I hold the following to be true: the natural world is a Bible; the Truth is the Word of God. Human beings can forge books, and books are always disputed, but no one can forge what has been written in the stars and everything else found in the universe around us. Hot water boils turning to steam and cold water turns to ice. Human opinion does not matter. This is just the way it is. The Truth revealed by the natural world always has priority over an opinion or a belief. People can forge or edit books, but the natural world is the only Bible that can be truly said to have been written by the pen of God alone. The Truth which can proceed only from God is Truth of the greatest importance, and thus the honest, diligent investigation of the natural world is a way to honor Scripture, in the honest search for the Truth in faith with the hope of gaining understanding of the mind of God.
The Bible itself testifies in its regulations governing court proceedings that nothing can be proved with only one witness, and that at least two witnesses in agreement are required to prove a case. It is here that the Bible, or rather interpretations of the Bible, come into conflict, and not agreement, with the required second witness, ‘science' or what I might more broadly describe as ‘reality'. The court system is adversarial both in our time and as described in the Bible, with prosecution and defense both interpreting the data in such a way as to prove that the evidence supports the verdict they desire. It is not surprising then, that in the contest between religious interpretation of the Bible and the conflicting testimony of science that the religious prosecutor will make all sorts of attempts to convince the watching jury that the testimony of science is a) flawed, unreliable, inaccurate, etc.; b) that the evidence of science is reliable and further that the scientific evidence supports the description of events in the Bible, and this is not understood because the data set is misinterpreted by scientists; c) and assorted other tactics people employ to convince a watching jury. Scientists have always complained during rebuttal that the tactics of Creation Science are not to use science but rather relentless propaganda to achieve their ends, and this is true. I have included some links to examples of Creation Science as a form of adversarial propaganda at the bottom of this page.
The debate over fossils and Creation Science is not a scientific controversy to be settled using the Scientific Method, but rather it is the struggle between those who hold firmly to an ancient religious cosmology and the entire universe itself,. There is only one piece of testimony to support the Ancient Cosmology, and that is supposedly the Bible (although in truth it is an interpretation of the Bible). The Universe testifies that for whatever reason this particular cosmological belief system is invalid (in the sense of it being an historical or scientific document). Therefore the religious must be in conflict with the Universe itself, for the interpretation of the Bible is in conflict with the evidence found in the universe (and ironically, therefore the religious must support and defend the Bible only by coming into serious conflict with the Living Word of God, the First Word and the Last Word).
It is always good to have multiple witnesses to the truth, and to find them in agreement is a wonderful thing. The problem comes in when you have a single witness, in this case an interpretation of the Bible, and it is in disagreement with another Bible. Now if the other Bible in question was written by human beings, even human beings who claimed to be doing the Work of God, then I might find myself perplexed, but when a human document conflicts with the Great Bible, written by God alone, I am not at all perplexed. I always know exactly what it is that I must do.
The fossil record is scripture, and it is for this reason that I find myself motivated to critique Biblical Creation Science. I follow the belief that Truth is of God, and therefore, to discover the truth I must accept Truth and follow where it leads me. To do otherwise would be to stray from the path. The fossil record must be read as scripture, and this is something I am sure that even the most conservative believer in Biblical Creation Science must understand. Similarly the diversity of voice in the Bible must be respected and must be heard, not silenced. I place these two practices together (Creation Science must honor Natural Scripture and must also honor Written Voices. In practice this means abandoning the belief in ‘infallible inerrancy of the Bible'. No one who does not respect the Written Voices, no matter how diverse, is going to be open minded enough to read the Truth written by God Alone. This is how one would expect things to have turned out.
Now the fossil record tells a shocking tale that is in serious conflict with traditional religious doctrines and interpretations of the Bible. It is one of the central beliefs of the system of interpretation that the Universe was perfect until the time of Adam's (literal) sin when corruption entered the entire universe. (This would restrict us to a scenario spanning only thousands of years total). The natural scenario spans billions of years. Nature tells us that what would be religiously defined as ‘corruption' and ‘decay' predate Adam by eons. The fossil record is globally sorted according to the same patterns. For a period of several billion years before we ever appeared on this planet, it experienced a repeating pattern of colonization by simple creatures, followed by mass extinctions, and replacement with newly created orders.
Now science tells us that the belief is false that all corruption proceeded from Adam at a time several thousand years ago. Now religious interpretation being what it is (malleable) it is simple to interpret the evidence a little differently and comes to different conclusions. For example, in the Garden of Eden parable the snake was already doing evil and planning evil before Adam or Eve ever got around to eating that apple. Now certainly evil has to be classified as a kind of ‘corruption' of a perfect universe during a time before Adam, in this case making Satan the Devil, assigned the role of the snake in theology, the cause of the fall, and this could have happened in the very distant past. A slight change in the interpretation of what is written in the Bible and the conflict between Science and Religion is solved. Attempts to interpret or discredit the scientific data set can be seen to be needed only to support a particular interpretation of the Bible. Creation Science is not a branch of the Sciences but rather a branch of Christian Apologetics.
The religious interpretation of Eden tells us that we are at the very center of the Universe and have been from the time of creation. What the fossil record tells us is that we are latecomers into a universe with a lot of history. Much took place before we arrived, things we know nothing about, long dark eons of time hidden in deep mystery.
Now the pattern of repeated creations and destruction of created beings revealed by nature does not fit classical ideas of God as Good, for the arbitrary destruction of created beings by an arbitrary or amoral Creator is something experienced as threatening in the sight of created beings. It is not surprising to find such adamant denial of the fossil record incorporated into theologies for they follow this line of emotional reasoning to come to a judgment. However, if we change the interpretation slightly we can then view the fossil record as a type of scripture and extrapolate and come up with plausible schema which adequately describe what we see.
I include my own personal interpretation of the fossil record as scripture as an example of what I mean. Let us assume that God is Good, and let us go one step further and insist that, in the sight of God, evil is not Good, and that evil causes great suffering and destroys living creatures, thus making it necessary to solve the problem of evil by destroying and removing evil. Now by definition Good should not be able to destroy evil, and therefore, from the viewpoint of evil, evil always triumphs over Good, destroying the Good which is helpless before their power. If we struggle with the question of Good destroying evil, then the fossil record could be understood as scriptures, written by God on this subject. The history of our planet could then be understood to be part of a greater struggle, between beings who existed long before we were ever born, as they quarreled over Good and Evil, and the consequences. What the fossil record says to me, as the Word of God, is that God is both Creator and Destroyer, so the argument that evil triumphs over Good is invalid. If God could destroy simple creatures repeatedly, this is a bad omen for intelligent evil beings, who, unlike the simple beings described above, have a sense of God and of eternity, and thus would be the ones who would understand the meaning of these scriptures, the Living Word of God written on a Living Earth. The meaning of the omen is simply this - Good is not weak when confronted by evil, and therefore evil could also expect destruction. The fossil record shows us that repeatedly simple life forms on the earth were created anew, flourished on the earth for hundreds of millions of years, and then vanished, and were replaced. The message is, as I read it, that God is Sovereign. It was the will of God that simple creatures live for several hundred million years and then vanish to be replaced by other interesting creatures. If higher life forms escape death and live forever, then it is understood that this difference was also due to the fact that God is Sovereign. According to this theological interpretation Satan the Devil would be a creature of fantastic age, even billions of years, since this pattern of Creation and Destruction would have been put on public display as one of many of God's contributions to the struggle between Good and Evil.
Included below are links to short pages discussing examples of Biblical Creation Science as a form of adversarial propaganda (rather than a true scientific discipline, using the Scientific Method).