Arecently published book documents the creationist misrepresentation of science called “theistic science.” Who WasAdam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity (2015) consists of a reprint of a book of the same title published more than ten years earlier, followed by a thorough update that constitutes one-third of the text.
The authors are Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, both executives and scholars with Reasons to Believe (RTB), a Christian ministry located in Southern California. They have graduate degrees in science (chemistry and astronomy, respectively) and have written many books that profess to put biblical creationism on a scientific foundation.
Rana and Ross’s work focuses on the “scientific case for God’s existence and the Bible’s reliability” and the “integration of scientific fact with biblical faith.” Throughout Who Was Adam? they describe their creationist approach to human origins as science.
However, Rana and Ross also make clear their fundamental biblical premise: “We believe life’s origin and history cannot be fully explained apart from the direct involvement of the Creator, who repeatedly intervened in Earth’s history, initiating new life-forms, including humans who alone were made in His image.”
This premise reflects Rana and Ross’s explicit statement that creation by supernatural intervention is the foundational assumption of RTB’s human origins model. The central presupposition of “theistic science” is operationalized in the repeated use of phrases such as “God’s handiwork,” “Creator’s direct action,” “work of the Creator,” “God’s cre ative work,” and other causal behavior attributed to the biblical deity.
The RTB strategy does not satisfy the basic requirements of a scientific endeavor, and in this article I explain why, giving numerous examples taken primarily from the ten-year update of Who Was Adam?.
Creation Model
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