Science in Christian Perspective

Letter to the Editor

"Naivete in Matters of Scientific Understanding"
Wayne E. Newquist
1220 W. 22d St.
Kearney, Nebraska 68847

From: JASA 35 (June 1983): 128.

Thank you for printing the letters of T. M. Moore and Jerry D. Albert in the September issue of Journal ASA (1982). 1 am writing as an interested reader, not as a scientist or a member of the American Scientific Affiliation, so maybe I will qualify for the "naivete in matters of scientific understanding" that Albert mentions. Moore's letter gives us all a lot of good food for thought.

The Creator Himself was on this earth and did repeat creation situations in many different ways by means of "miracles," observed by thousands of witnesses.... It seems to me that He proved His ability to handle any of the original creation situations right there in real-life laboratory conditions, doing it again and again right in front of plenty of witnesses. Surely that gave plenty of chance for creationism to be "falsified" if it is ever going to be. It seems that He was putting His deity, His power over the material things of this universe, and the creation record "as that is explicitly spelled out in the Bible" (quoting from Moore's letter) on the line every time He attempted a miracle. If He were not the Creator, or if things just could not be done that way, it is conceivable that He could have failed some of those times. Several times He put life, and all the mysteries that involves, back into dead bodies. This very closely duplicates what He did at creation when He "breathed" life into Adam and then into Eve, He demonstrated His complete understanding of and power over all the intricasies of the eye, the ear, the mouth, the skeleton, and all the organs of the human body. He did so many things of this nature that John says that it would be impossible to write about all of them (John 21:25).... 

Even if there are "unanswered questions" in the Genesis record, what is so earth-shaking about that? There are plenty of unanswered questions about evolution. In fact, it seems that new scenarios have to be dreamed up, only to be supplanted by others as time goes by, and that is supposed to be "the only, or at least by far the best, scientific theory to account for origins."