In “The Role of Creation in Science: The Real Story, a Breath of Fresh Air” (Evolution News & Views, July 2, 2011), science historian Michael Flannery remarks on Jonathan Bartlett’s “The Doctrine of Creation and the Making of Modern Biology,”
In a recent article at the Classical Conversations web site, Jonathan Bartlett authored an interesting commentary on creation as a concept for and catalyst to scientific inquiry and advance with “The Doctrine of Creation and the Making of Modern Biology.” Given the persistent claim by so-called “defenders” of quality science education such as Eugenie Scott, Paul Hanle, and others that only natural processes functioning via unbroken natural laws in nonpurposeful ways counts as science and that anything else is a “science stopper,” everyone–especially those least likely to do so–would do well to take page from Bartlett’s page of history.
Jonathan Bartlett is quite right, of course; science owes much more to teleology and creation than materialism, randomness, and chance. This is not to suggest that stochastic processes don’t occur in the natural world, but as a prompt to scientific inquiry it has been notably lacking as a motivational force in history. In fact, definitive evidence for wholly materialistic explanations for complex features of nature is simply not there. As an example, consider Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). He surely struck a blow against abiogenesis when he demonstrated that life begets life, and yet the enthusiasts for abiogenic explanations for the origin of life persist despite all evidence to the contrary. This seems close to Einstein’s definition of insanity–“doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
But, given their definitions, do they have a choice?
Follow UD News at Twitter!