The Power of God and the Role of Evidence in Creationist Thought

Unlike most conventional scientists, creationists are self-consciously engaged in an apologetic mode of inquiry; creationists attempt to exhibit the rational acceptability or even superiority of their worldview by both explicating it and critically engaging its competitors. Their apologetic strategies range over a spectrum with two endpoints. Evidentialists believe that scientific evidence does or ultimately will support a creationist worldview; they therefore work to expose and/or develop evidential support for creationism. Presuppositionalists, on the other hand, believe that "evidence" is so thoroughly worldview dependent that it can be used to support most any position, and therefore attempt to retrofit the “data” of natural history to conclusions reached independent of scientific inquiry. Evidentialists are philosophically akin to most conventional scientists, but presuppositionalists are quite postmodern in their thinking.

This paper aims to facilitate understanding of the most radical form of contemporary creationism by, 1) relating its apologetic strategies to historically important views of the relationship of God to the world, and 2) placing the methods of its practitioners into dialogue with influential theories of scientific theory change. The alleged superiority of God to nature was historically important for the development of empirical methods of inquiry that are used alike by conventional scientists and creationist evidentialists, and creationists who incline toward the evidentialist end of the apologetic spectrum are relatively responsive to empirical considerations. Creationist presuppositionalists, however, find in divine omnipotence both infinite conceptual resources for their apologetics and infinite physical possibilities for nature; they are therefore even more likely than evidentialist creationists to interpret nature in light of their religion. These differing attitudes toward evidence carry implications for historicist theories that would assess the worth or recount the development of creationist thought. Toward exploring these implications, creationism is placed into a critical dialectic with the theories of Kuhn, Lakatos, and Neville.