The apostle Paul closed his first epistle to Timothy by urging the young pastor to guard the deposit of truth that had been entrusted to him, “avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge” (1 Timothy 6:20-21). In the King James Version, the text famously speaks of “science falsely so called."
Over the course of human history, all kinds of speculative ideas have been falsely labeled “science” and mistakenly accepted as true and reliable knowledge by otherwise brilliant people. The now-discredited dogmas of older scientific theories are numerous—and in some cases laughable. They include alchemy (the medieval belief that other base metals could be transmuted into gold); phrenology (the Victorian belief that the shape of one’s skull reflects character traits and mental capacity); astrology (the pagan belief that human destiny is determined by the motions of celestial bodies); and abiogenesis (the long-standing belief that living organisms are spontaneously generated by decaying organic substances). All those false beliefs were deemed credible as “science” by the leading minds of their times.
Consider just one of those—abiogenesis. Popularly known as “spontaneous generation,” this idea has long been, and continues to be, one of the archetypal expressions of “science falsely so called.” It is also one of the most persistent of all demonstrably pseudoscientific fictions. The notion that aphids arise naturally from dew on plant leaves, mold is generated automatically by aging bread, and maggots are spontaneously begotten by rotting meat was more or less deemed self-evident by most of humanity’s brightest intellects from the time of Aristotle until 1861, when Louis Pasteur conclusively proved that non-living matter cannot spawn life on its own.
Read more:
https://www.gty.org/library/blog/B170417
Naturalism as Religion by John MacArthur
Dethroning the Judge by John MacArthur
The Fallacy of Uniformitarianism by John MacArthur
The Exegetical Errors of the Day-Age Theory by John MacArthur
The Gaping Holes in the Gap Theory by John MacArthur
A Monument to Biblical Truth by Jeremiah Johnson and Cameron Buettel
Reflecting on the Creation Series by Jeremiah Johnson
Featured sermons
"Evangelicals, Evolution, and the BioLogos Disaster” - John MacArthur
"Through Adam, Death” - John MacArthur
"Creation, Theology, and the End of the Universe” - John MacArthur
In the debate over how the universe began, the battle lines are clear. And regardless of which side you’re on, there are important questions that relatively few in either camp have bothered to ask, much less answer. Questions like:
- Why is the issue of origins so universally controversial?
- How can creationists support biblical claims that so obviously seem to contradict modern science?
- Whose side of the argument does scientific evidence support?
- What roles should science and the Bible play in a person’s beliefs about the physical universe?
LISTEN and/or DOWNLOAD the series here.
The Institute for Creation Research has a series of podcasts on this same topic. Check it out!
Six Days of Creation, Part 1 [Podcast] - The Institute for Creation Research
Six Days of Creation, Part 2 [Podcast] - The Institute for Creation Research
Biblical Creation Confirmed [Podcast] - The Institute for Creation Research
Scientific Evidence for Creation [Podcast] - The Institute for Creation Research
Scientific Evidence for Divine Design [Podcast] - The Institute for Creation Research
Five Reasons to Believe in Recent Creation (Intro) - The Institute for Creation Research
Creationist Worldview [Podcast] - The Institute for Creation Research