You may have seen memes on social media that claim things like this:
“Cosmology disproves a created universe. Biology disproves Adam and Eve. Genetics disproves intelligent design. Engineering disproves Noah’s Ark. Geology disproves Noah’s flood. Statistics disproves the power of prayer. History shows religion and believers are anti-science. Ethics disproves God being good.” and so on and claim there is no way the Bible and creation could be true.
Well, that’s a claim. But does actual science agree with this claim? Does research about history support this claim? Here are some crucial facts:
1) BIBLICAL ORIGINS OF SCIENCE. Is the God of the Bible really anti-science, or did He invent science as a way to help us check His claims and to give us a chance to use the brains that He created in us and make major contributions to life? Creationists/Jews/Christians developed almost all the foundational methods of science including the scientific method itself, the peer review process, peer reviewed scientific journals and many others.
Dr. James Hannam (Ph.D. in the history of science from Cambridge who is not a creationist himself) writes:
“…Christians believe that God created the world and ordained the laws of nature. He is the guarantor of constant and rational laws, such that investigating the world can consequently be a religious duty. It’s easy to forget that, until the 19th century, science had almost no practical applications. A religious imperative to study nature provided almost the only reason to bother doing it. It’s no surprise that so many scientific pioneers were devout men: Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, Michael Faraday, Georg Mendel, and James Clerk Maxwell, to name just a few.”
https://www.patheos.com/resources/additional-resources/2011/04/science-and-christianity-can-get-on-better-than-you-think-james-hannam-04-14-2011
Christianity actually gave science it’s golden age esp. in terms of advance in distinguishing truth from deceptions and methods of science. The modern scientific method, peer review, falsification, 1st scientific societies, 1st scientific journals and other foundations of modern science were all developed/pioneered/promoted by Christians. Dr. Hugh G. Gauch Jr. from Cornell writes:
“The thirteenth century began with a scientific method that lacked experimental methods and lacked an approach to truth that applied naturally to physical things. It concluded with an essentially complete scientific method with a workable notion of truth. Because of Robert Grosseteste at Oxford, Albertus Magnus at Paris, and other medieval scholars, it was the golden age of scientific method. Never before or since that century have the philosophy and method of science been advanced so greatly.” Scientific Method in Practice Hugh G. Gauch Jr. (a professor in plant genetics from Cornell University), Cambridge University Press, p. 52, 58
2) BIBLICAL ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC FIELDS: Creationists/Jews/Christians were by far the foremost founders and pioneers of nearly all major fields of science and they did so while believing in a Creator whose principles and incredibly sophisticated designs in nature actually inspired their scientific work. Here are a few:
Here are a few things that Christian and creationists pioneered:
• 1ST RECORDED EXPERIMENT WITH A CONTROL GROUP: The first scientific experiment with a control group was done by Daniel in the Bible. See Daniel 1.
• MODERN SCIENTIFIC METHOD. *Bishop Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon
• ENCYCLOPEDIA, SCIENTIFIC. The first scientific encyclopedia featuring articles, pictures, alphabetical entries–was prepared by a creation science believing minister, John Harris.
• PHYSICS. Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Thompson (Kelvin), Tait, Lemaître and MANY more.
• SCIENCE & ROCKETRY: Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Dr. Wernher von Braun, father of space science, 1st NASA director most responsible for putting men on the moon.
• GENETICS: Gregor Mendel
• COMPUTER SCIENCE. Blaise Pascal, Charles Babbage, etc.
• ANTISEPTIC SURGERY/BACTERIOLOGY VACCINATION. Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, Anton von Leeuwenhoek, Edward Jenner
• RELATIVITY THEORY. Einstein built his theory of relativity on the work of three men, two of whom were Christians: Bernhard Riemann & James Clerk Maxwell. He also used the work of Michelson-Morely & Morley was a Christian.
• CHEMISTRY: Robert Boyle is called by some the Father of Chemistry. Michael Faraday, John Dalton, a Quaker, gave us the atomic theory behind chemistry.
• SYNTHETICS: George Washington Carver
• ANESTHESIOLOGY. Crawford Long, James Young Simpson
• GEOLOGY. Nels Steno the Father of Geology.
• THERMODYNAMICS. James Joule and Lord Kelvin
• WAVE THEORY OF LIGHT. Thomas Young, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, etc.
• FIELD THEORY. Michael Faraday first envisioned field theory.
• OPTICS. George Berkeley idealist philosopher and Christian bishop, showed how images form upside down in the eye.
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): Dr. Raymond Damidian
See more at:
https://www.icr.org/article/bible-believing-scientists-past/
and
https://creation.com/biblical-roots-of-modern-science
3) BELIEVERS AND NOBEL PRIZES: Jews have won an incredible ~22% of Nobel prizes with only 0.2% of the world’s population, Christians have won over 65% of Nobel prizes with only ~1/3 of the world’s population. Combined, that is a stunning % of all Nobel prizes in history, while atheists have won ~3.6-8.9% of Nobel prizes with at times up to 20-25% of world population. And this has saved at least 7 billion lives (see this link for details on that: http://blog.truth-is-life.org/education/nobel-prizes/).
4) ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE: Christians developed the original theistic concept of the Big Bang and it has brought many to belief in God.
Big Bang
http://scienceuprising.com/bang
5) NOAH’S FLOOD AND FOSSIL RECORD
Dr. Walter Veith was an atheist/Darwinian professor, with a Ph.D. in zoology. Now he is creationist because of scientific evidence. He writes about the fossil order that we should usually see if creation is true and a flood really happened:
“The type of fossil found in the various layers changes as one goes up the geological column, from invertebrates, fish, amphibians, and reptiles, to the mammals and birds in the upper layers. This order in the fossil record is one of the prime evidences used by scientists to establish evolution as a fact. However, the sequence is not from simple organisms to complex organisms as evolutionists suggest, but rather from:
1) marine sessile [sealife that doesn’t move such as shells] to
2) free swimming [other sea life that can move] to
3) land dwelling.
There is no simple generalized animal in the fossil record that proves that organisms develop from simple to complex.
Surprisingly, most of the organisms of the past were much larger and more impressive than present day animals. In fact, the fossil record is evidence for devolution rather than evolution.
“The Fossil Record” by Dr. Walter Veith.
http://storage.amazingdiscoveries.org/assets/files/ADDownloads/Section PDFs/The Fossil Record.pdf
The fossil record is almost completely backwards from what Darwin claimed. All the major body plans (~30-50 phyla) appear in the lowest layers of the earth (the Cambrian). Many phyla and a myriad of species die out (some say up to 99%), but there is more variation as you go up, but it’s severely limited to being within the original phyla/body plans.
Dr. Valentine, a Darwinian expert on the Cambrian says:
“Darwin had a lot of trouble with the fossil record because if you look at the record of phyla in the rocks as fossils why when they first appear we already see them all. The phyla are fully formed. It’s as if the phyla were created first… it’s kind of a top down succession, you start with this basic body plans, the phyla, and you diversify them into classes,…orders and so on. So the fossil record is kind of backwards from…what you would expect from Darwin’s ideas.”
James W. Valentine, “On the Origin of Phyla: Interviews with James W. Valentine”,
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/php/video_show_item.php?id=7
Dr. Kurt Wise studied Darwinism in paleontology at Harvard…so he knows its claims very well. He has found that science is wayyyy more supportive of creation claims than Darwinism claims…in the fossil record area…95% against Darwinism and supporting creation.
“I thought about seven of the strongest arguments…for evolution and worked through each of those to determine a creationist response.
One of those questions was the claim that the fossil record or is explained by evolution. Is that in fact true? It was a very difficult project. It involved a lot of work…because it involved something that I don’t think anyone has ever tried to do, which is to take all the organisms that exist, from bacteria to humans…determine what the evolutionary tree should look like and…then check that order against the actual fossil record.
The result of that work..was that the vast majority of evolutionary lineages do not in fact correspond to the order…in the fossil record…it’s hard to do real statistics on it,…but roughly 95% of the lineages do not have an order predicted by evolution that corresponds to the fossil record.
There were only a few groups that seemed to have a correspondence between the fossil record order and the order that evolution predicted, in fact a little less than 5%.
In science we generally think that if a hypothesis can explain 95% of the date, who cares about the 5%…but one of those groups nagged at me, the…higher order groups of plants that seemed to fit the order. It was intriguing. [he goes on to develop the floating forest hypothesis which can explain this plant order well although it still has a few things to work out].”
Wise, Kurt. “Floating a Forest: A Study in Creationist Theory Formation(~4:00-9:00)”. Presented at the 2020 Gateway Creation Conference (creationconf.com).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyvIotyo_nw. See also Wise, Kurt P. “Completeness of the Fossil Record” November 23, 2009.
https://answersingenesis.org/fossils/fossil-record/completeness-of-the-fossil-record/.
Dr. Wise says:
“Let’s begin by considering the nature of the fossil record. Most people don’t realize that in terms of numbers of fossils 95% of the fossil record consists of shallow marine organisms such as corals and shellfish.6 Within the remaining 5%, 95% are all the algae and plant/tree fossils, including the vegetation that now makes up the trillions of tonnes of coal, and all the other invertebrate fossils including the insects. Thus the vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) together make up very little of the fossil record—in fact, 5% of 5%, which is a mere 0.25% of the entire fossil record.
So comparatively speaking there are very, very few amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal fossils, yet so much is often made of them. For example, the number of dinosaur skeletons in all the world’s museums (both public and university) totals only about 2,100.7 Furthermore, of this 0.25% of the fossil record which is vertebrates, only 1% of that 0.25% (or 0.0025%) are vertebrate fossils that consist of more than a single bone! For example, there’s only one Stegosaurus skull that has been found, and many of the horse species are each represented by only one specimen of one tooth!8
Wise, K.P., ‘The Flood and the fossil record’, an informal talk given at the Institute for Creation Research, San Diego (USA) on August 17, 1988.
6) NOAH’S ARK: Many claim that Noah’s ark couldn’t have floated. That is simply not true. Korea has been the #1 ship building country in the world for quite a few years. Experts at the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Engineering in Taejon have found that Noah’s ark has the most stable ship shape found so far, capable of withstanding waves up to 100 feet tall or more.
The conclusion of the peer reviewed research says they evaluated 12 hull shapes and found the Ark’s hull shape to be the best possible shape for overall stability.
“When we took the weighted average including overturning stability, such as seakeeping safety 4, structural safety 4 and overturning safety 2, we derived the total safety index as shown in Figure 9. These results also showed that the Ark had superior safety compared to the other hull forms…
The voyage limit of the Ark, estimated from modern passenger ships’ criteria reveals that it could have navigated sea conditions with waves higher than 30 metres.”
Safety investigation of Noah’s Ark in a seaway
https://creation.com/safety-investigation-of-noahs-ark-in-a-seaway
or
https://dl0.creation.com/articles/p028/c02813/j8_1_26-36.pdf
7) GENETICS/ADAM AND EVE:
Many scientists have found that superficial mutatations are common and make some changes, new species, etc. BUT mutations that change basic structures, embryos, etc. are known to be lethal. In addition, Cornell professor Dr. John Sanford pioneered the concept of genetic entropy showing that way over 99% of mutations are neutral or losing genetic information, which is backwards from what Darwinism requires.
Both of these scientific facts make universal common descent completely impossible.
Dr. Sanford used to an atheist professor teaching Darwinism…but later realized it was fraud and rejected it for creation. He wrote a scientific book on genetic entropy one of many defeaters for Darwinism. He talks about it here.
Dr. Robert Carter has very strong evidence for the reality of Adam and Eve from genetics.
The Non Mythical Adam and Eve (Dr Robert Carter, Ph.D. marine biology)
Dr. Robert Carter – Meet Your Ancestors: Adam & Eve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BV-bUXqALE
8) GEOLOGY: Plate tectonics actually requires a young earth. One reason is because the earth’s crust that goes deep into the earth is still cool. It would have melted if it was millions of years old. Dr. Emil Silvestru talks about this in this talk (and so do Dr. Kurt Wise, Dr. John Baumgardner among others)
Geology and Deep Time (strong evidence for a global flood) by Dr. Emil Silvestru
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE
10) DOES PRAYER WORK?
Dr William Sadler wrote the textbook “The Practice of Psychiatry”. He said prayer protects people from mental diseases:
“Prayer is a powerful and effectual worry remover. Men and women who have learned to pray with childlike sincerity, literally talking to and communing with the Heavenly Father, are in possession of a great secret whereby they can cast their care upon God, knowing that He cares for us. A clear conscience…[protects] the mind against neuroticism.” William Samuel Sadler, “Practice of Psychiatry”, P 1012.***
The prestigious Mayo Clinic summarized ~1200 scientific studies and said that belief in God brings many benefits in mental and physical health (many of these tests were on Christians).
“Mayo Clinic researchers reviewed published studies, meta-analyses, systematic reviews and subject reviews. The authors report a majority of the nearly 350 studies of physical health and 850 studies of mental health that have used religious and spiritual variables have found that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes.”[1]
The value of spirituality is illustrated in the story of Ruby Bridges. For many years, black children and white children went to different schools in America. But finally, the government decided to have all students study together. Ruby Bridges was a 6 year old girl. Her parents were strong believers in God and had taught her to trust in God through difficulties. They also helped her learn to pray for those who treated her wrongly. Many people the changes in society. They screamed and threw things at Ruby because they didn’t like the changes. But Ruby just kept smiling and just kept praying for them. She said:
“After my mom stopped coming to school with me, I started praying on the way to school. The things people yelled at me didn’t seem to teach me. Prayer was my protection…
My parents shielded me as best they could, but I knew problems had come to our family because I was going to the white school. My father lost his job. The white owners of a grocery store told us not to shop there anymore. Even my grandparents in Mississippi suffered. The owner of the land they had sharecropped for 25 years said everyone knew it was their granddaughter causing trouble in New Orleans and asked them to move…
We (her teacher Mrs. Henry and her) stayed a part of each other’s lives It turns out that because of what I went through on the front lines of the battle for school integration, people recognize my name and are eager to hear what I have to say about racism and education today. I speak to groups around the country and when I visit schools Mrs. Henry [her first grade teacher] often comes with me…We tell kids our story and talk about the lessons of the past and how we can still learn from them today, especially that every child is a unique human being fashioned by God.[2]
It’s because of believers like Ruby Bridges that most schools now have students from many different races.
Here are a few of 1000s of scientific studies show that prayer, belief in God and especially belief in God improves mental health, happiness and prevents mental problems in life, improves physical health and many other benefits.
- In a 12-year follow up of all articles appearing in American Journal of Psychiatry and Archives of General Psychiatry, 72% of the religious commitment variables were beneficial to mental health; participation in religious services, social support, prayer and relationship with God were beneficial in 92% of citations.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1532477 - The Iona Institute reported:
“A meta-analysis of all studies, both published and unpublished, relating to religious involvement and longevity was carried out in 2000. Forty-two studies were included, involving some 126,000 subjects. Active religious involvement increased the chance of living longer by some 29%, and participation in public religious practices, such as church attendance, increased the chance of living longer by 43%. http://www.religiouspractice.ie/Religious_practice-2.pdf http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Papers/rel_mort_meta.pdf - The prestigious Mayo Clinic reported the following on December 11, 2001:
“In an article also published in this issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Mayo Clinic researchers reviewed published studies, meta-analyses, systematic reviews and subject reviews that examined the association between religious involvement and spirituality and physical health, mental health, health-related quality of life and other health outcomes. The authors report a majority of the nearly 350 studies of physical health and 850 studies of mental health that have used religious and spiritual variables have found that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes.”
http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2001-rst/921.html - Surveys by Gallup, the National Opinion Research Center & the Pew Organization conclude that spiritually committed people are twice as likely to report being “very happy” than the least religiously committed people. Is Religion Dangerous? p. 156, citing David Myers The Science of Subjective Well-Being Guilford Press 2007
[1] ” Religion, spirituality, and medicine: application to clinical practice.”, Koenig HG, JAMA. 2000;284:1708 https://www.childrensmercy.org/content/uploadedFiles/Religious involvement spirituality and medicine Implications for clinical practice.pdf
[2] Ruby Bridges interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0bhSQR14nw
11) DARWINISM IS IRRELEVANT: In actual fact, science shows that Darwinism is irrelevant to nearly all science and against numerous scientific facts as above.
Dr. Marc Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School stated:
“In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.” (he’s lamenting this fact and calling for other fields of biology to use common descent ideas more). Quoted in the Boston Globe, 23 October 2005.
Dr. Philip Skell (Ph.D. in chemistry from Duke University), Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry at Penn State University, has authored ~180 papers in major peer reviewed journals. He wrote in an article,
“[T]he modern form of Darwin’s theory has been raised to its present high status because it’s said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct? “While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky’s dictum that ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,’ most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas,”
A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000. “Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.”
I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.
I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others.
I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin’s theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.”
From my conversations with leading researchers it had became [sic] clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.
Skell, P., Why do we invoke Darwin? The Scientist 16:10.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/16649/title/Why-Do-We-Invoke-Darwin-/
In stark contrast, creation science has been crucial to the progress of science. Dr. James Hannam (Ph.D. in the history of science from Cambridge) writes:
“…Christians believe that God created the world and ordained the laws of nature. He is the guarantor of constant and rational laws, such that investigating the world can consequently be a religious duty. It’s easy to forget that, until the 19th century, science had almost no practical applications. A religious imperative to study nature provided almost the only reason to bother doing it. It’s no surprise that so many scientific pioneers were devout men: Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, Michael Faraday, Georg Mendel, and James Clerk Maxwell, to name just a few.”
https://www.patheos.com/resources/additional-resources/2011/04/science-and-christianity-can-get-on-better-than-you-think-james-hannam-04-14-2011
12) GOD-GOOD: If we look around us in the world,
The origins of our universe, the fine tuning of life, DNA, gorgeous sunrises, animal antics, the exquisite joy of love, complex brains and much vast evidence inspires many top scientists to say, “I stand in awe of God because of what He has done through His creation.” Dr. James Tour. In stark contrast, Dr. Yuval Harari says American democracy lasted 250 years because “the idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation.” Historians Will/Ariel Durant say: “There is no significant example in history…of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”