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What Science Tells Us about the Age of the Creation
pg 6 The Catastrophic Failure of Modern Science
Modern science cannot infer how the creation occurred because God utilized processes in creation that we do not observe in the present. Since God claims to have ended all the works of the Creation on the seventh day,9 science would fail to deduce the mode, the tempo, and the order of creation. In general, modern science will fail to infer the correct process when that process is unobserved by humans in the present. Because of this, modern science will certainly err in its study of such things as the conception and resurrection of Christ—because we do not observe fatherless human conception or humans rising from the dead. In fact, since miracles and wonders are, by definition, outside normal human experience, at least the vast majority of the miracles and wonders—and possibly all of them—cannot be understood by modern science. Science is not the right method to study miracles. But we have already seen that science’s failure is even more substantial than that. Science not only fails properly to understand the process of creation, it is also blind to the fact or event of creation itself. The scientist infers an unbroken history through the creation event, as if it had never occurred. This is not only because the process of creation is outside the experience of a scientist, it is also because God wove into the creation various processes that were intended to maintain the creation indefi nitely into the future. These cyclical processes effectively make the creation event invisible to the eyes of science. In general, if provisional cycles were either instituted (such as in the creation) or reinstituted after a cycle-breaking event, many aspects of the event itself would be invisible to scientists using assumptions of uniformitarianism and actualism. The more localized the event, the more invisible the event will be. The more the history of the universe was designed to continue seamlessly through a given event, the less one would expect science to notice the event at all. Thus, not only would modern science fail to understand the nature of the conception or resurrection of Christ, it would—like most of the world at the time—not even infer that either event had ever happened at all. The same can be said for a vast percentage of the miracles and wonders recorded in Scripture. In fact, even though many of them were global, most of the events of Genesis 1-11 are invisible to science. For example, consider fi rst the world before the Fall of man. Certain elements of the Genesis account such as the tree of life and a talking serpent are clearly outside of modern experience and would never be deduced from modern science. Neither the identity of the tempter, nor the cause of man’s Fall nor the nature of the curse could be inferred from science. But that is only the beginning. Before the Enlightenment,10 the church believed the pre-Fall world was not only without carnivory11 but, in fact, lacked animal death altogether.12 It was a world that not only could have persisted forever, but it was without thorns and thistles13 and a world without suffering.14 Such a world is so unfamiliar (and unthinkable) to us today, that modern science cannot (and would not) infer anything like this as part of earth history. And, since God intended the cursed creation to persist through time—at least until the final judgment—after the curse he established (and/or re-established) cyclical processes for the preservation of the creation in this fallen state. The scientist projects modern cycles of provision through the curse in the same way he projects those same cycles through the creation. In both cases he presumes the existence of the present world and its processes when they did not exist—in one case (pre-Creation) when there was no world at all, and in the other case (pre-Fall, post-Creation) when the world existed, but in an uncursed state with processes of preservation designed to preserve that world forever. If the cursed world did change as radically as the Scripture suggests, the modern scientist not only fails to understand what happened in the Fall, but fails to deduce that it ever happened at all. He not only fails to recognize specifi c elements of the world between the Creation and the Fall, he in fact fails to recognize that that world ever existed at all.
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pg 10 Science to the Rescue?
Following the reasoning presented above, one would expect that if it ignored the claims of Scripture, modern science would deduce deep history and deep time before the actual beginning of things. And, truly, modern science deduces ages for the universe, for the most part, millions of times older than the Bible suggests. Again, by the reasoning presented above, science would also be expected to reconstruct incorrectly the mode, tempo, and order of creation. And, again, none of the objects listed in Genesis 1 (the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, plants, animals, humans, etc.) are suggested by modern science to have been formed instantaneously by anything approaching the word of God. Nor does modern science deduce the order of origin given in Genesis 1. Modern science reverses the earth-before-sun, plants-before-animals, and flying-before-land animals order given in Genesis 1. As we concluded above, modern science is not the place to begin to determine the age or nature of creation. Can we use science to determine anything about the age of things? Perhaps. When we turn to the biblical account we learn not only about the creation, but also the Fall and God’s response in the form of the curse. The pre-Fall world was designed to persist forever and might—because of the provisionary cycles embedded within it—appear infi nitely old. With the curse, however, we are told that the universe was made subject to corruption (Rom 8:19-21), groans and travails in pain (Rom8:22), and “waxes old like a garment” (Ps 102:25-26). Whereas it might not be possible to determine how old things really are, it might be possible to determine how long things have been decaying. An example might be the decay of DNA. Deleterious mutations accumulate in organismal DNA, increasing what is called the mutational genetic load of organisms. Although we are not quite able to measure this mutational load directly, we can measure some related phenomena. In human DNA, for example, new mutations of all types (neutral, deleterious, and presumably advantageous) accumulate at a rapid rate (on the order of one to ten mutations per generation per person). The number of mutational differences between all humans seems roughly consistent with what would be accumulated in the 6000 years since Adam’s Fall going through the population bottlenecks of the fl ood and Babel.31 Another example concerns the earth’s magnetic fi eld—an important protector of life on earth. It seems that the magnetic fi eld of the earth is decreasing in intensity, dropping half of its strength every 1400 years or so. It does not seem possible for that decay to have been occurring for as long as even 10,000 years—i.e. quite consistent with an earth-impacting Fall only about 6000 years ago.32 Similarly, the loss of material by some comets as they orbit the sun suggests they have been losing material like this for less than 10,000 years (consistent with a solar-system-impacting Fall only 6000 years ago).33 Even the absence of supernovae remnants in our vicinity of the galaxy older than several thousands of years suggests stars may have been blowing up in this region for less than 10,000 years (possibly consistent with a galaxyimpacting Fall only 6000 years ago).34