Taking Back Our Stolen History
Science
Science

Science

Science is defined in the dictionary as ‘knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method’. Many Christians today hold science in awe. Many seem to have more respect for what scientists tell us than what God tells us in the Bible. How did this situation arise and how justifiable is such an attitude? In order to answer these questions we need to look at the nature and history of science and at the trustworthiness of scientists and reporters of science. Firstly it is worth noting Douglas Jones’ comment: “Nothing can take the puff out of the scientific chest more than a study of its history. Perhaps that’s why it’s so rare to find science departments requiring courses in the history of science. The history of science provides great strength to the inductive inference that, at any point in its history, that day’s science will almost certainly be deemed false, if not laughable, within a century (often in much less time).” [ Jones Douglas. A Rating System for Science, Credenda Agenda Vol 9 no 1. ]

Dr Philip Stott (BSc, BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD) is a world-renowned authority and public speaker on Origins. He is also a practicing civil engineer and author. He lives in Bloemfontein. After many years as a firm atheist Dr Stott was converted to Christianity in 1976. Following several years of studying the conflicting claims of secular science and scripture he entered the Creation/Evolution debate in 1989. Below, he gives us a little history on science…

For many centuries science was a mixture of philosophy, mathematics and observation largely practiced for interest and enjoyment. Where hypotheses were put forward to explain observations they were accepted largely on their appeal to reason and aesthetics, rather than on their ability to stand experimental testing. Aristotle’s physics was thus able to reign supreme for close to two thousand years. When Roger Bacon, who is widely regarded as the “Father of Modern Science” proposed the “scientific method” he faced opposition and even imprisonment from the established Catholic Church, which accepted philosophy as the way to truth. But Bacon pointed out that nature carries “the stamp of the Creator Himself”, whereas our reason carries “the stamp of our own image”, and that “we will have it that all things are as we in our folly think they should be”. He therefore stressed the importance of experiment, observation and exact measurement. (source)

Francis Bacon received his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, and went on to practice law. During his lifetime, Bacon achieved high-ranking political positions. He became Solicitor-General in 1607, Attorney-General in 1613, Lord Keeper of the Seal in 1617 and, finally Lord Chancellor in 1618, after which he fell victim to the charges of corruption. Francis Bacon was, in a sense, a breath of fresh air for philosophy and a pioneer for a new system which discarded two major schools of thought at that time.

  1. Firstly, he regarded the rationalists as flawed because they believed that language, the meaning and content of words, were the path to knowledge. In “Sir Francis Bacon,” Jeremy Harwood quotes Bacon’s description of the rationalist who were, he claimed: “spiders which make cobwebs out of their own substance.”
  2. Secondly, he had no approving words for Aristotelians, who, he believed, “ran around like ants to amass raw data.” The trouble was, they had no meaningful way of interpreting that information.

He encouraged proving a hypothesis through the means of experiment, but he also advocated not being afraid to disprove such a hypothesis. A negative result could be as useful as a positive one. Jeremy Harwood in “Sir Francis Bacon” explains: “If a definition is correct, it cannot contain any negative instances. Therefore, a negative result is the only way of knowing for certain that an assumption is false.” “He believed that science,” says Harwood, “if properly understood, offered humanity its best possibility of understanding the natural world and, by so doing, becoming master of it.”

Bacon was the ultimate Philosopher of Science, always maintaining that truth could not be reached through mere argument, and that only his new, revolutionary scientific method could advance scientific knowledge and truth. (Source)

In the video above, Dr. Phillip Stott breaks down Bacon’s scientific method as:

The Scientific Method

The search for knowledge about any phenomenon or process involves:

  1. Observation and measurement
  2. A search for patterns in the observations and measurements
  3. Proposal of a hypothesis to explain these patterns
  4. Design of critical experiments to test the hypothesis
  5. If experimental results do not support the hypothesis, then search for a hypothesis that explains both the old and the new observations and measurements
  6. If much experimental evidence supports a hypothesis, and none contradicts it, then it is considered a “Law of Science”
  7. If any observation contradicts a hypothesis, it must be abandoned and a new hypothesis sought

As Albert Einstein said: “What can be measured is science, everything else is speculation.” Dr. Stott also points out how the Greek philosophers who studied science and astronomy and many other things took measurements, but did not experiment and test their conclusions. Once Bacon’s scientific method was introduced during the Renaissance period, many philosophies that were previous believed had to be abandoned because they could be tested and proven right or wrong.

Tyco Brahe had spent most of his life building mechanisms to measure the movement of the sun, moon, and stars and recorded the most precise measurements of anyone up to well beyond his own years. Johannes Kepler, his assistant, dedicated his life to studying these measurements and looking for patterns in those observations and measurements. Eventually he found the pattern in those measurements and deduced that the planets orbit the sun with an elliptical orbit. When he discovered it, he rejoiced, “Isn’t it wonderful that God made such a wonderful planet!” Kepler is famous for his statement, “The privilege of a scientist is to think God’s thoughts.”

Dr. Stott explains how science was only possible in the beginning in the Judaeo-Christian societies that believed in an orderly, single Creator of all things. Those societies that believed in multiple gods, or no God, did not accept science until it was shown to work and advance understanding, technologies, etc. based on the scientific work of Christian scientists such as Euler, Maxwell, and Newton, and others. He explains:

Science and Christianity have an intertwined history. Even atheist historians of science find themselves having to admit that it was only under the Christian worldview that one could expect nature to behave in a way that would make science a reasonable pursuit. In spite of the fact that some steps towards a beginning in science had been taken by other cultures, it was only in the Christian culture of Europe, and in particular that of Reformation Europe, that science came to fruition.

The great pioneers of science, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Euler, Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin and many others professed Christianity and accepted the Bible as God’s revelation to mankind. Many spent much time studying the Scriptures. Newton claimed the most important aspect of his work was in showing the greatness of God. Maxwell noted that his great pioneering work in field theory was inspired by the Scriptural revelation of the way God himself is and works.

But during the twentieth century science was taken over to a very large extent by secular humanists. Such a world-view actually has no rational basis for expecting science to succeed. Yet secular humanists have cultivated the idea that science is essentially an atheistic domain which is at loggerheads with Christianity.

The scientific establishment

We rely on the scientific community as a context for almost every public policy decision. People who want to influence policy know this, and they don’t just lobby Congress, they also buy scientists, scientific reporting, and placement in prominent journals. Most scientists are honest, but they have to survive in a world where funding is tighter than it should be. It’s not surprising that some of them succumb and publish what powerful and corrupt institutions want them to.1

Own and control the scientific journals which forbid the publication of any scientific law that contradicts their theoretical beliefs. Sacrosanct to the scientific establishment are such false theories as evolution, an earth that is billions of years old, naturalistic cosmology (big bang, etc.), the Copernican principle, and Einstein’s theory of relativity, gravity, etc. – none of which have been proven with scientific method. Banned from publication in the establishment scientific journals are science in favor of creationism, young earth, alternatives to naturalistic cosmology, geocentricism, etc. Ironically, all of the scientific methods to prove the sacrosanct theories have actually proven otherwise – especially that of geocentricism which only rests on the theory of relativity, a theory that cannot be measured and scientifically proven true or false, but gave the dying Copernican principle a crutch.

Sanctions against scientists who challenge those sacrosanct principles or attempt in the slightest way to prove a banned principle may be fired from their job or demoted, have their qualifications annulled, certainly denied publication in the approved scientific journals, denied research grants, and are no candidate for Nobel prizes – that’s for sure. If the find publication in non-establishment journals, then they are typically demonized and discredited by the establishment.

In addition our schoolbooks never admit doubt. You never read in our textbooks such phrases as; “it is the theory of.” Or “the speculation is,” etc. No, everything in the establishment printed “science” books is presented as known facts. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a movie about the freedom of speech suppression to which Intelligent Design proponents are being subjected to by the atheistic American academic dictatorship.

Examples include Professor Herbert Dingle who found conclusive evidence that Einstein’s formula of relativity is incorrect. When he tried to get oany of the establishment journals to print his evidence, he was shocked to discover that none of them would. His attempts were blocked at every turn and he became upset at the deliberate efforts to suppress his important information. He eventually wrote a book on the proof, but few have heard of it, titled ‘Science at the Crossroads’. 

The same thing happened to Robert Gentry. He is the world’s foremost expert on halo formations found inside of rocks and his study of polonium halos (that have a known radiation emission rate) prove the earth is not millions of years old, but only thousands, 6-10 thousand years old just as the Bible says. This discovery cost him his job. The following simple analogy will show how these polonium microspheres — or halos — contradict the evolutionary belief that granites formed as hot magma slowly cooled over millions of years. To the contrary, this analogy demonstrates how these halos provide unambiguous evidence of both an almost instantaneous creation of granites and the young age of the earth.

A speck of polonium in molten rock can be compared to an Alka-Seltzer dropped into a glass of water. The beginning of effervescence is equated to the moment that polonium atoms began to emit radiactive particles. In molten rock the traces of those radioactive particles would disappear as quickly as the Alka-Seltzer bubbles in water. But if the water were instantly frozen, the bubbles would be preserved. Likewise, polonium halos could have formed only if the rapidly “effervescing” specks of polonium had been instantly encased in solid rock.

An exceedingly large number of polonium halos are embedded in granites around the world. Just as frozen Alka-Seltzer bubbles would be clear evidence of the quick-freezing of the water, so are these many polonium halos undeniable evidence that a sea of primordial matter quickly “froze” into solid granite. The occurrence of these polonium halos, then, distinctly implies that our earth was formed in a very short time, in complete harmony with the biblical record of creation.

The Academy (or establishment) has vehemently opposed Gentry’s radiohalo evidence as with all creation science, even claiming that the evidence for creation has been scientifically invalidated. We have repeatedly challenged the Academy to publicly explain where the polonium-halo evidence for creation has ever been scientifically invalidated. For over 15 years, they have refused to even try, for they know that their statement is insupportable when it comes to the polonium-halo evidence.

Fred Hoyle, considered one of the top 20 astronomers, and although an atheist, still recognized the absurdity of what he coined ‘the Big Bang’ theory and the clear signs of intelligent design in the universe. Hoyle wrote,

“Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
(Fred Hoyle, The Universe: Past and Present Reflections, Engineering & Science, Nov 1981, pp 8-12.)

“If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter [Earth-based abiogenesis], without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.”
(Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space, Omni Lecture at the Royal Institution, London, 1/12/1982.)

“Imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik’s cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have a chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”
(Fred Hoyle, New Scientist, November 1981.)

Hoyle also derided the fundamentals of evolutionism as a completely inadequate explanation for life:

“The trouble was that in reading widely during my early teens I ran into the Darwinian theory, for a little while with illusions and then with less respect than adults with bated breath were wont to show. The theory seemed to me to run like this: ‘If among the varieties of a species there is one that survives better in the environment than the others, then the variety that survives best is the one that best survives.’ If I had known the word tautology I would have called this a tautology. People with still more bated breath, called it natural selection. I made them angry, just as I do today, by saying that it did nothing at all. You could select potatoes as much as you pleased but you would never make them into a rabbit. Nor by selecting oak trees could you make them into colonies of bats, and those who thought they could in my opinion were bats in the belfry.”
(Fred Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution , 1999, p. 2.)

One of Hoyle’s most famous metaphors about the origin of life communicates the magnitude of the problem for evolutionists:

“That a living organism emerged by chance from a prebiotic soup is about as likely as that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a 747.”
(Marvin Olasky, Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial, p 192.)

Though Hoyle was not a Biblical creationist or even a Christian, he eventually recognized the impossibility of Darwinian evolution. Hoyle regularly took to task the Darwinian establishment for ignoring the complex sources of information and information processing programs (like DNA) needed for the creation and continuation of life. He realised that life couldn’t have arisen by chance in a primordial soup on Earth. First, he tried to solve the problem by saying that if we had the whole universe to work with instead of Earth, then this might overcome the problem. Hoyle favored and popularized a view called panspermia, the notion that life originated somewhere else in the universe and was driven to earth by electromagnetic radiation pressure.

But eventually he realized that even this would be woefully inadequate as a materialistic explanation of life’s origin. In his 1981 book Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe), he calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell was one in 1040,000 (one followed by 40,000 zeroes). Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (1080), even a whole universe full of primordial soup wouldn’t have a chance.

Alas, Hoyle paid for his outright questioning of the materialist paradigm. In the 1950s, Hoyle had some ingenious ideas about stellar fusion, and predicted that the Carbon-12 nucleus would have a certain energy level (called a resonance) to enable helium to undergo fusion.8 His co-worker William Fowler eventually won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 (with Subramanyan Chandrasekhar), but for some reason Hoyle’s original contribution was overlooked, and many were surprised that such a notable astronomer missed out. Fowler himself in an autobiographical sketch affirmed Hoyle’s immense contribution:

‘Fred Hoyle was the second great influence in my life. The grand concept of nucleosynthesis in stars was first definitely established by Hoyle in 1946.’

Dr. Stott gives these and several more examples in the first video above. You can continue the video after Hoyle by clicking HERE

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