The true role of natural sciencein relation to creation
From a Christian point of view it should be easily seen that God was the Transcendent First Cause of all created things but that he also created secondary causes to uphold his creation and ensure the continuity of life on earth. The true scope of natural science is therefore the observation of created things and the investigation of those secondary causes created by God: that is, those continuously repeatable laws which govern the composition and function of created things and ensure their continuity.
Always subject to his will as to their operation and continued existence, God gave those laws their own autonomy. Natural science can only ever obtain a much less than certain knowledge of them and thus the true investigatory task of scientists is an "unended quest."11
The evolution world view
Rationalist, Auguste Comte, in his Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830) claimed that the first two stages of man's thought, the theological and metaphysical stages, had been superseded by the final or positive stage when men through scientific experimentation and observation would reach the positive truth.
Applied to origins, as it was meant to be, this philosophy is a fallacy, because unique past events cannot be observed nor can any hypothesis as to their history be experimentally tested. Yet it is the philosophy adopted by modern scientific establishments, who advocate a world-view built upon uniformitarian and evolutionist concepts in which they claim to know the ages of geological strata, the earth and the universe. Suffice to say that all these suppositions contain assumptions, vital to their validity, which are not only unproven but are also untestable and outside of the scientific method. Any claim that they scientifically contradict the biblical history of origins is therefore untrue.
11 Karl Popper states at p. 104 of his autobiography (Ref. 2) concerning genuine scientific theories: "Although we cannot justify a theory-that is, justify our belief in its truth-we can sometimes justify our preference for one theory over another; for example, if its degree of corroboration is greater." As an example he gives present day preference of Einstein's theory over Newton's. Thus Popper has called his book Unended Quest. Although Popper's view concerning certainty in relation to scientific theories is considered by some to be controversial, it is no doubt correct in the case of cosmological theories.