters wrote in 2006 that, “to be scientific in our era is to search for solely natural explanations.” To be sure, you get that this is a big deal—that “science” wishes to silence scientists who are creationists. Take a peek at what happened to Richard Sternberg when he allowed a paper written in favor of intelligent design into the journal The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Sternberg writes in 2008, “I faced retaliation, defamation, harassment, and a hostile work environment… designed to force me out as a Research Associate.” The scientific community didn’t have issues with the paper because it didn’t meet the scientific standard. It was peer-reviewed. It was edited as directed in that process. It was a good paper. But the premise was not built on the “solely natural explanations” that the religious zealots of naturalism have claimed for science.

Many atheists and secularists who engage in debates and discussions with creationists are not skeptics. In fact, many of them are ideologues who have little to no understanding about creation or of what science is. The philosophy of science is something many just don’t get. They buy into this notion that science can and will answer all our questions. That’s nonsense. But they eagerly await the next pronouncement from a journal that claims more “may have been,” “it’s believed,” and “some scientists think.” They don’t realize the nonsensical nature of Darwinism because their worldview will not allow it. They make unfounded claims about “unscientific” scientists or laypersons who question their ideology concerning molecules to man evolution. They are far from the freethinkers they claim to be. How they respond to questions and confrontation tells the story.

Be encouraged! Science is on the side of the creationist. God has spelled out His creative power and imagination in the natural world for us to study! Go take it in.

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