The origins debate has brought in an interesting aspect about the use of science. The Evolutionary side practices this aspect religiously and demands the creation side do the same. What is it? Doing science in a vacuum. Does that mean we go up into space and perform science there? No. Doing science in a vacuum means you’re completely ignoring or setting aside any other data that is already present.
I get asked all the time where the scientific evidence for the Biblical Creation is and I cannot point to pure science. Why? Because pure science cannot answer that question. To be able to answer the past, I need more than scientific processes. I am going to delve deeper into the difference between historical science and observational science next week, but to give you a preview, you cannot scientifically prove you read this post. Why not? You can have the document in front of you and you can cite information that came from it, however you cannot repeat the process. If you tried, that would be reading it a second time. You cannot scientifically prove you read it the first time. You can’t repeat it. You can, however, historically prove you read it. More on that next week. My point is, to do science, particularly on past events, you need more than just science. You need history. You need anthropology. You need archaeology. You need written documents. You need oral records. The problem is when you try to do science without taking of all these into consideration.
The Old Earth Creation model follows the general evolutionary timeline for mankind to start coming around in the hundreds of thousands of years ago and if they have an Adam and Eve, they would be around about 30,000 years ago. The Young Earth model has man arriving suddenly at 6000 years ago in Day 6 of Creation and the people groups dispersed shortly after the Flood, around 4400 years ago due to the Tower of Babel dispersion. Here is my question. If the Old Earth models are true, where is the history of man? According to several old earth models, Adam and Eve lived about 30,000 years ago, and at that time they had the power of understanding language and could communicate clearly, both with God and each other. Where is the history for the 25,600 years of an intelligent man to the first records of modern written history?
Some will say, “Writing had not been developed yet.” I can give credence for that argument, however regarding writing, there is no evidence anywhere of it “gradually” developing. There are nice theories about how it developed, but we have no records of a gradual development. It appeared suddenly with full language, letters, context, grammar. If the Young Earth account of history is true, this “sudden appearance” makes sense because God would have instilled in Adam a full language and writing it down would not be an issue. If any Old Earth models are true, this is a hole in their model that remains unaccounted for.
We have cave paintings that seem rather “amateurish” to some degree. These date tens of thousands of years old to hundreds of thousands of years. The secular concept is that these were primitive mankind showing their battles with large creatures. However, the only places we see adults writing on walls like that are to leave messages for other people. The Juarez Mountains (in Juarez, Mexico) have two pieces of art work on the mountains. One is “La Biblica Es La Verdad. Leela” (The Bible is the Truth. Read it). The churches of Juarez gather every few years to white wash the mountain. It is the largest Biblical message on mountains in the world. On the other side is a seemingly childish depiction of a horse. However, this was white washed to be a sign to travelers that there was an outpost there. But let me throw in a wrench to the common understanding of these cave drawings. What if they were not done by primitive man, but by children? Our kids draw on walls all the time. This makes absolute sense in a post Tower of Babel dispersion. But if from primitive man, where is the history for tens or hundreds of thousands of years? Cavemen were not bumbling half-apes with only grunting language at best. King David was a caveman for a few years of his life. Would it not be reasonable to suggest children in a hunting group, or even merely a travelling group, staying in a cave to escape the weather or a war could have done those drawings?
Oral traditions are greatly misunderstood today because we don’t live in one. The oral tradition of the passage of history is not unreliable as is perceived today. It’s actually extremely reliable. The telephone game is the common example to refute this idea, but any who uses this argument has not playing this game with an oral tradition culture. In oral tradition cultures, they emphasize on mnemonics and memorization. These cultures have incredible memories. Many Jews were illiterate. They could not read, so what did they do? They memorized the Torah. It was expected every 12-year-old boy would have the first five books of the OT memorized. Try playing the telephone game with that mindset. You’d get a perfect transmission of the message, or at the most minimal errors.
Cultures that had an oral tradition would have a history that far exceeds the written language. Why aren’t there any cultural legends that describes even a few tens of thousands of years? Why do the oral traditions actually point back to a recent creation, a massive flood with a few survivors, and a dispersion? What really surprised me about Eternity in Their Hearts by Don Richardson is the fact that polytheism actually came from the lost knowledge of the One True God. The secular models insist it was the other way around, that the monotheistic religions got their ideas from simplifying the polytheistic models. Again, where is the history for the secular claims? We have it for the Biblical account.
We cannot do science in a vacuum. We cannot do science properly without understanding the historical context, not just of our day but of the past. The old earth models have absolutely NOTHING to anchor their models to. If Adam and Eve lived about 30,000 years ago, where did that number come from? The Bible? Science? Historical data? The answer is… NOWHERE. It’s a made up number. So are all the figures of millions of years. Scientists try to get dates established with their methods, however with such a wide range of results from the methods, which is reliable? Because such methods are done in a vacuum, they have no basis for any of their claims, let alone any legitimacy of their methods.
When YEC does their science, they anchor to a historical account, namely Genesis. But we do not look at the Bible alone. We look at history. We look at archaeology. We look at anthropology. We look at all these well-established fields and consider them together. The secular models depend exclusively on their dating methods, which provide one giant circular reasoning argument. It is not uneducated to believe in a young earth. YEC tend to be far more knowledgeable on numerous fields, in part because we have to be, but also because we have the data that supports our position. The written and oral history matches with precisely what we should expect from the Biblical account to be true.
Which science do you support? That which is done in a vacuum and completely misses what the other sources have to say, or that which constantly checks with the context to see if the results match with all the other fields? The secularist will deny the Bible has any input into the equation and that they need to do science to validate the historical accuracy; however, what validates their science? They can only point to themselves for that. With the Bible, however, it not only matches itself, but everything else matches with it. When you do science, check with all the other fields and include the Bible in the equation. When you do that, the science will work itself out and reveal the truth, as the Bible always does when it is used as the standard.
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