"When interviewed about
Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, which we
reviewed earlier this week, the host of the new miniseries, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, said this:
If you start using your scripture, your religious text as a source of your science, that’s where you run into problems, and there is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying “I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet because this gave me insight let’s go test this prediction and have that theory turn out to be correct.”
1
During the recent
Nye-Ham Debate Ken Ham addressed this issue and
gave several examples of scientifically confirmed predictions based on the Bible. One of these is the fact that animals only
vary and reproduce within their
created kinds. Ken cited a January 2014 study “supporting a single origin for dogs,”
2 which is exactly what creation scientists have long said was true. The many species of dogs we see today developed from the pair of dogs Noah
took aboard the Ark.
To show our readers how misinformed Tyson is about this issue, I decided to ask creation scientists from several disciplines, all with doctoral degrees and experience in their professions, to share their favorite examples of
Bible-based predictions that led to demonstrably true scientific discoveries. Space does not permit including all their answers here, but those I include should readily disabuse any interested reader of such a false position.
Kinds and Species and Lack of Transitional Forms
The more we learn about speciation, the more we see that animals reproduce and vary only within their created kinds and do not evolve into new kinds. Microbiologist Dr. Andrew Fabich pointed out the newest discovery about finches, just published in
Nature (“Evolutionary biology: Speciation undone,” which we will discuss in next week’s
News to Know), demonstrates this principle. He says, “Darwin’s finches are widely accepted as being within the same kind. Their variation within a kind is based on the fact that there were droughts and rainy seasons. It is no surprise to creationists that the finches can still interbreed.”
3
And while animals vary within their created kinds, the fossil record has failed to produce the transitional forms Darwin predicted would be found.
Dr. Terry Mortenson, a historian of geology, points out that early nineteenth century “scriptural geologists” correctly argued that “the original created ‘kinds’ of Genesis 1were not the same as what modern scientists classify as
species or
genus, but were bigger biological categories and that while variation is produced within each kind, the kinds stay distinct. Writing before Darwin published his theory in 1859, they rejected as unscientific the idea of biological microbe-to-manevolution being proposed by Jean Lamarck and others. Darwin admitted in
The Origin of Species that the fossil record did not provide any evidence to confirm his theory and he had no supporting evidence from the study of living creatures. He predicted however that the fossils in confirmation of his theory would be found. History shows that Darwin was wrong.”
4" (Emphasis mine)
Can Bible-Based Predictions Lead to Scientific Discoveries?