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by Charlie Wolcott

One of the common charges against Biblical Creationists (who hold that God made everything in six days, that there was a global flood, and that the earth is only 6000 years old) is that they do not and cannot do science. I have long argued that such notions are absolute nonsense and flat out lies. I will argue that not only can we do science, but we do BETTER science than the extreme majority of our mainstream, secular peers.

We have to understand that science is a tool, not an theory. Science is a tool we use to analyze how the universe works and operates; it does not tell us “truth.” As a tool, science can be used correct or incorrectly. It can build up and support or it can tear down and destroy. It can lead to truth, or it can be manipulated to teach lies. Just because someone calls it science or just because someone has “PhD” with their name does not make it truth.

The scientific method and scientific processes are about observing, testing, analyzing, and seeking how things work and operate. The secularists boast that science is about questioning things, though it sure is amazing to me how little they actually question. But if one is going to call it “science,” then it should be backed up by experimentation. While there are areas like theoretical physics, they are not in the same category as hard science” Nikola Tesla stated over 100 years ago that “Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.”

Do Creationists, who believe in the supernatural, miraculous creation, do real science? The answer is yes. I have known this for a long time, but at the International Conference on Creationism, I got to see it first-hand. During this conference, 29 full papers were presented along with 27 abstracts and 22 posters, each showcasing scientific study and either experimentation or pointing towards experimentation. My own poster didn’t have any experimental data because of not having equipment, but I did have data for what experiments should showcase. All the presentations had guidelines to follow including the concept, idea, materials, methods, data, conclusions, etc. All those things you may have seen in your high school science fair are actually what is practiced in the real world, too. For the posters, you just had a few minutes to discuss your research. For the papers and abstracts, you not only dealt with presenting much more detailed research, but you also faced questions from elite scientists.

“But you are all creationists and therefore you are just affirming your own worldview and your own position,” says the skeptic. Don’t the mainstream journals do the same? Do they allow critique from creationists as they demand we let them do with us? To this day, I have yet to hear a single complaint against Biblical Creationists that is not practiced by those very complainers. We aren’t perfect, and we do get things wrong. The science by YEC is not the gold standard; Scripture is. Likewise, to the secularist, their “science” is not the gold standard; to them naturalism and “millions of years” is. Don’t believe me? Question it in front them and they defend it religiously, like it is a sacred cow.

Coming into this conference, the very weekend we arrived, an article was released regarding updated models of how the universe came about due to the images of the James Webb Telescope. They are now calling to push the age of the universe to 27 billion years instead of the 13.8 billion we have been taught for decades. Fully intact galaxies and stars that totally refuted the current Big Bang models keep showing up. Instead of changing their models because they were refuted by the evidence, they simply change the target and tweak things to make it fit.

One comment really caught my attention. This doubling of the age of the universe was necessary so the “constants could evolve.” I teach physics for a living. Constants in science are, well, constant. Yet this is published and accepted for mainstream science. If a creationist were to say this, we’d be the laughingstock.

In 1994, Dr. Owen Lovejoy infamously sought to explain the hip of the Lucy fossil by using a Dremel to “fix” the hip. This was shown on public TV on NOVA. Imagine a Creationist doing this. Lovejoy gets a pass, but what about Creationists? We are held to far stricter standards. And guess what? The science we are doing still holds against such standards. That said, secularists can do true science, too. They can build computers and rockets and medical machines just as easily as we can. But when it comes to anything related to origins, secular science is truly the lowest quality work that can be conceived, with the false priests of “Word of Faith” people being their prime competition.

During the ICC, I got to see the film “Is Genesis History: Mountains After the Flood,” a quasi-sequel to the original film. The film primarily focused on the work of Andrew Snelling and John Whitmore in their investigation of the Grand Canyon and the folded rocks that take all sorts of wild shapes. Snelling was denied access to the Grand Canyon on religious grounds and had to win a lawsuit to do his work. The film focused on this study, walking the audience through the field work. This is not storytelling. Snelling is not an Evolutionist or an “Old Earther” who does little study and tells many stories. He gets out there and gets his hands dirty. We see Dr. Whitmore measuring the angles of the Coconino Sandstone in person, easily refuting decades of textbook literature which has it all wrong because they did not go out and actually do the measurements themselves. We see here what professional science looks like. You go out, you do the experiments, and your experiments can be replicated. Any mainstream person can go do what Snelling and Whitmore did. None of us can do what the “old earthers” tell us they did because it’s storytelling.

The old earth experiments they actually do look nothing like what they are extrapolating. They say you can bend a chunk of ice with just the right pressures without bending it, therefore stacks upon stacks of rocks can bend with just the right heat and pressure too. But they only did this with a single block of ice, not stacks of ice each of which would bend the way they did at different pressures. Also, when you DO bend rock like that, there are signs of fractures and some metamorphosis involved. What Snelling showcased was that no such pressures were present upon solid rock, and a blind test with a similar rock just upstream of the Grand Canyon that was NOT bent could not be distinguished. This proved that the folded rocks were bent when they were soft, justifying the Flood models and refuting the mainstream models.

There are things that creationists have gotten wrong, but my point is that if you hear someone claim that Creationists cannot do science, you can be sure of at least one of several things: 1) they have never read any Creationist literature, 2) they don’t understand science, and 3) they are in denial. We do science, and we do good science, certainly a higher quality than what the mainstream practices. It was Creationists who founded the extreme bulk of the fields of science we know today, and it is Creationists who are leading the studies on finding facts. Read the Creationist journals; we are constantly finding things. Read the mainstream journals; they are constantly getting things wrong. To say we don’t do science is either ignorance, naivete, or simple dishonesty. It is time we stop letting the scoffers set the terms and force them to actually engage our material. They won’t, because they wouldn’t know what to do, but don’t let them off the hook.

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