Has Science disproved Christianity?

Do you have to choose between God and science? Depending on who you ask in our secular age, often you’ll encounter an underlying belief that there is a zero-sum game between two competing options for making sense of the universe: faith versus fact, religion versus reason, God versus science. When you survey how many high-profile scientists are vocal critics of religion, you could easily form the impression that modern science has progressively chased away the superstitious shadows of religious belief.

After all the ancients used to invoke the gods to explain all manner of natural phenomenon. Lightning was Zeus from Mt Olympus. Thunder was Thor striking his hammer. But the rise of modern science has meant that these gaps in our knowledge of the natural world, the ones religious people used to plug God into, are quickly disappearing, such that soon there will be no room for God at all. And so Neil DeGrass Tyson famously remarked,

“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”

So has science disproved God?

HIGH PROFILE SCIENTISTS STILL BELIEVE IN GOD

To explore the territory of this question, let us start by making a simple observation (since that is a huge part of the scientific method). If God and science are at war then you would expect to find a certain demographic of casualties strewn across the intellectual battlefields. Namely, scientists who believe in God. For if science had buried God, then any scientist worth their salt would surely give up on their religious beliefs. 

The only problem? The facts suggest otherwise. 

A great many high-profile scientists are also believers in God. Francis Collins directs the United States National Institute for Health. Jennifer Wiseman serves as the Senior Project Scientist for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Gerhard Ertl was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2007. And beyond these selective examples, a survey of Nobel-Prize winners across the twentieth century reveals that more than 85 percent self-identified as Christian or religiously Jewish, outing they themselves as believers in God. So from this simple observation, we can draw a simple conclusion: that if science had disproved God then someone forgot to tell an awfully large number of prize-winning scientists.

CHRISTIANITY ARGUABLY GAVE BIRTH TO MODERN SCIENCE

Historically speaking the scientific revolution did not take place within a vacuum. Rather it seems that the Christian story played a unique role in the rise of modern science. In pondering why science exploded in a Christianised Europe, as opposed to in Africa or Asia centuries before, historians of science have landed on the notion that the Judaeo-Christian story provided the intellectual soil and motivational fertiliser out of which the scientific method could grow. 

The Christian story teaches that:

(a) our universe is rationally ordered by an eternal mind

(b) humanity is made in God’s image with minds of our own that have the capability to unlock the universe’s secrets

(c) humanity was tasked in the cultural mandate to study God’s creation in order to make it fruitful

(d) humanity was damaged by evil, meaning we could fudge our results or misinterpret the data, requiring a system of external measurement and peer review that could curtail our fallenness and lead to truth.

When you survey the fathers of modern scientific fields—Newton, Kepler, Faraday, Pascal—all of them were believers in God, Jesus, and the Christian story. Rather than seeing their faith as a hindrance to science, they genuinely believed that God inspired their science. They took seriously Jesus’ great commandment to love God with their mind (Matthew 22:37). Johannes Kepler remarked how in his study of mechanics he was thinking God’s thoughts after Him. Isaac Newton argued that his Principia Mathematica was intended to move people from perceiving the rational order of the universe to believing in an intelligent Creator. In fact, C. S. Lewis sums up in a single sentence what historians and philosophers of science justify in lengthy scholarly tomes:

“Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”

SCIENCE HAS PROVIDED GOOD REASONS TO BELIEVE IN GOD

Not only did the Christian story provide the philosophical soil and motivational fertilizer out of which modern science largely grew, but many of the subsequent discoveries of science, far from pointing away from God, make more sense in light of God’s existence. For instance, the discovery that our universe—space, time, matter, and energy—is not eternal but had an absolute beginning at some finite point has strengthened one of the most famous philosophical arguments for God’s existence: the Kalam Cosmological Argument. 

So too has the discovery of the highly improbable calibration of the initial conditions of our universe to allow for intelligent life led to the development of a teleological line of reasoning known as the Fine-Tuning Argument. When combined with discoveries like the surprising way abstract mathematics maps onto the physical world, or the way biological organisms are comprised of coded information systems, our universe bears the unmistakable appearance of design. 

This ordered structure in our cosmos is what recently prompted Ard Louis, professor of theoretical physics at Oxford University, to observe in conversation with Morgan Freeman, “I think the more we learn about the world, it points more toward God, rather than less.” So far from burying God, if anything it seems that science is resurrecting a rational belief in God.

GOD AND SCIENCE ARE COMPLEMENTARY EXPLANATIONS

While science can unearth a great deal about the history of our universe, when it comes down to it, disproving God is simply not in its purview. As huge of a gift as the tool of science is to the tool-belt of knowledge, not every question has a scientific answer. 

Science has limits. 

Being bound to purely observe and measure the physical universe, science has no access to the metaphysical. It cannot say definitively whether God does or does not exist. It cannot move from describing what is to pontificating about what ought to be. It cannot repeat the past to prove what did or did not happen in history. So as soon as we step into questions of metaphysics, ethics, or even human history, we simply move beyond the authority of the hard sciences to speak. 

Where many who pose the science objection ultimately get tripped up is by confusing two different types of explanations. Suppose I were to ask you why you are reading this post, and you answered, “Well, the pixels on my screen are emitting light, which then passes through the lenses of my eye. There the arrangement of the letters are translated into electro-chemical signals, which my brain interprets via centers for language and memory, forming them into coherent thoughts that convey meaning to my conscious mind.” 

Now I might be impressed at your wit, but you haven’t actually answered my question. You gave a mechanistic explanation, using science. You explained how you are reading. What I was really asking for was a personal explanation or an explanation of agency. The why. To which the answer might be something like, “Because I am searching for answers to life’s deepest questions.” 

The how and the why, the mechanism and the agency, are not competing explanations. They are perfectly complementary. Because as much as we can learn about the process of reading from science, we can learn nothing about why you are reading from that same enterprise. 

For that, you have to speak. 

And the same is true when it comes to science and God. Science can tell us a great deal about how the universe operates, but it cannot tell us why it exists. 

For that, God has to speak. 

And when it comes to God and the Christian story where God speaks, I know of no serious scientific reason to disbelieve anything Jesus has said about who you are, why you are here, and where you are going. If anything, science should give you some good reasons to tune in more carefully.