Walker seemingly stumbled, "For me, I am going to punt on that one…I'm here to talk about trade, not to pontificate about evolution." Recognizing that answer might indicate indecisiveness, his team later released a statement saying he believes, “faith and science are compatible.”
Unlike Walker, Dr. Robert Jastrow was a rocket
scientist. Jastrow earned a PhD in
theoretical physics and joined NASA when it was formed in 1958. He was the first
Lunar Exploration Committee chairman and the Chief of its Theoretical Division.
He was later the founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies until
he retired in 1981. After NASA, he
became a Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth
College, the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the George C. Marshall Institute, and
Director Emeritus of Mount Wilson Observatory and Hale Solar Laboratory.
Jastrow’s view on understanding creation is,
"the curtain drawn over the mystery of creation will never be raised by
human efforts, at least in the foreseeable future." Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “As
we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know
there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not
know…”
How do we deal with the “known unknowns?” Typically, we develop theories to explain them: Creation – The Big Bang Theory; Man – The
Theory of Evolution; Summer and Winter – Climate Change. But theories are just that, theories. Jastrow theorized that science can’t explain
the universe without the supernatural.
Although Jastrow was an
"agnostic, and not a believer,” in an interview with Christianity
Today, Jastrow said "Astronomers now find they have painted
themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that
the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds
of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the
earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they
cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call
supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven
fact."
There are some things you have
to understand to believe. In other cases
you have to believe to understand. For most Americans the explanation
“In the beginning God created…” was enough.
George Washington, our founding father and first President reasoned it
this way, “It is
impossible to account for the creation of the universe, without the agency of a
Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a
Supreme Being. It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is as necessary to reason, as reason
is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other. A reasoning being would
lose his reason, in attempting to account for the great phenomena of nature,
had he not a Supreme Being to refer to.”
Like Washington, Jastrow
unifies God and the astronomical in his book, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in
the Universe by explaining, “The
details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical
accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced
suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and
energy…For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the
story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is
about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he
is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for
centuries."
The “mountain of ignorance" may not be the end of
the bad dream for those that deny the Creator.
The book that Jastrow claimed got the creation account right, thousands
of years before the astronomer, also declares that, “every knee will bow and
tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
For those that deny the Creator, that confession could create
quite a problem.
Yes, Scott Walker did stumble. I thank our Good Shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ, that He is still in the business of restoring our souls when we stumble. But may we then be led back into His path of righteousness, steadfastly determined to avoid the same pitfall again. Why are we ashamed to say that Louis Pasteur was right when he objectively disproved spontaneous generation? Why now do we think that we are appealing to "blind faith" (as the evolutionist camp must do) to affirm that the Laws of Nature require a Law-Giver that answers to the description of Genesis 1:1 (and John 1:1-3)? Thank you, Colonel, for introducing us to Dr. Robert Jastrow whose objective honesty makes his statements controversial.
ReplyDeleteAllow me to introduce yet another rocket scientist to the list, Dr. Werner Von Braun, Director of NASA (designer of the Saturn Rocket Booster that put us on the moon) who in a letter responded to the California School Board of Education on September 14, 1972 with the following analysis of why DESIGN should be taught in the science classroom:
"For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without evoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all. In the world round us, we can behold the obvious manifestations of an ordered, structured plan or design. We can see the will of the species to live and propagate. And we are humbled by the powerful forces at work on a galactic scale, and the purposeful orderliness of nature that endows a tiny and ungainly seed with the ability to develop into a beautiful flower. The better we understand the intricacies of the universe and all harbors, the more reason we have found to marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based. While the admission of a design for the universe ultimately raises the question of a Designer (a subject outside of science), the scientific method does not allow us to exclude data which lead to the conclusion that the universe, life and man are based on design. To be forced to believe only one conclusion—that everything in the universe happened by chance—would violate the very objectivity of science itself."
The case Dr. Werner Von Braun so eloquently made was that DESIGN, rather than CHANCE, is the only scientifically sound conclusion in the light of the Law of Cause and Effect, and that dismissing that option VIOLATES the objectivity of the scientific method!
Perhaps it would be good for some of those who seek, by God's grace, to fill the highest office of the land, to develop a ready approach to the question that addresses a personal and rational trust in God, something like, "I believe in the objectivity of the scientific method to take us wherever the evidence leads, unrestrained by antiquated views that violate the scientific method... Don't you?"