Has science invalidated the bible’s account of creation?

After Christians invented science and spread the light of understanding, rationalism spread darkness by leading some to imagine that science has invalidated the bible’s account of creation.  It’s not true – despite the claim that geological processes gradually formed the earth over millions of years.

Until 1785, geologists were all ‘catastrophists.’  They believed the world was only thousands of years old.  They inferred from the evidence that the earth had been shaped by a series of major catastrophes including a worldwide flood.  Clearly, their logic was built on biblical presuppositions.

In 1785, however, Scottish geologist James Hutton proposed the uniformitarian theory to support his belief that ‘nature’ was a self-governing machine and not subject to a Creator.  Without making any new scientific discovery, he simply presupposed that the current rate of geological processes had been uniform (i.e. the same) throughout history.  On that basis he calculated the earth’s age to be millions of years, not thousands as the bible suggests.

Catastrophists and uniformitarians debated the issues until, after the publication in 1830 of Charles Lyell’s “Principles of Geology,” when opinion began to favour the uniformitarians.  Lyell, a close friend of Charles Darwin, became a major influence on modern geological theory.

Hutton’s fashionable new presupposition gave rise to the mistaken idea that science had invalidated the bible.  In reality, the bible was being challenged only by the unproven beliefs of rationalistic scientists.

Nevertheless, his belief caught on.  Scientists increasingly became naturalistic, or materialistic in the sense that they began assuming that the uniformity of natural causes operated in a closed system that included sociology and psychology.  They made man part of their meaningless ‘machine’ and there was no longer any room for God!  That is how rationalistic science began – not on the basis of any new discovery, but purely because of a change in the dominant philosophy.

Schaeffer says of this shift to anti-biblical, materialistic science:

“It arose not because of that which could be demonstrated by science, but because the scientists who took this new view had accepted a different philosophic base.  The findings of science, as such, did not bring them to accept this view; rather, their world-view brought them to this place.  They became naturalistic or materialistic in their presuppositions.[1]