Many creationists claim that creationism has a scientific foundation. I have always wondered, therefore, what exactly creationist research would look like. And I don’t mean sitting at a desk analyzing the book of Genesis. I mean, what would creationist scientific research (if such a thing is possible) look like? You can get some sense of what that would look like in this interview that Michael Shermer did with a Ph.D. scientist on staff with Answers in Genesis.

Or you can take a look at Todd Wood’s blog. Todd works for the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee.

In his post, Designed to Kill, Todd writes about the problem of evil in terms of the argument from design. If organisms were all specifically designed by a creator, that means that many organism were designed to be efficient killers:

Actually, I don’t think these things are that much of a problem. Sure, they’re designed. The real question is when were they designed? What I think these things do for us is deepen our understanding of the Curse. Think about this for a second: How could the world we live in now exist without animal death? To be honest, it couldn’t. Overpopulation alone would bring it to a grinding halt, not to mention the need for a completely different kind of ecological cycling of nutrients. And the list goes on. No, if the world before the Fall had no animal death, then it must have been very different from the world we live in now.

Alright. Presuming that “creation” looked very different in the Garden of Eden, then how do you explain the current state of things?

It follows then that the Curse wasn’t merely some minor tweak to the original perfection. Whole components of creation had to be redesigned, and that redesign must have included predators. The more interesting question is not where or when predators originated, but how. What kinds of mechanisms did God use? Was it a direct intervention? Or was there some kind of pre-designed mechanism involved? That’s a question that can actually be researched by studying predators and the attributes that give them their hunting skills. One of these days, I hope our research at CORE will help us to better understand where predators come from.

This is presented as a serious research question. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and then the world suddenly morphed into far more dreadful place like some sort of bad dream. Todd presents two hypotheses. The first is God directly intervened to turn some animals into deadly predators. You might as well say that God magically created predators – that’s not a scientific question. Divine fiat does not fall under the purview of science. And that, really, cuts to the heart of the problem with creationism. Once you propose a God that can literally do anything through no particular means then you can explain anything and therefore explain nothing.

The second hypothesis is a bit more interesting. Todd supposes that God built into some of the animals a “mechanism” that, upon the fruit touching Adam or Eve’s lips, perhaps reshuffles their DNA and causes carnivores to grow pointed teeth and claws. Or, to take an example he uses, jellyfish to suddenly have poisonous tentacles (please tell me how and what did jellyfish eat pre-Fall?) That sounds pretty magical too, but I suppose by invoking the word “mechanism” Todd makes it sound a bit more scientific. Nonesense. That any intelligent person would actually be asking such “research” questions in a serious manner boggles my mind.

Nevertheless, theologically neither scenario presents God in a very favorable light. Either way it is clear that God intentionally created animal death and suffering where it did not (and therefore did not have to) exist before. Whether He did it by directly shuffling His creation or creating it in the first place to do so does not really matter.