Hasn't science disproved God?
Science has explained thunder, disease and the origin of species without God. Every gap where God used to be has been filled by a natural explanation. Belief in God is a pre-scientific hypothesis that modern knowledge has made unnecessary.
Science studies how the natural world works; it cannot, by its own methods, show whether nature is all there is. That is a philosophical claim, not a scientific result. The God of the Bible is not one more cause inside the universe competing with gravity or chemistry. He is the reason there is a lawful universe at all. Modern science grew up largely among people who believed exactly that, and many working scientists still do.
What Scripture says
1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
God is the source of the whole created order, not a part of it. Science studies the creation; it does not find the Creator as one more object.
1The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. 2Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. 3Without speech or language, without a sound to be heard, 4their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens He has pitched a tent for the sun.
The heavens 'declare the glory of God'. Studying nature is one way of hearing that testimony.
20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.
God's eternal power and divine nature are 'clearly seen' through what he has made.
16For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. 17He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
In Christ 'all things hold together'. The regularity science depends on is, on this view, God's faithful upholding of creation.
25This is what the LORD says: If I have not established My covenant with the day and the night and the fixed order of heaven and earth, 26then I would also reject the descendants of Jacob and of My servant David, so as not to take from his descendants rulers over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For I will restore them from captivity and will have compassion on them.”
God compares his covenant faithfulness to his fixed 'ordinances of heaven and earth', the kind of order that makes science possible.
2It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out.
It is the glory of kings to 'search out a matter'. Investigating what God has made is an honorable calling.
3By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
The universe was formed at God's command, so the visible world did not explain itself.
The case
What science can and cannot do
Science is one of humanity's great achievements. It works by observing, measuring and testing the regular patterns of the natural world. That method is powerful precisely because it is limited: it asks how nature behaves under repeatable conditions.
The claim "science has disproved God" quietly adds a second claim: that nature is all there is. That second claim, usually called naturalism, is not a finding of any experiment. No telescope or microscope could detect that there is nothing beyond the physical world. It is a philosophical position brought to the evidence, and it has to be argued for on philosophical grounds like any other.
Two kinds of explanation
A cake can be explained by chemistry (proteins, heat, leavening) and by Aunt Mary, who baked it for a birthday. These explanations do not compete. Oxford mathematician John Lennox uses a similar illustration: knowing how an engine works does not disprove that someone designed it (see God's Undertaker).
The biblical God is not a rival to gravity or natural selection, a larger version of a natural cause. He is the Creator who gives the universe its existence and its order (Colossians 1:17). Discovering how the world works does not tell us why there is a world, or why it works so reliably.
Why science works at all
Science rests on assumptions it cannot prove by its own methods:
- Nature is orderly. The same laws hold tomorrow as today and on the far side of the galaxy.
- Nature is mathematical. Abstract equations, worked out on paper, describe the behavior of planets and particles.
- Our minds can grasp it. Human reason is reliable enough to discover truth, not merely to help us survive.
Christianity explains why we should expect all three: a rational, faithful God made both the world and the minds that study it (Genesis 1:27; Jeremiah 33:25). Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that the real conflict is not between science and theism but between science and naturalism. If our minds are the product of purely unguided processes aimed only at survival, he contends, we have reason to doubt that they track deep truths at all (Where the Conflict Really Lies, ch. 10).
The historical record
The idea that science and religion have always been at war was popularized in the late nineteenth century by John William Draper (1874) and Andrew Dickson White (1896). Historians of science now widely regard this "conflict thesis" as a misleading oversimplification (see Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail).
| Scientist | Field | Faith |
|---|---|---|
| Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) | Planetary motion | Lutheran |
| Robert Boyle (1627–1691) | Chemistry | Anglican; funded lectures defending Christianity |
| Isaac Newton (1643–1727) | Physics | Theist with unorthodox views on the Trinity |
| Michael Faraday (1791–1867) | Electromagnetism | Devout member of a small Protestant church |
| James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) | Electromagnetism | Presbyterian and Anglican |
| Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) | Genetics | Augustinian friar |
| Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) | Expanding universe | Catholic priest |
The point is not that great scientists prove Christianity true. It is that many of the founders of modern science saw their work as exploring a world made by a rational God. Faith motivated their science rather than blocking it.
What science has actually found
Many believers think science has made the case for God more interesting, not less. The universe appears to have had a beginning. Its physical constants seem to fall within narrow ranges that permit life, a feature physicists call "fine-tuning". These findings are debated, and they do not by themselves prove the God of the Bible. But they are hardly what one would expect if the universe were a brute fact with no explanation.
Why it matters
Science can tell us a great deal about the world. It cannot tell us why the world exists, what we are for, or how we can be reconciled to the One who made us. Christians do not need to fear any honest discovery, because all truth is God's truth. And the God who "upholds the universe by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3) did not remain an abstract first cause. He entered his creation in Jesus Christ, who invites the curious and the skeptical alike to come and see.
Word study
greek · “is clearly seen, perceived” · Romans 1:20
From kathoraō, to look down on or see distinctly. Paul says God's invisible attributes are 'clearly perceived' in the things he has made. Creation is not silent about its Maker; investigating it can sharpen that perception rather than erase it.
“But what about…?”
Isn't God just a 'God of the gaps' who shrinks as science grows?
That is a fair warning against bad arguments, and Christians should not rest faith on what science has not yet explained. But the main theistic arguments are not about gaps. They ask why there is a universe at all, why it obeys mathematical laws, and why our minds can grasp them. Those questions get sharper, not smaller, as science succeeds.
Don't most scientists reject God?
Scientists are less religious than the general public. A 2009 Pew survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found 33% believed in God and a further 18% in a universal spirit or higher power. That is a minority, but a large one, and it includes leading researchers such as Francis Collins, who directed the Human Genome Project. Belief is clearly not something scientific training makes impossible.
If science can't test God, isn't belief in him just unfalsifiable?
Not everything true is testable in a laboratory, including the claim that only lab-testable things are true, which refutes itself. Christianity does make checkable historical claims, above all the resurrection of Jesus, and it offers arguments that can be weighed. That is how we reason about history, ethics and philosophy, not only about God.
Doesn't the Big Bang show the universe needs no cause?
Cosmologists continue to debate what, if anything, preceded the hot Big Bang. Many believers find the evidence for a beginning strikingly consistent with Genesis 1:1, and it is worth noting that the theory's early pioneer, Georges Lemaître, was a Catholic priest. But Christian belief in creation does not depend on any one cosmological model. Even an eternal universe would need an explanation for why it exists and has the laws it does.
Where Christians differ
Go deeper
- book · 2011Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and NaturalismAlvin Plantinga
- book · 2009God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?John Lennox
- book · 2006The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for BeliefFrancis S. Collins
- book · 2009Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and ReligionRonald L. Numbers (ed.)
- book · 2015The Big Question: Why We Can't Stop Talking About Science, Faith and GodAlister McGrath
Sources (4)
- Pew Research Center, 'Scientists and Belief' (5 November 2009): survey of AAAS members; 33% believe in God, 18% in a universal spirit or higher power
- Georges Lemaître, 'Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant', Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles 47 (1927)
- Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard University Press, 2009)
- John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874); Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896)
Related questions
Wasn't the church always against science?
Historians of science today reject the idea of a constant war between Christianity and science. The church founded the universities, medieval Christians knew the earth was round, and many pioneers of modern science were devout believers. The Galileo affair was real and the church's handling of it was wrong, as the Catholic Church itself has acknowledged. But it was a tangled episode of science, politics and personalities, not proof that faith and science are enemies.
Does evolution mean the Bible is wrong?
Christians who fully trust the Bible hold several different views on how Genesis relates to the scientific account, from a young earth to an old earth to God creating through evolution. What they share is what Genesis most centrally teaches: one God made everything, the world is good, humans bear God's image, and sin has broken our relationship with him. Evolution as a biological theory cannot disprove those claims. Only the philosophical add-on that the process was unguided and purposeless conflicts with Christianity, and that is not a scientific finding.
Aren't miracles impossible because they violate the laws of nature?
Laws of nature describe what happens when nothing outside nature acts. They cannot tell us whether something outside nature exists or ever acts. If God exists, a miracle is not a broken law but a new cause entering the system. Hume's argument assumes experience against miracles is 'uniform', which is the very thing in question. Whether a miracle happened is decided by evidence, not ruled out in advance.
How did life begin without a Creator?
There is no agreed scientific explanation yet for how life first arose from non-living chemistry. Researchers have made real progress on pieces of the puzzle, but building a self-replicating, information-rich cell remains an unsolved problem. Christians should not rest their faith on that gap. The deeper point is this: even a complete chemical pathway would not explain why the universe has laws and chemistry capable of producing life. Scripture presents God as the giver of life, however he brought it about.
This entry is a draft and has not yet been theologically reviewed.