Chapter I

While the disclaimer wars in Cobb County and elsewhere illustrated the surface patina of the creationist milieu, the “Design Hypothesis” game plan in Ohio went way beyond the generalities of the Georgia textbook sticker to redefine the nature of science. Science Excellence For All Ohioans drew a distinction between “empirical (or experimental)” science and “historical science” where pretty much nothing can be “proved” for events in the past because they “cannot be verified experimentally,” SEAO (2001; 2003). This way of keeping Deep Time origins issues isolated from contemporary investigation had been an undercurrent in creationist thinking from the start (especially when dismissing fossil evidence for evolution as mere speculative guesswork), but the explicit historical/experimental demarcation was a child of Charles Thaxton’s The Mystery of Life’s Origin in the 1980s, Rusbelt (2010).

Regular creationists found it a most congenial cleaver, of course, picked up by Batten (2002a) for example, while Hanegraaff (2005h) fiddled with the terminology somewhat by contrasting “operation science and origin science,” and similar distinctions arose as Steve Fuller (2008a, 145-150) approached Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity argument, showing how in practice Fuller could end up reasoning much like Calvert and the YEC brigade. By the time of Lycklama (2008), Lacey (2011) and SABBSA (2013b) this “operation science” distinction had become yet another entrenched dogma, prominently on display when Ken Ham debated Bill Nye at Ham’s Creation Museum in February 2014.

That even historical events can be tested by present observation and experiment (forensic scientists do it all the time in criminal cases) evidently eludes Creation Science and Intelligent Design methodology in equal measure. This may reflect how few of either actually do science of any kind, let alone ones where “observation” is liable to leak over into the “origin” danger zone. Nor was it obligatory for religious scientists to cleave along the arbitrary fault lines proposed by antievolutionists, as the blog of Christian biology teacher Defensedefumer (2010a) reminded Answers in Genesis that all science employs observation as basis for their justifiable conclusions.

Veterinarian Dan Korow (2001a) was most obtuse on this issue at the Alpha Omega Institute, illustrating by his own experience how past action could be inferred (such as the wound marks on a dead pet suggesting a dog bite) but insisting that kind of reasoning precluded “direct observation, experimentation, retesting, and refutation” once you are into “millions to billions of years” (as though a tooth mark on a fossil or the telltale isotope content of deposits aren’t just as firmly observable than comparable phenomena closer to today). With that, Korow decided evolution and Creation “are statements of faith, and are inherently religious in nature.”

Online Bible instructor RockieSue Fordham (2009a) saw far less equivalence, though, holding evolution’s failure to distinguish Operational from Historical science served to “successfully entangle Satan’s lies with the scientific truth.” Such attitudes continue in the online world, where the 144 character limit in Twitter-land seems tailor made for glib superficiality. During an exchange I had with creationist Joseph O’Lear on Twitter in April 2015, for example, he summarily flicked aside science topics like the reptile-mammal transition with repeated links to his own short posting, O’Lear (2014), which characterized the regular science work (that he showed no inclination whatsoever to investigate) that did not follow this Operational/Historical distinction was but a “putrid looking mess.” And so do antievolutionists use the Historical science trope as a handy slide to move them as far from the data as possible, rescuing their neurons from the potentially exhausting process of actually studying something.

If one wants to get really technical about things, though, a lot of “observational” science involves theoretical contexts (you don’t actually “see” protons, or “observe” distant stars as they are at the time of their observation, for example, but rely on inferences that the instrument readings or photographic plate represents something real beyond the researcher’s literal grasp). The implications of deductive versus inductive reasoning, and related methodological concerns that crop up when antievolutionism takes up science (including Thaxton’s pseudoscientific open mindedness about Velikovskian catastrophism), but for the moment I am reminded of the old Thoreau jibe that “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

The Ohio antievolutionists were resolved to redefine what “science” meant in another way. SEAO (2003) argued how the TTC approach could avoid “thorny questions like evolution vs. design and traditional science vs. naturalism,” which coyly presupposed there was some brand of “traditional science” out there that had been doing something notably distinct from “naturalism.”

The former standard was succinct on how natural figured in what science does: “Recognize that scientific knowledge is limited to natural explanations for natural phenomena based on evidence from our senses or technological extensions.” But that first “natural” was an objectionable impediment in the covertly theistic perspective of Calvert and Lattimer, and in their October replacement Michael Cochran, Deborah Owens-Fink and James Turner had more wording minus one: “Recognize that science is a systematic method of continuing investigation, based on observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, and theory building, which leads to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

The omission of one “natural” while retaining the other was no mere quibble, as one can read much the same targeted definition of science in the YEC textbook Exploring Creation With General Science, Jay Wile (2000, 426): “A branch of study dedicated to the accumulation and classification of observable facts in order to formulate general laws about the natural world.”

As Creation Science has been around long enough to have refined their educational boundaries, it is instructive to notice how in the same General Science volume Wile illustrated how this amended “scientific method” could be applied to any subject. Choosing (surprise!) Christianity and Messianic prophecies (one can imagine comparable applications for “scientists” writing in Delhi or Tehran), Wile (2000, 50-55) reviewed such resources as Ezekiel’s prophecies and Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict to confidently conclude “that there is evidence for the hypothesis that the Bible is the Word of God” (as opposed to competitors in Delhi or Tehran who might reach differing certainties off in their corners of the “natural world”). Just to warn you, though, McDowell (1972) happens to be a work whose analytical proficiency is on a par with Nostradamus prophecy mongering, as noted in Chapter 6 of Downard (2004), which should give you some idea of just what range of “scientific” conclusions can embellish a General Science textbook once that other inconvenient “natural” is pried loose.

In a similar vein, objecting to the judge in McLean v. Arkansas ruling “that an account of life’s origin which postulates a Divine Creator is not scientific,” Hank Hanegraaff (2005g) illustrated what “observable” means in his creationist context:

It’s ironic that in an age of scientific enlightenment, skeptics still claim that science deals with what is observable while theology only deals with what is unobservable—especially in light of the fact that we can’t even explain what science is in the first place. Not only this, but much of what is being touted today as science isn’t really observable at all—things like quarks, electromagnetic fields, and even the evolving big bang theory. In fact, if we’re to consider only what is observable to be scientific, we’d still be saying that the earth is flat.

Truth is, God Himself bases his own integrity upon certain scientific premises (e.g., Jer. 31:35-37). For instance: the fact that Christ rose from the dead is testable and verifiable. To prove that he rose bodily, Jesus said to his disciples, see, touch, and eat with me (Luke 24:36-42; John 20:24-31; 1 John 1:1-4).

The point is, the Bible and science are neither mutually exclusive nor contradictory—they fit together like hand and glove.

And what does Jeremiah 31:35-37 say about “scientific premises” back in the Old Testament? Here’s the King James Version:

35 Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The Lord of hosts is his name:

36 If those ordinances depart from me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever.

37 Thus saith the Lord; if heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord.

Clearer now?

So, a poetic Bible exhortation by the “weeping prophet” intended to buck up the faithful in a time of supreme national crisis (King Josiah’s attempts to steer the realm away from the apostate idolatry of his predecessors didn’t prevent Nebuchadnezzar II destroying the Temple in 587 BCE) by saying how the Lord would stand by the people of Israel so long as the sun shines, the moon and stars shunt along at night, and the waves slosh, relates somehow to the scientific study and nature of stars, orbiting celestial bodies, and the aggregate behavior of water molecules in motion under the application of tidal gravity?

Indeed, the third verse sounds suspiciously like the opposite of scientific curiosity: the Lord laying down a dare line that modern science has more than significantly stepped across. Either the heavens are so immeasurable and the “foundations of the earth” so inscrutable that no one could ever hope to discern their nature—or if they ever were found out, as science is busily doing today, this would be a trespass into the workings of the divine toy box sufficiently egregious to signal the summary withdrawal of support for Israel. Are then the deep space snaps of the Hubble telescope and seismic probes of the lower mantel some eschatological offenses that might be cause for why the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has heated up so much lately?

As strained as Hanegraaff’s summary invocation of Jeremiah was, his application of observation was even more problematic. The notion that electromagnetic fields aren’t “observable” because you don’t see them within the spectrum open to our limited human vision (you most certainly can observe and measure them quite precisely with other instruments constructed for that purpose) while reading the visible light reflections of ink spots recording the uncorroborated assertion of a purported historical occurrence (Jesus’ resurrected body) are somehow objective in a way the electromagnetic spectrum isn’t (or the visible light observations of the ink sequences recounting events in the Book of Mormon are apparently not, given Hanegraaff’s antipathy to the LDS) shows yet another way in which “testable and verifiable” could play out if the sectarian creationist version of science ever gets entry into the public school system.