Non sequitur. Denying evolution does not imply “God did it directly”. Besides you’re incredibly wrong because early scientists were all people who were duh, Christians, and probably believed in a 6000 year old earth and “God did it” and yet somehow Newton, Pasteur, Copernicus, Brahe, Bacon etc. all came up with the knowledge we have. Saying God did it, in Catholicism, is to say God is the First or Ultimate cause. It’s not to say HOW God does things. But that their ultimate cause lies in God, in that existence is at this very moment sustained by the First Cause or Unmoved Mover. In a universe with God we have reason to believe there is order which can be known and not utter chaos. We believe that what happens today with bacteria and with the laws of physics happened 13 billion years ago and yesterday and will happen tomorrow. Why? Well either it’s a brute fact or it’s a fact with an underlying nature lying in God. (In Catholicism we use the 4 causes. You can see that whether evolution is true or not, these would not be affected, and the belief in God does not equate inability to do empirical science.)
This is important because this is a the real point of contention between “Creationists” and Evolutionists.
I think most Young Earth Creationists have no problem with natural selection and selection of positive traits inside a particular species, often called microevolution. Most people who have strong feelings for or against evolution do have a problem with what happened before and the whole man-is-just-a-glorified-ape, which does not actually follow from evolution, but many New Atheists, science fetishists and some “Creationists” believe.
But this depends also on metaphysical/philosophical import, and is not science. That conditions at the time of the Big Bang and throughout history are just right that Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Water etc can form and can form stable DNA/RNA/protein compounds which can form complex structures which can lead to metabolically active life which can become more complex and lead to abstract thought and grasp of universal truths is just uncanny and proof of God sustaining and creative function, right here and right now.
Is there empirical research to show that man evolved from early apes? Or is it just a clever bit of detective work based on correlating fossils and genetic similarities between animals? I don’t follow it but Behe and some of his colleagues have published some papers in peer review too.
As most, as in 99.9% of scientific knowledge is not related to evolution I would disagree.
It would not for example destroy our understanding of antibiotic resistance. We see antibiotic resistance in practice. We would study it and understand it, why and how it happens in today’s populations while we may not have been able to conclude - oh duh, man came from some ape at some stage. Now we may reject some irrelevant stuff but nothing which would prevent us from studying resistance and developing new strategies to combat it, including novel antibiotics or drugs which block bacterial enzymes or antibiotic pumps. We don’t need evolution to understand how a penicillinase enzyme works, where it comes from and how we can block it. It would however probably divert funds away from useless paleontology research and more into genetics, molecular biology and so on so that we could cure some of these diseases and ills people have to suffer from each day. Millions of people die from malaria, yellow fever, viral hepatitis, cancer, AIDS, etc.
I think you need to think longer about this topic and the light bulb will go on and you’ll see that yes denial of evolution does not imply denial of all science nor the ability to not be able to use the scientific method. Nor does it imply that one would deny all knowledge.
There are YECs who have done terrific research in genetics. I heard the inventor of the “Gene Gun”, John C. Sanford is a YEC. He is one example of how EMPIRICALLY you are wrong. As mentioned guys like Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci etc were all YECs. It didn’t stop them from being ahead of their time and ahead of the typical GNU atheist-science fetishist or millions of mediocre and useless PhDs we have around the world.
Have a nice day.
