Jonathan Sarfati: A Christian view of natural laws

 on the allegation made by Scientific American that creationism is religion, not science.

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.

Jonathan Sarfati

chapter 1, Refuting Evolution 2

Now online here