Where'd I Come From

Ken Ham of Answers In Genesis states "One of the ways I teach children to understand the philosophy of science is to teach them, based on Job 38:4 (when God asks Job, “where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth”) to ask “Were you there?�” Obviously, when talking about origins, no human being living in the present was there when it happened to write down an eyewitness account. In matters of history, we rely on those who were living in the past to remember their own history and pass it on orally until such time when their descendants develop a means of creating a permanent record. Apart from this scenario, we are reduced to proposing theories about the past based on the evidence we find in the present. If we begin with a presupposition of naturalism then we automatically assume that all that exists came into being through the natural processes we can observe in the present. Since we can't observe changes in the present that we assume must have happened to bring about the tremendous variety of complex living things from non living elements, the naturalist needs to assume that the present order needed an almost infinite amount of time to develop. This approach assumes a theoretical partner called uniformitarianism . This theory is inherently unscientific because it assumes things about the past that cannot be confirmed by experimenting in the present, and it ignores documented accounts of phenomenon which cannot be explained by ordinary processes, but may be explained by catastrophic events be they natural or supernatural.

If on the other hand, we presuppose that events can occur beyond the bounds of natural processes, then an explanation of origins need not be restricted in any sense by what we observe in the present. So we pose a theory of how things may have originated and we attempt to test those theories through application of the Scientific Method. "Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, there are features that distinguish scientific inquiry from other methods of developing knowledge. Scientific researchers propose specific hypotheses as explanations of natural phenomena, and design experimental studies that test these predictions for accuracy. Any hypothesis that cannot be subjected to a test is not considered to be scientific".

It should begin to become obvious to rational persons that neither of the aforementioned presuppositions in regard to origins, or their derivative theories can be adequately tested through experimental studies. However, we can take a rational look at each of the two presuppositions, namely: 1) Naturalism and 2) Supernatural Intervention, and propose what type of evidence we should expect discover if that presupposition was valid. Such suggestions of evidence have been proposed by scientists adhering to each of the two positions. I encourage you to submit your well reasoned response in support of either position.