Operational science has indeed been very successful in understanding the world, and has led to many improvements in the quality of life, e.g. putting men on the moon and curing diseases. As explained above, because creation finished at the end of Day 6, biblical creationists would try to find natural laws for every aspect of operation science, and would not invoke a miracle to explain any repeating event in nature in the present. So a creationist would actually not dispute Lerner’s statement as far as operational science is concerned, despite his best efforts to caricaturize our position. This can be shown in a letter I wrote to an enquirer who believed that atoms had to be held together by miraculous means:

“‘Natural laws’ also help us make predictions about future events. In the case of the atom, the explanation of the electrons staying in their orbitals is the positive electric charge and large mass of the nucleus. This enables us to make predictions about how strongly a particular electron is held by a particular atom, for example, making the science of chemistry possible. While this is certainly an example of Col. 1:17, simply saying ‘God upholds the electron’ doesn’t help us make predictions.”
And in my days as a university teaching assistant before joining CMI, I marked an examination answer wrong because it said ‘God made it so’ for a question about the frequency of infrared spectral lines, instead of discussing atomic masses and force constants.

So Lerner is wrong that creationists are in any way hindered in real operational science research, either in theory or in practice.

In contrast, evolution is a speculation about the unobservable and unrepeatable past. Thus it comes under origins science. Rather than observation, origins science uses the principles of causality (everything that has a beginning has a cause11) and analogy (e.g. we observe that intelligence is needed to generate complex coded information in the present, so we can reasonably assume the same for the past). And because there was no material intelligent designer for life, it is legitimate to invoke a non-material designer for life. Creationists invoke the miraculous only for origins science, and as shown, this does not mean they will invoke it for operational science.

The difference between operational and origins science is important for seeing through silly assertions such as the following by Levitt (as quoted by Lerner):

‘… evolution is as thoroughly established as the picture of the solar system due to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.’
However, we can observe the motion of the planets, but no-one has ever observed an information-increasing change of one type of organism to another.

To explain further: the laws that govern the operation of a computer are not those that made the computer in the first place. Lerner’s anti-creationist propaganda is like saying that if we concede that a computer had an intelligent designer, then we might not analyse a computer’s workings in terms of natural laws of electron motion through semiconductors, and might think there are little intelligent beings pushing electrons around instead. Similarly, believing that the genetic code was originally designed does not preclude us from believing that it works entirely by the laws of chemistry involving DNA, RNA, proteins, etc. Conversely, the fact that the coding machinery works according to reproducible laws of chemistry does not prove that the laws of chemistry were sufficient to build such a system from a primordial soup. For more information about difficulties with the origin of life from non-life, see Q&A: Origin of Life.