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Occam’s razor says that, when there are multiple competing hypotheses for the same outcome, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions.56 Six-day creationists need make only one assumption: the narrative of Genesis 1 and 2 is a factual, literal narrative. By contrast, the number of assumptions that must be made in order to develop unbiblical theories of origin is huge. Even common sense ought to tell us which to choose. The problem with assumptions will be our next topic.
Henry Ford is credited (discredited?) with saying, “History is bunk.” Now, that statement is, of course, not true. In fact, if one were to hand a Bible to a librarian who had no previous knowledge of its existence, after thumbing through it and reading random passages, he or she might put it in the history section; all events and teachings of the Bible are set in some historical context. But while the discipline of history is not bunk, there is certainly a lot of “history” that is bunk. Much of the problem comes from false assumptions, some from scholarly dishonesty or carelessness, and some from primary sources that are themselves false. Controversies among historians are rampant; it is just plain hard to determine exactly what happened during such and such historical event, even with plenty of preserved source documents. Often many assumptions must be made to try to fill in a complete picture of some historical event. And this is during our present “historic” age. The situation among archaeologists is even worse; many assumptions and suppositions are made from an inscription, pottery fragment, corroded bronze tool or weapon, or other artifact. Paleobiologists,57 who must deal with the prehistoric, fare worse yet; they build theories on a fragment of bone, some DNA resemblance, a stone spearhead and the like, and with many assumptions try to construct what the organisms or people looked like and how they thought and lived. To sum up the situation for evolutionists, it is one assumption after another. Cosmogonists have a similar problem. No probe, much less an astronaut, has ever reached another star. Humans have observed the heavens with sophisticated instruments for barely a century, and astronomers assume that things were the same for billions of years in the past.
To make things even worse, all of the problems of discontinuities introduced by the creation process itself, the fall, and the flood are piled on top of the problems just discussed. The result is that Occam’s razor not only cuts the throats of false theories of origin, but beheads them.
To sum up, when assumptions multiply, the possibility of error multiplies even faster. This is a poor contrast to the infallible and inerrant Word of God. A couple of stories about electrical troubleshooting will illustrate the problem humans have with assumptions at a practical level. Because these two stories will not be equally interesting or understandable to all, there are three reading paths from which you may choose:
You understand something about electricity and know what an ohm is. You also like those troubleshooting stories that appear in trade magazines and might enjoy a couple of small technical whodunits. Perhaps you want to see if you can figure it out before I did. Then please see Appendix D now as the spoilers will come fast in this main text. Then jump to the In Summary paragraph below the Optional Science paragraphs for each narrative.
Others should go ahead and read the Optional Science stories below; they are not technically demanding. But if you get lost…
Just jump to the next paragraph; it summarizes what happened and makes the point clear.
Optional Science: Burglar alarm systems often use sensors to detect when a door is opened. If the door is closed, the alarm control panel sees a normal voltage; otherwise, an alarm is raised. One place had an outdoor concrete structure with a sensor on the door. The alarm was armed after hours, but sometimes people had to get in that door after hours, so there was a switch that was wired in parallel with the sensor. If someone needed to get in that door after hours, the security operator could just flip the switch and a red light would also come on. The rest of the area remained protected, except that one remote door. One day, the alarm computer reported a funny voltage on that circuit. The voltage was not off enough to make an alarm, so the computer just gave a warning that maybe something was starting to come loose. The security operator, wondering, flipped the switch on and the voltage returned to normal. He flipped the switch back to off, and the voltage stayed normal, so he forgot about it. But you do not ignore problems with alarm systems. So, after about the third time, the owner got involved and figured the switch must be bad.
So I arrived one fine day, new switch in hand. But, after I had studied the computer logs and looked at the wiring, it did not appear likely that the switch was the problem. The logs showed the voltage slowly creeping up over a few days. I pulled the sensor out of its hole in the concrete and it was wet as a fish and the terminals were all corroded. That explained a lot, but not why flipping the switch “fixed” the problem. Quite curious, after disconnecting and removing the sensor, I measured the sensor, or tried to. The reading was crazy. My meter was telling me the sensor should have been making the alarm go off. Wondering if my meter was bad, I measured the voltage across the sensor, expecting it to be zero. It was not; it was the same voltage the computer logs had indicated. That sensor, resting disconnected on the table, should not have been a source of voltage. On a hunch, I briefly shorted the sensor leads and measured the voltage again. It was zero. I repeated my original measurement, and the sensor was dead shorted. So, not only were the contacts corroded shut, but the corrosion, the water, and dissimilar metals had created, over time, a battery.58 When I shorted the sensor leads, or the security operator flipped the switch, the short drained the battery so the now-dead battery did not create strange voltages anymore.
In summary, a burglar alarm system was behaving oddly. Because a switch affected the behavior, it was assumed that there was an electrical problem, probably in the switch itself. Investigation revealed that the problem did not make sense from an electrical standpoint. But it turned out that water and corrosion had caused a chemical reaction that created an unwanted voltage. What had seemed like a simple electrical switch problem was actually a chemistry problem. The switch was fine. That is the kind of thing that can make troubleshooting malfunctioning systems interesting, to say the least. Here was a simple thing nobody had thought of that changed everybody’s entire understanding. The original assumption of a bad switch was dead wrong. The owner could not think of any other explanation. I never expected a chemistry problem. This illustrates the problem with assumptions; the many assumptions used in Darwinism and Big-Bang cosmogony make their conclusions highly doubtful.
Optional Science: In this next one, I did not exactly come out of it with an enhanced reputation. There was a piece of equipment that consumed some fair amount of power. It had to be available at all times, so there was no off switch; to work on it, you removed the fuse. The equipment had come over on the Mayflower and was showing its age. I had designed, built, and programmed a new controller for the equipment that used a then-modern microcontroller, a small, entire computer on one chip such as are used in programmable thermostats, microwave ovens, and the like. It had worked just fine for a good while, but then one day it just sat there and sort of stuttered. So something had gone wrong.
I went up to the equipment, pulled the fuse and, finding nothing obvious, put it back in for further testing. It immediately started working fine. Now, most of us have experienced computer crashes or malfunctions. They do that. I used to say that, if cars were like computers, a minor adjustment to your carburetor could make your muffler fall off. So I put a reset switch on the controller. After all, the standard advice before calling computer tech support is to first reboot. That actually does fix very many problems. So, the reset switch seemed to be a reasonable idea. Then, sometime later, it stuttered again, but the reset switch did not work. So I pulled the fuse, then put it back in, and, like before, it immediately started working fine just as previously. Thus, I decided that, if killing the power for half a minute solved the problem, the best thing would be to build a circuit that would detect the failure and cycle the power on the microcontroller, similar to pulling the fuse for a minute. The owner grudgingly bore the cost and I built and installed it, and things were fine for a good long while.
Then, all of a sudden the equipment quit completely. I traced voltages back through the chain of power supplies from the microcontroller all the way back to the fuse. The fuse measured open. I pulled the fuse, and it looked perfectly good; the fuse element was a big high-amperage thing that was easy to see. Wondering if I had made a mistake, I measured the fuse again and it was not all the way open, but bad. I measured it again, and the reading had changed. Pushing and pulling on it changed the reading some more. So all this time, the fuse was not blown, but had an intermittent bad connection inside of it. So much trouble was caused by a defective, but not blown, fuse.
In summary, some equipment would suddenly start malfunctioning in a manner that suggested that its little computer was causing the problem. Each time I went to work on it, I had to remove the fuse and put it back in. This restarted the computer and the equipment started working again, so I kept blaming the computer. But all along, the problem was that the fuse, while not blown, had an intermittent bad connection inside of it. Every time I had pulled the fuse out and put it back in, the movement fixed the loose connection for a time. Small mistakes or small things overlooked can greatly mislead a person! Again, this problem of false assumptions makes Darwinian evolution and Big-Bang cosmogony very doubtful.
The two stories above show how hard it can sometimes be to find the truth behind some phenomenon without being misled by incorrect assumptions or bad data. Now consider how many assumptions scientists must make when trying to figure out what happened thousands (and they think billions) of years ago, and in the case of astronomy, across vast unexplored distances. Any one false assumption or error can make a whole grand scheme wrong. Mistakes and false assumptions are to be expected in any human activity. But there are no mistakes or false assumptions in God’s Word, and the Holy Bible infallibly teaches us that false theories of origins are definitely making many wrong assumptions.
It is not just bad assumptions that can get you into trouble. One day I was in my lab working on some high-voltage, high-power equipment that had some really expensive precision parts in it. I had helped design and build it, so now it was my job to debug the new design. To try to find the cause of some odd behavior, I had to probe a very sensitive point in the circuit. One slip of the test probe could create a huge power surge that would blow things up seriously. I could not help recalling the day years before when my test probe slipped and I blew a minicomputer processor board that was worth more than a month’s pay. I braced my body and arms and carefully touched the probe to the circuit and instantly everything went dead, including the overhead lights. I could do nothing but sigh deeply, then get up and go reset the circuit breaker. I toggled the breaker, but my lab was still dead. In fact, the whole suite was dead. As I went outside, heading for the main distribution breakers, I saw that all the other business signs and windows were also dark. Some drunk driver had knocked out a major utility pole and darkened a good part of the city—at just the instant my probe touched.
Coincidences, mistakes, glitches in the apparatus, and all manner of possible interfering events are why scientists repeat their experiments. Unfortunately, it would seem rather difficult to repeat the Big Bang so as to make sure there are no mere coincidences in the data.
Everything presented so far has more than adequately refuted all Framework Hypotheses. The more recent subchapters have shown why Christians need not accept or fear Big-Bang cosmogony or Darwinism. These false teachings are supported by numerous unverifiable assumptions, making trust in them optional, to say the least. The eternal wisdom of the Word of God and a small bit of sanctified common sense have done this without actually delving into scientific arguments. The fact remains, however, that there are some very powerful and simple scientific arguments against “creation by chance.” Optional Science: A few readers may wish to just jump to the A Warning to the Stubborn subchapter below. But it should be more profitable to just go ahead and not be concerned if there is something you do not understand. Have fun watching good science chew up bad science.
56Occam’s Razor is not natural law. Probability theory supports its validity but also shows that it must be sometimes wrong. It is a very handy rule of thumb that has proven to be useful, even if sometimes it does not yield the correct result.
57paleobiologist: one who studies the origin, evolution, and biology of plants and animals from prior geologic eras
58That “battery” is more properly known as an electrochemical cell. If you have a modern digital voltmeter you can make something like this yourself. Take a bright penny and a nickel. Put the nickel on the table, wet a piece of paper towel with salt water and put it on the nickel, leaving an edge exposed. Put the penny on the towel so it does not touch the nickel. Now measure the voltage across the penny and nickel. You should get about 0.3 volts.
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