[CottShop]

And for htose (who come from DC) who are confused about what science really is, and what it is not, and just which side practices ‘Real Science’ (And for htose who keep insisting that Macroevolution ‘isn’t about origins science’ lol:

“Confusing ‘origins science’ with ‘operational science’; the real origins of science

Scientific American also repeats the common claim that evolution and ‘methodological naturalism’ are the basis for modern advances in science:

Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape. [SA 85]

This fails to note the distinction between normal (operational) science, and origins or historical science.3 Normal (operational) science deals only with repeatable observable processes in the present, while origins science helps us to make educated guesses about origins in the past.

Operational science has indeed been very successful in understanding the world, and has led to many improvements in the quality of life, e.g., putting men on the moon and curing diseases. And it’s vital to note that many historians, of a wide number of religious persuasions, from Christians to atheists, point out that the founders of operational science were motivated by their belief that the universe was made by a rational Creator. An orderly universe makes perfect sense only if it were made by an orderly Creator. But if atheism or polytheism were true, then there is no way to deduce from these belief systems that the universe is (or should be) orderly.

Genesis 1:28 gives us permission to investigate creation, unlike say animism or pantheism that teach that the creation itself is divine. And since God is sovereign, He was free to create as He pleased. So where the Bible is silent, the only way to find out how His creation works is to experiment, not rely on man-made philosophies as did the ancient Greeks.

These founding scientists, like modern creationists, regarded ‘natural laws’ as descriptions of the way God upholds His creation in a regular and repeatable way (Col. 1:15–17), while miracles are God’s way of upholding His creation in a special way for special reasons. Because creation finished at the end of day 6 (Gen. 2:1–3), creationists following the Bible would expect that God has since mostly worked through ‘natural laws’ except where He has revealed in the Bible that He used a miracle. And since ‘natural laws’ are descriptive, they cannot prescribe what cannot happen, so they cannot rule out miracles. Scientific laws do not cause or forbid anything any more than the outline of a map causes the shape of the coastline.

Because creation finished at the end of day 6, biblical creationists would try to find natural laws for every aspect of operation science, and would not invoke a miracle to explain any repeating event in nature in the present, despite Scientific American’s scare tactics. This can be shown in a letter I wrote to an inquirer who believed that atoms had to be held together by miraculous means:

‘Natural laws’ also help us make predictions about future events. In the case of the atom, the explanation of the electrons staying in their orbitals is the positive electric charge and large mass of the nucleus. This enables us to make predictions about how strongly a particular electron is held by a particular atom, for example, making the science of chemistry possible. While this is certainly an example of Colossians 1:17, simply saying ‘God upholds the electron’ doesn’t help us make predictions.

And in my days as a university teaching assistant before joining CMI, I marked an examination answer wrong because it said ‘God made it so’ for a question about the frequency of infrared spectral lines, instead of discussing atomic masses and force constants.

So, Scientific American is wrong to imply that creationists are in any way hindered in real operational scientific research, either in theory or in practice.

In contrast, evolution is a speculation about the unobservable and unrepeatable past. Thus, it comes under origins science. Rather than observation, origins science uses the principles of causality (everything that has a beginning has a cause4) and analogy (e.g., we observe that intelligence is needed to generate complex coded information in the present, so we can reasonably assume the same for the past). And because there was no material intelligent designer for life, it is legitimate to invoke a non-material designer for life. Creationists invoke the miraculous only for origins science, and as shown, this does not mean they will invoke it for operational science.

The difference between operational and origins science is important for seeing through common silly assertions such as:

… evolution is as thoroughly established as the picture of the solar system due to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.5

However, we can observe the motion of the planets, but no one has ever observed an information-increasing change of one type of organism to another.

http://creation.com/refuting-evolution-2-chapter-1-argument-creationism-is-religion-not-science

[RobbyS]

I hate to use the word “miracle,” except as another word for evidence, or sign that leads beyond present science, or even contradicts it. . What I hate about Evolutionism is that it ignores the lack of unity among the scientific disciplines and turns a scientific theory into a kind of metaphysics, and it is not up to the task. It is one result of the failure of idealism to provide a metaphysic to replace Greek Metaphysics. On the other hand, it does understand that realism is the only basis for scientific work. Without realism we fall into skepticism and pace Dawkins et al. methodical doubt is fruitless unless it is founded on something analogous to realism, which gives us trust in our senses.