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poseurs or hypocrites. Many have spent many patient decades in
quite humble circumstances, often enduring public ridicule, yet still
working selflessly and doggedly in the service of their beliefs.
When they state, for instance, that evolution is inspired by Satan and
leads to pornography, homosexuality, and abortion, they are entirely
in earnest. They are describing what they consider to be clear and
evident facts of life.
Creation-science is not standard, orthodox, respectable science.
There is, and always has been, a lot of debate about what qualities an
orthodox and respectable scientific effort should possess. It can be
stated though that science should have at least two basic
requirements: (A) the scientist should be willing to follow the data
where it leads, rather than bending the evidence to fit some
preconceived rationale, and (B) explanations of phenomena should
not depend on unique or nonmaterial factors. It also helps a lot if
one's theories are falsifiable, reproducible by other researchers,
openly published and openly testable, and free of obvious internal
contradictions.
Creation-science does not fit that description at all. Creation-
science considers it sheer boneheaded prejudice to eliminate
miraculous, unique explanations of world events. After all, God, a
living and omnipotent Supreme Being, is perfectly capable of
directing mere human affairs into any direction He might please. To
simply eliminate divine intervention as an explanation for
phenomena, merely in order to suit the intellectual convenience of
mortal human beings, is not only arrogant and arbitrary, but absurd.
Science has accomplished great triumphs through the use of
purely naturalistic explanations. Over many centuries, hundreds of
scientists have realized that some questions can be successfully
investigated using naturalistic techniques. Questions that ca
answered in this way are not science, but instead are philosophy, art,
or theology. Scientists assume as a given that we live in a natural
universe that obeys natural laws.
It's conceivable that this assumption might not be the case.
The entire cognitive structure of science hinges on this assumption of
natural law, but it might not actually be true. It's interesting to
imagine the consequences for science if there were to be an obvious,
public, irrefutable violation of natural law.
Imagine that such a violation took place in the realm of
evolutionary biology. Suppose, for instance, that tonight at midnight
Eastern Standard Time every human being on this planet suddenly
had, not ten fingers, but twelve. Suppose that all our children were
henceforth born with twelve fingers also and we now found
ourselves a twelve-fingered species. This bizarre advent would
violate Neo-Darwinian evolution, many laws of human metabolism,
the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy, and quite a
few other such. If such a thing were to actually happen, we would
simply be wrong about the basic nature of our universe. We
thought we were living in a world where evolution occurred through
slow natural processes of genetic drift, mutation, and survival of the
fittest; but we were mistaken. Where the time had come for our
species to evolve to a twelve-fingered status, we simply did it in an
instant all at once, and that was that.
This would be a shock to the scientific worldview equivalent to
the terrible shock that the Christian worldview has sustained
through geology and Darwinism. If a shock of this sort were to strike
the scientific establishment, it would not be surprising to see
scientists clinging, quite irrationally, to their naturalist principles --
despite the fact that genuine supernaturalism was literally right at
hand. Bizarre rationalizations would surely flourish -- queer
"explanations" that the sixth fingers had somehow grown there
naturally without our noticing, or perhaps that the fingers were mere
illusions and we really had only ten after all, or that we had always
had twelve fingers and that all former evidence that we had once
had ten fingers were evil lies spread by wicked people to confuse us.
The only alternative would be to fully face the terrifying fact that a
parochial notion of "reality" had been conclusively toppled, thereby
robbing all meaning from the lives and careers of scientists.
This metaphor may be helpful in understanding why it is that
Whitcomb and Morris's *Genesis Flood* can talk quite soberly about
Noah storing dinosaurs in the Ark. They would have had to be
*young* dinosaurs, of course.... If we assume that one Biblical cubit
equals 17.5 inches, a standard measure, then the Ark had a volume
of 1,396,000 cubic feet, a carrying capacity equal to that of 522
standard railroad stock cars. Plenty of room!
Many other possible objections to the Ark story are met head-
on, in similar meticulous detail. Noah did not have to search the
earth for wombats, pangolins, polar bears and so on; all animals,
including the exotic and distant ones, were brought through divine
instinct to the site of the Ark for Noah's convenience. It seems
plausible that this divine intervention was, in fact, the begi
the migratory instinct in the animal kingdom. Similarly, hibernation
may have been created by God at this time, to keep the thousands of
animals quiet inside the Ark and also reduce the need for gigantic
animal larders that would have overtaxed Noah's crew of eight.
Evidence in the Biblical geneologies shows that pre-Deluge
patriarchs lived far longer than those after the Deluge, suggesting a
radical change in climate, and not for the better. Whitcomb and
Morris make the extent of that change clear by establishing that
before the Deluge it never rained. There had been no rainbows
before the Flood -- Genesis states clearly that the rainbow came into
existence as a sign of God's covenant with Noah. If we assume that
normal diffraction of sunlight by water droplets was still working in
pre-Deluge time (as seems reasonable), then this can only mean that
rainfall did not exist before Noah. Instead, the dry earth was
replenished with a kind of ground-hugging mist (Genesis 2:6).
The waters of the Flood came from two sources: the "fountains
of the great deep" and "the windows of heaven." Flood geologists
interpret this to mean that the Flood waters were subterranean and
also present high in the atmosphere. Before they fell to Earth by
divine fiat, the Flood's waters once surrounded the entire planet in a
"vapor canopy." When the time came to destroy his Creation, God
caused the vapor canopy to fall from outer space until the entire
planet was submerged. That water is still here today; the Earth in
Noah's time was not nearly so watery as it is today, and Noah's seas
were probably much shallower than ours. The vapor canopy may
have shielded the Biblical patriarchs from harmful cosmic radiation
that has since reduced human lifespan well below Methuselah's 969
years.
The laws of physics were far different in Eden. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics likely began with Adam's Fall. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics is strong evidence that the entire Universe
has been in decline since Adam's sin. The Second Law of
Thermodynamics may well end with the return of Jesus Christ.