Is Science Incompatible with Christianity?

During a panel on the future of religion among Gen Z, a student asked me, “Are you scared of our coming generation? Because we’re so into reason and science, and that seems threatening to the future of religion and what you do.”

In voicing this sincere question, the student tapped into a long-standing trope in our culture about an alleged conflict between religion and science. This trope, known as the “conflict thesis,” was popularized by John William Draper’s 1874 book A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. He tells a familiar story: humanity, on its upward trajectory of progress, is continually opposed by a blind-faith peddling, power-hungry church. Scared of a heliocentric universe, it opposed Galileo. Terrified of evolution, it opposed Darwin.

In the conflict between science and faith, it’s not just religion in general that seems bad—Christianity and the Bible are particularly dangerous. Evolutionary science, we’re told, has made biblical accounts of human origins seem out of date, while contemporary accounts of geology and astronomy make the Bible’s chronology implausible. Moreover, it seems like the whole approach to knowing is basically opposed. On one side, you have reason, evidence, and observation; on the other side, you have faith and trust in ancient, unverifiable books with little connection to the real world.

We’ve become so familiar with the conflict thesis that it’s taken for granted today. We assume there’s a worldview generated by science (including the hard sciences) and worldviews generated by religion, and you must choose: one means thinking, the others feeling.

While these are the choices presented to us, it’s worth taking a step back and asking whether this is the right framing of the debate or if there’s a more truthful and compelling starting point to the relationship between science and Christianity. I believe there is, and the starting point may be surprising: Genesis 1. The basic worldview Genesis 1 provides is necessary to the practice of science as we know it. As Alvin Plantinga suggests, while at first it may appear there’s a deep conflict between Christianity and science, it’s only superficial. There’s actually deep concord.

Genesis 1 gives us the metaphysical foundation, the epistemological grounds, the moral boundaries, and a purpose necessary for scientific inquiry.

Metaphysics: Genesis 1 Explains the Orderliness We Perceive in the Universe

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). That phrase is a merism, a literary feature where God creates everything by referring to the whole range of things in between them. This opening verse gives us important metaphysical data. First, before there was a beginning to the universe, there was a God beyond the universe. In other words, the world isn’t divine, nor is anything in it. It’s the result of the Divine.

The basic worldview Genesis 1 provides is necessary to the practice of science as we know it.

Second, how does God make things? By the power of his word: “God said . . . and it was so” (vv. 6–7). He doesn’t take preexisting, eternal matter and reshape it. God speaks and matter comes into existence as he desires it. Unlike in other ancient creation narratives, there’s no competition, chaos, or violence at the origin of the world but simply the reasonable decree of an all-wise King who brings it all into existence.

Third, Genesis 1 portrays a basic order, symmetry, and beauty to creation. As Meredith Kline and others have shown, there’s a logical flow to the order of the first six days—on the first three days, God creates realms (heavens, waters, land), and on the next three days, he fills these realms with inhabitants and rulers (sun, moon, stars, the beasts of the deep, vegetation, animals, and humans).

Further, there’s an orderliness implied to the order—the sun, moon, and stars are placed in the sky to mark the passage of time and changing of seasons, and their regularity provided a consistent calendar for activities like planting and reaping and religious festivals. All this paints a portrait of a universe uniquely suited for the practice of the empirical sciences.

For these sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, physics, geology) to work, you must assume much at the outset about the nature of reality. Processes of observation, the testing of hypotheses, and inductive reasoning about the future and present consistency of reality all rely on a set of assumptions about the universe’s orderliness.

Nature’s regularity is what makes inductive reasoning work—reasoning that proceeds from observation to infer something like “Every day before today, the sun has risen; therefore the sun will rise tomorrow.” This might not seem like a big deal at first, but it’s the kind of assumption that kept philosopher David Hume up at night. One of the major criteria for the verification of scientific studies is their repeatability. Verification, however, assumes the present is consistent with the past is consistent with the future. It assumes an essentially lawlike regularity within nature.

Physicist Paul Davies puts it this way: “Even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as a lawlike order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.”

Davies’s observation helps us see it was no coincidence that during the rise of modern science in the West, most of the leading scientists were Christians. Galileo was a Roman Catholic. Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method, was a believer. Physicist Robert Boyle was a Christian who, in addition to writing the natural law that bear his name, wrote extensive commentaries on Scripture. James Clerk Maxwell, one of the great unifiers of physics who brought together electricity, magnetism, and light, was a Presbyterian and elder in the Church of Scotland. More could be named.

Many historians of science conclude it’s no accident that science developed in a culture largely influenced by Christianity and its account that the rational, reliable, and orderly universe in which we live was created by a God who transcends creation.

Metaphysically, we all act as if we live in an orderly universe. And the first gift Genesis 1 gives to science is an Author and Sustainer of a rational order who underwrites that intuition.

Epistemology: Genesis 1 Explains Why We Can Trust Our Perceptions of an Orderly Universe

It’s one thing for the universe to be orderly, but how can we know it’s orderly? Is there a match between our reason and reality? In Christianity and Science, Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck wrote, “All scientific research assumes in advance and without proof the reliability of the senses and the objectivity of the perceivable world.” Bavinck is noting the practice of science assumes that reality seems to fit with the way our mind reasons.

If naturalism (the view that the world is only material) is true, then a strong case can be made that our rational faculties aren’t (or don’t have to be) accurate preceptors of the way the world is. This is the case Plantinga makes in Where the Conflict Really Lies, which he calls the evolutionary argument against naturalism.

Plantinga’s argument begins with what’s true if two things, evolution and naturalism, are true at the same time. If you take both these beliefs and put them together, you have good reason not to trust your senses or cognitive capacities to tell you the truth about reality. Here’s why: evolution is based on natural selection—a process that preserves genetic traits that help a species fight, fly, feed, or reproduce. Therefore, we can trust our perceptive abilities only to keep us alive, not necessarily to tell us what’s true.

Plantinga illustrates this point with an analogy: he says imagine an ancient person who comes to believe that every time he sees red berries, a witch doctor is waiting to curse him. So whenever he sees a bush with red berries, he avoids it and doesn’t eat its fruit. Now, it turns out those berries are poisonous, and if he ate them, they’d kill him. What you come to understand is that his false belief is keeping him alive, and this belief will allow him to pass on his genetic material as well as his beliefs. It’s an evolutionarily useful belief that isn’t in contact with reality.

Here you start to understand that without God, you have a potential reason to doubt that your cognitive functions give you true knowledge of reality. All you can conclude is they give you beliefs that keep you alive functionally. And if our rational abilities only serve to give us useful beliefs but not necessarily true beliefs, on what kind of footing does that put us with respect to our ability to do science confidently?

What does all this have to do with Genesis 1? This:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (vv. 26–27)

Genesis 1 teaches that God created human beings in his own image. What does that mean? The basic idea is that humans are supposed to represent God and act like him, and to do so they’ve been given certain qualities that resemble him, including the rationality of their minds and souls.

According to Genesis 1, the Mind that made the world made your mind, and he made it in such a way that you’re able to perceive the world in a way analogous to the way he does. This starting point gives us the highest confidence in our capacity to study the world as it is and discern an orderliness to it. We have reason to trust there’s a fit between our thoughts and the world outside them, because God made both.

This all amounts to good epistemological grounds for the practice of science.

Ethics: Genesis 1 Best Explains Our Moral Intuitions Concerning Science’s Limits

Metaphysical and epistemological principles seem to be enough to ground the basic practice of science, but science also needs a third standard: moral boundaries. While the connection won’t be immediately intuitive, let me mention one name: Josef Mengele.

Mengele, a chief medical researcher under Adolf Hitler, was infamous for his research on humans. He conducted tests on Jews and Roma people to advance Hitler’s racial theories. He had studies performed on twins involving amputation, organ dissection, and various forms of torture and death to study their effects on the human body. If one twin died of a certain cause, he’d have the other one killed so they could compare them side by side. The list of horrors goes on.

We have reason to trust there’s a fit between our thoughts and the world outside them, because God made both.

Most of Mengele’s “research” resulted in nothing, but there have been long-standing questions about the value of potentially life-saving medical research into hypothermia, hypoxia, dehydration, and more derived from human experimentation in concentration camps.

This kind of science wasn’t unique to Nazi Germany. Infamously, the research performed on black men in the Tuskegee Study in Alabama studied the progress of syphilis in the lives of hundreds of poor black men, despite there being a cure at the time.

Most people have some sense that this kind of experimentation is wrong, but you have to ask the question: Why?

This question is relevant not only for experiments conducted in the past but also for us today. There are ethical questions all over campus: the bioethics of cloning, or testing the unborn for genetic abnormalities (and then killing them in utero), or performing experiments with tissue from aborted fetuses. What about the ethics of artificial intelligence or technologies that will be used for wicked ends?

This is the classic question raised by movies like Jurassic Park. You have scientists asking the question “Can we do this?” without asking whether we should do it. And absent God, the question becomes what grounds there are for stopping Mengele, Tuskegee, or future experiments? Where do our moral boundaries come from?

Several answers could be given. First, our moral sense could originate from our individual consciences—issues are right and wrong because I’ve determined them to be so. But why is your conscience, and not someone else’s, ultimately authoritative of right and wrong?

Second, it’s been said morality is socially constructed—something is wrong because we’ve collectively decided it is. But this explanation kicks the can down the road. Why is a group establishing moral boundaries more authoritative than the individual? What if society changes its mind?

Third, you might argue that evolution provides grounding for ethics. Again, this is flawed: studying evolutionary behavior can, at best, yield a description of behaviors that have been advantageous for human survival. As I explained earlier, Plantinga argued that if we take evolution and naturalism as equally true, we’re not left with any coherent, rational standard against which we can judge our actions.

So where does that leave us? Let’s revisit Genesis 1. God made humans in his image, and that includes at least two imperatives relevant for us in forming a coherent moral vision: a dominion mandate and a clear line.

First, God gives humans a dominion mandate: they’re supposed to exercise dominion and subdue the earth. They’re to take raw, untamed nature and cultivate it. Dominion in the Bible isn’t about self-aggrandizement but about service and blessing. This is where the mandate for science begins. Science is a human activity pursued to understand the world as well as to develop it under God’s command.

In exercising dominion, humans do this as an image, which means we’re supposed to do it in a way that reflects God’s goodness, character, creativity, and righteousness. This is why, elsewhere in the Bible, Paul describes becoming a Christian as being renewed in God’s image in holiness and righteousness (Eph. 4:24). We’re given a guardrail: What you do with creation is supposed to reflect the perfect and moral character of its Creator.

Second, because all human beings are made in God’s image, you’re not to attack, abuse, or mistreat your fellow humans in the name of science. This is why God issues the death penalty in Genesis 9:6. He says that anyone who sheds the blood of another will have his own blood shed. Why? Because humanity is made in God’s image, and any assault on a human is essentially an assault on God himself.

Why was what Mengele did so evil? Why was what happened in the Tuskegee experiments so horrid? Why do we recoil at the thought of turning humans into science experiments? It’s not just a reflex from our evolutionary past that we can decide to override if we want. It’s the testimony of a truth our world suppresses: we’re made in God’s image, and therefore science ought to be used to bless and build, not to curse and destroy.

Purpose: Genesis 1 Provides a Worthy Goal for the Practice of Science: Doxology

Finally, Genesis 1 gives the practice of science is the answer to the big question of why. Every human endeavor must have an answer to the question of why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s the question of purpose: What are you ultimately trying to do when you do science?

It’s not enough to have small, short-term goals: I want to get a conclusion to this experiment. I want to come up with a product so I can keep my job. I want to make some money. I want to cure cancer. Instead, you need an answer that can sustain you.

What you do with creation is supposed to reflect the perfect and moral character of its Creator.

Christianity gives us several reasons for pursuing science, but let me synthesize them into two: love of neighbor and love of God.

First, the love of neighbor. Part of unfolding a dominion in the world and building it out is to bless and benefit our fellow humans made in God’s image. So when you pursue knowledge in technology, biology, and chemistry, you do so knowing it’ll contribute to human flourishing and that this is a service of love to your neighbor.

Second, the worship, enjoyment, and glory of God himself. Many scholars point out that Genesis’s creation account contains several parallels with ancient Near Eastern narratives of kings building temples for their gods. The temple of the god was supposed to be a microcosm of the world, and you’d go there to worship that god. In Genesis 1, we have God building the world as a temple within which he can dwell and meet with his people.

The Westminster Catechism says the chief purpose of humanity is to “glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” That means everything you do, whether it’s literature or art, raising your family or falling in love, or even pursuing the sciences, is supposed to be part of this overall goal. We’re to praise God and live in a way that reflects him, while at the same time enjoying him and loving him. So when you pursue science, when you study the cosmos, it should lead you into greater wonder and appreciation and worship of the God who created it.

Growing our knowledge in the sciences should ultimately lead us to a growing knowledge of Jesus. In Christ, as Paul says, are hidden “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. To come to know creation is a way to come to know Jesus.