Born in Ararat, Victoria, Sarfati moved with his family to New Zealand as a child, where he became a dual national. He attended Wellington College in New Zealand, later graduating from Victoria University of Wellington with a B.Sc. (Hons.) in chemistry, and a Ph.D. in the same subject for a thesis entitled "A Spectroscopic Study of some Chalcogenide Ring and Cage Molecules." He co-authored a paper on high-temperature superconductors that was published in Nature in 1987 ("Letters to Nature")Mawdsley, A., Trodahl, H.J., Tallon, J., Sarfati, J. and Kaiser, A.B. (1987) Thermoelectric power and electron-phonon enhancement in YBa2Cu3O7-6 Nature 328: 233-234., and from 1988 to 1995, had several papers on spectroscopy of condensed matter samples published in other peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In 1996, he returned to Brisbane, Australia to work for the Creation Science Foundation, then Answers in Genesis and now Creation Ministries International, as co-editor of their magazine, Creation, and their technical journal, Journal of Creation (formerly TJ). Fellow creationist Gary Bates, in an interview with Sarfati in Creation magazine, says:

"Sarfati means Frenchman in Hebrew. Despite having no religious upbringing, Jonathan was driven to investigate his Jewish roots after his conversion. As a Messianic Jew, he has also passionately imbibed knowledge about church history and theological issues."

Creationism

According to the Creation Ministries International website, Sarfati was a founder of the Wellington Christian Apologetics Society in New Zealand, and has long retained an interest in Christian apologetics and the creationism versus evolution debate. His first two books, Refuting Evolution in 1999, and Refuting Evolution 2 in 2002, are intended as rebuttals to the National Academy of Sciences' publication Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science and the PBS/Nova series "Evolution," respectively. Refuting Compromise, published in 2004, is Sarfati's rebuttal of the day-age creationist teachings of Dr. Hugh Ross, who attempts to harmonize the Genesis account of creation with mainstream science regarding the age of the earth and the possible size of the Biblical Flood, against which Sarfati defends a literal biblical timeline and a global flood. Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education called Sarfati's Refuting Evolution a "crude piece of propaganda".

In other writings, he has criticized abiogenesis models, pointing out what he considers difficulties in chemical evolution, such as polymerization, chirality,instability of building blocks,and the origin of self-replicating molecules. He also accuses many origin of life researchers, such as David Bartel of MIT and Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute, of having a religious kind of faith in materialism.

Sarfati's critics, such as Reed A. Cartwright and Dr Douglas L. Theobald, have criticized Sarfati's claims such as one that accuses scientists of continually changing the definition of vestigial to match the evidence. In their criticism, Cartwright and Douglas note that Sarfati's PhD is in physical chemistry, not biology. Sarfati himself has criticised some of his opponents for their lack of appropriate credentials, noting of one researcher, that he was an anthropologist, and therefore "anything he says about radiometric dating should be taken with a large grain of salt."

Beliefs

Abortion

Sarfati wrote in Prayer News: "Right throughout Scripture, murder ... that is the intentional killing of innocent humans ... is regarded as a heinous sin (Exodus 20:13, , Romans 13:9). Since abortion kills an innocent human being, it is nothing less than murder. So all the usual 'hard cases' pushed by pro-abortionists, e.g. 'What if the woman was raped?', 'What if the child is deformed?', 'What if she can't afford to keep the child?' are completely irrelevant. We should also remember Ezekiel 18:20, which prohibits executing a child for the crime of his/her father ... this means that even the tragic cases of pregnancies due to incest or rape are no justification for killing the innocent child conceived."

Racism

He has argued that "the Bible speaks against racism regardless of any way in which people have misused it."

LGBT issues

He strongly believes that marriage should only be available to heterosexual couples, stating that it is "God's ideal".

He opposes homosexual behaviour, while advocating "love the sinner, hate the sin."

"Homosexuals are now a politically protected victim group, about which it is verboten to say anything negative. And certain homonazis want Christians punished if they quote from the Bible against homosexual behavior. Indeed, 63-year-old Pastor Åke Green was jailed in Sweden for just that, because they have such a sodomofascist law restricting Christian freedom. Fortunately his conviction was overturned on appeal, to the ire of homosexual activists, by a higher court because it was such an egregious violation of Sweden's free speech laws."

Politics

Sarfati frequently expresses his conservative views on some blogs, most notably that of columnist Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun newspaper. He has supported Bolt's position on the conservative side of Australia's culture wars.

Although tied with Rey Casse for first place in the Australian Junior Championship of 1981, he was not eligible to share the title due to his being a resident of New Zealand at the time. After becoming New Zealand national chess champion in 1987-8, he represented New Zealand in three Chess Olympiads: the 27th in Dubai in 1986, the 28th in Thessaloniki in 1988, and the 30th in Manila in 1992. He also represented New Zealand on top board at the 5th Asian Teams in New Delhi.

He is known for giving blindfold chess exhibitions at creationist conferences and chess clubs, and has played twelve such games simultaneously.

His previous best was winning 11/11 at the Kapiti Chess Club in New Zealand.