How Can We Make Sense of Science and the Christian Faith?

Doesn’t science make the Christian faith unnecessary? Can’t science explain everything in a way that makes the Christian faith obsolete? The often-assumed answer to these loaded questions is: of course.

What, exactly, is "science"? This is not meant to be a complete or formal definition, but it is enough for the question at hand.

Science begins with a set of assumptions:

The physical world exists

Human beings can observe it accurately (at least some of the time) - because it is orderly.

Logic (reason) applies to these observations and descriptions.

Some things are causes and others are effects.

You can’t really be justified in trying to do what scientists typically try to do unless these things are true - and note this carefully: science cannot prove any of these.

How do we rightly "divide the territory" between science and the Christian faith?

Possibility 1 - there is no room for faith

Perhaps the material world is all there is. Perhaps - but notice that science isn’t competent to make a judgment here - this is outside the jurisdiction of science, so to speak. Science can’t prove that science is the only reliable way to get at truth. That would be like the little girl who says, very clearly and distinctly, "I can’t say the word ‘yes’."

Some scientists make this assumption - but it is just their assumption. Some scientists debate this point, but when they debate it, they are outside their expertise, since science is about observing the physical world and reasoning about causes and effects in that domain. For some scientists, their religion is materialism, and some of them even admit it, like Harvard geneticist Richard Lowentin, who said, "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs . . . because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.."

There is absolutely nothing about pure science that leaves no room for the Christian faith. This becomes very apparent when you study the history of modern science, because many of the outstanding figures of modern science also believed in God and at least some version of the Christian faith.

Possibility 2 - there is room for faith if we keep it in its own little "compartment."

In this view science gives us real knowledge of the way things actually are. Faith is another matter. It is groundless. It is something you accept without evidence.

So, from this point of view, if you keep faith in its place, it is permissible. But science is the king, and its domain is knowledge. Faith is a social, psychological construction only. One science department chairman long ago said, "We have professors here who go to church. But that’s religion. They keep it in its place, and it has nothing to do with science."

Possibility 3 - science and the Christian faith are completely compatible.

If science and faith are both about truth then there should be no conflict. Recall the meaning of truth: saying of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.

While the revelation God gave in scripture is true, that does not necessarily mean that it is all the truth there is. God didn’t reveal everything about reality. He didn’t, for example, mention the molecular structure of DNA. That is the sort of thing we would expect science to explore. But could science ever discover that Christ died for our sins? No, because that is not something that comes from observation, reasoning, and causal explanations.

An interesting test case for this - something mentioned by C. S. Lewis in Miracles, is the virgin birth of Jesus. Suppose Mary had been a study case for a bunch of modern medical investigators. Here is Mary, with no access - you might say - to any male chromosome material. Suddenly, right there under the ultrasound and so forth, one of her eggs is fertilized. How could that happen? Science couldn’t tell us. Science could never discover that the Holy Spirit was the cause, because the Holy Spirit is not a cause within the material world, and that is the domain of science. But notice that once that fertilization took place, everything else presumably would have been just like other pregnancies, and medical scientists could have studied that to their heart’s content.

So, to sum up so far:

The documents of the Christian faith - scripture - are true. But they are not science books, so to speak.

Science is not competent to make claims about anything beyond the material world, and it is certainly not competent to tell us that there can be nothing beyond the material world.

If the Christian faith and science are both about truth, we should expect there to be no final conflict between the two.

How do apparent conflicts come up? None of this means that it is always easy to figure out how to harmonize science and the Christian faith, because we are always working from a limited understanding of both. So there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong.

We might misunderstand the Bible and the Christian faith. There is always more to be learned from the scripture. While this does not mean that we can never come to a definite conclusion, when exploring such complex a question as how to reconcile the Bible and science, we should probably always be a bit provisional about our conclusions.

We might misunderstand science. By its very nature, science works by proposing explanations, testing those explanations, and revising them. Much of "science" is provisional by design. By its very nature is should be ever-changing, at least in part. (This is one reason why it is probably never a good idea to stake too much of your case for the Christian faith on current science. It will change, and your case will crumble with that change!)

In a worse-case scenario, we might misunderstand BOTH science and the Christian faith!

Examples

Example #1: The age of the earth

One general problem in harmonizing science and scripture regards the age of the earth.

When you read the genealogies of the Bible, and count the "so and so begat so and so" and then estimate how long each generation was, you come up with (only) a few thousand years. This is how a fellow named Bishop Usher came up with creation at 4004 BC. However, someone noticed that when the Bible says "John was the father of James" that "father" can mean only that John was some grandparent (or more) of James. This leaves "room" in the Bible for more time, but still not nearly as much as some think is needed.

However, most observations of the world make the earth appear to be very, very old, and man to have been around for more than a few thousand years.

How do we reconcile these differences? Several approaches have been tried. Some try to "revise" science, attempting to find fault with any indications that the earth is very old. Some say the earth was created with "apparent age" so that while it appears very old, it is not. Others find time for an old earth by understanding the "days" of genesis one to be long ages of time. There are problems with all these approaches.

A related point here is the relationship of geology and scripture. Those who think the earth is very young usually conclude that the flood of Noah can account for all geologic formations on the earth. This is called "flood geology." Those who think the world could be older might still believe that there was a world-wide flood, but not think that this flood accounts for all the sedimentary formations (for example, like all the limestone around here) found on the earth.

My judgment on the age of the earth problem is that some Christians might have misunderstood the Bible on this point. It is not clear that the Bible requires the earth to be only a few thousand years old.

Example #2: Evolution

The word "evolution" can mean a lot of different things.

Sometimes misunderstandings start right here because "evolution" can just mean "change." No one doubts that biological organisms are constantly involved in "change" until they die. So that definition does not get to the heart of the matter.

Here I am talking only about the idea that physical, natural causes are sufficient to account for the change of inorganic material, over long periods of time, into human beings, or other living organisms.

There are shelves of books on this topic, so we will just be touching the tip of the iceberg here. This is clearly one of those areas where science tends to step beyond its rightful bounds, because this is necessarily a question that goes beyond science. Science is incompetent to rule on whether or not a non-physical cause is necessary to account to human beings.

Dr. Cornelius Hunter, whose field is molecular biophysics, has written two books in which he shows that there is a constant religious assumption that undergirds the conclusions of evolutionists. Hunter quotes evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, "Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin . . . Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense." (Darwin’s Proof, pp. 95-96)

Another quote from Hunter sums up the issue: "Evolution is an organizing idea that inherently relies on ultimate truth claims – claims that are outside of science. Evolution draws on several scientific disciplines, but evolution itself is not scientific. Thus it is not a matter of finding a better scientific explanation before evolution is dropped from science; rather, it is a matter of understanding the boundaries of science. When assumptions about God are made before the science begins, the result is not science, no matter how much science follows. When limited to scientific findings, the evidence for evolution is easily countered. And when the metaphysics are brought in for support, evolution relies on a particular and rather sentimentalized version of God. The evolution theodicy is a combination of questionable science and narrow metaphysics." (Darwin’s God, p. 158)

The point is that evolution is much more than science. It is a whole ideology that won a great public relations battle long ago – something very obvious when you look at almost any primary, secondary or post-secondary school. Evolution is a kind of dogmatic orthodoxy that cannot be successfully questioned in government-sponsored educational institutions. If you don’t think so, just go try it sometime. But Hunter is right about evolution. It is clearly a case of mis-understanding science, and allowing science to try to do much more than it is capable of doing.

Regarding the earlier point about the age of the earth: one very strong motive for evolutionists to see the earth as very, very old is that this is required for the scheme of evolution. Some Christians fight the old earth view to the death as a way of defeating evolution before it starts. This can all get very complicated, can’t it?

One final note about evolution: one attempt to solve this problem is sometimes called "theistic evolution." This is the idea that evolution is true, but God directed it. This solution solves nothing, however, because Darwinism in all its forms is an attempt to explain life without reference to God, but by resort instead to chance. So a God-directed evolution is really a hidden contradiction of concepts. If God is needed to direct "evolution" then Darwin and his modern followers are wrong. If God is not needed to account for life, then the Christian faith is wrong.

See how complex this can quickly become? There are surely a lot of things about the relationship of science and faith that we will never know in this lifetime. So humility is in order all around.

Don’t accept the "warfare theory" about the history of science and the Christian faith - the idea that religion was always somehow at odds with science and science finally and bravely won the battle.

One little bit of mythology maintains that before Columbus, Europeans believed nearly unanimously in a flat earth—a belief allegedly drawn from certain Biblical statements and enforced by the medieval church. This myth seems to have had an eighteenth-century origin, elaborated and popularized by Washington Irving, who flagrantly fabricated evidence for it in his four-volume history of Columbus. The myth was then picked up by others.

The truth is that it’s almost impossible to find an educated person after Aristotle (d. 322 B.C.) who doubts that the earth is a sphere. In the Middle Ages, you couldn't emerge from any kind of education, cathedral school or university, without being perfectly clear about the earth’s sphericity and even its approximate circumference.

Science is outside its rightful bounds if it tries to offer up explanations about things outside the physical world. At that point we are into the area of religion or philosophy.

Don’t let the assumption go unchallenged that the material world is all that exists. The most credentialed scientist, when making such a claim, is speaking outside his expertise.

Don’t accept "chance" as an explanation of anything. As we said in an earlier lesson, if everything can be explained by chance, then so can the explanation that everything can be explained by chance. And if that is the case, it is not much of an explanation at all!

Don’t be too quick to adjust your view of the Christian faith just to accommodate a particular conclusion of science, or to attempt to defeat any view of science. Science by nature is ever-changing, and the Christian faith by its nature is never-changing.