Science and historyDraft · awaiting advisor review
Hasn’t science disproved God?
In short
Science explains how the natural world works; it can’t settle whether there is a God behind it. Many founders of modern science were Christians, and many scientists are today. Christians do differ on how to read Genesis alongside the age of the universe and evolution.
The Objection
Science explains more and more without God: the origin of the universe, of life and of human beings. God was an explanation for what we didn’t understand, and the gaps keep closing. Believing in miracles doesn’t fit a scientific view of the world.
Put as its strongest advocates would put it.
The Christian Case
- Philosophical argument
Science studies the regular ways nature behaves. Whether nature exists because of God is a question about why there is anything at all, which no experiment can settle either way.
- Historical evidence
Many pioneers of science, including Kepler, Boyle, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell, believed in God and saw studying nature as studying God’s handiwork. Historians of science today reject the popular story of an age-long war between science and religion.
- Scripture
The Bible presents creation as orderly and good, and as something worth searching out.
- Philosophical argument
Some features of the universe, such as its having a beginning and its physical constants falling within the narrow range that allows life, are taken by many as pointers to a Creator. Others explain them differently, for example with many universes. These are arguments, not proofs.
- Christians differ
Christians differ on the age of the earth and on evolution: young-earth creation, old-earth creation and evolutionary creation are all held by faithful Christians. What they share is that God made everything and that human beings bear his image.
Where the Evidence Is Weaker
Arguments from the universe’s beginning and its fine-tuning are debated among physicists and philosophers, and future science may change them. Faith shouldn’t rest on any single current theory.
Arguments to Avoid
- “God of the gaps”: pointing to what science can’t yet explain as proof of God.
- Claiming that a particular scientific finding proves the Bible true.
- Treating Christians who hold a different view of creation as unfaithful.
Read for Yourself
Genesis 1:1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Psalm 19:1–4
1To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. 2Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. 3There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. 4Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
Colossians 1:16–17
16For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: 17And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
Further Reading
- The Language of God · Francis S. Collins (2006)By the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project.
- God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? · John C. Lennox (2007)
- The Territories of Science and Religion · Peter Harrison (2015)A historian on how the two came to be seen as rivals.
Drafted with Opened AI and awaiting review by Opened’s apologetics advisors. Labels show the kind of support each point has: Scripture is what the Bible says; historical evidence and philosophical arguments can be checked by anyone; “Christians differ” marks questions on which faithful Christians disagree.
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