Are Science and Christianity Compatible

Somewhere along the way, someone started a rumor.

The rumor was that science and the Christian faith went through a nasty divorce around the time of the Renaissance - and that the two of them are no longer on speaking terms. You can either look to science to lead you into truth, the rumor goes, or you can lean on your faith, but you can't do both. They're in separate corners of the room, and they don't get along anymore.

If you're a new Christian, or if you're someone who's been quietly wondering whether your faith can survive contact with what you learned in your high school biology class, that rumor probably hovers in the background of a lot of your thinking. It comes through cultural shorthand. It comes through the very confident voices of public atheists who treat "intelligent" and "non-religious" as synonyms. It comes through the assumption - which almost no one ever defends, but many people seem to share - that the more we learn about the universe, the less room there is for God.

The problem with that rumor is it's not true. It's never been true. And the actual history of how modern science came to exist proves exactly the opposite.

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."

Genesis 1:1-2 (ESV)

These are some of the most loaded words in human history. They are also, increasingly, some of the most controversial. And they are the foundation on which the entire scientific revolution was built, by people who had the audacity to believe they were true.

Are Science and Christianity Compatible?

Yes - and not only compatible, but historically inseparable. The notion that science and Christianity are at war with each other is a modern conceit, popularized by a small number of skeptics in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and now the twenty-first centuries. The actual record is that modern science, as we know it, grew out of a Christian worldview, not in spite of it.

The argument many skeptics make sounds reasonable at first. Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, said plainly, "I do not respect Christian beliefs. I think they're ridiculous." Richard Dawkins has compared religion to a virus. Bill Maher has called it "stupid and dangerous" and proposed it should be insulted out of existence. The late Christopher Hitchens wrote that faith makes people "more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid."

If you only ever heard those voices, you might well conclude that to be a thinking, scientifically literate adult, you have to leave the Christian faith behind. You might assume any pastor preaching the opening verses of Genesis is asking you to put reason in a separate compartment.

But hear it directly from the men who built the very tradition Crick and Dawkins claim to defend. "When I reflect on so many profoundly marvelous things that persons have grasped, sought, and done," Galileo Galilei - the father of modern observational astronomy - wrote, "I recognize even more clearly that human intelligence is a work of God, and one of the most excellent." Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion: "Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God." Sir Isaac Newton, considered by many the greatest scientist in human history: "Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors."

These are not the words of men who thought their faith was at war with science. These are the words of men who believed science testifies to the glory of God.

For the new Christian, this matters: when someone tells you that you have to choose between trusting Scripture and trusting science, they are presenting a false choice. The men who invented the scientific method did not see one.

Did Bible-Believing Christians Invent Modern Science?

Yes - and the historical record tells where, when, and why. Modern science, in the form we recognize today, only arose in northern and western Europe after the Protestant Reformation. There are civilizations centuries and millennia older than Western Europe - China, India, Egypt, Greece, the Islamic world - and many of them produced extraordinary mathematicians, astronomers, and engineers. But none of them produced modern science in the rigorous, systematic, repeatable, predictive sense. That breakthrough happened in one specific area, in one specific period in history, among people with one specific worldview.

That worldview was the conviction that a rational God had made a rational universe - operating by natural laws, which require a Lawgiver. If God created the cosmos and ordered it according to laws, then we, his image-bearers - human beings, made to think his thoughts after him - could be expected to discover those laws. We could observe the universe, measure it, find regularities, make predictions, and confirm them by experiment. The very assumption that the universe is intelligible at all is a theological assumption. And it was the foundation on which Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, Faraday, Boyle, Maxwell, Pasteur, and dozens of others built the modern scientific tradition.

The men who built it were not nominal believers

It is sometimes said that the early scientists merely paid lip service to Christianity because they had to, in a culture that demanded it. The historical record makes that claim hard to sustain. "There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable," wrote Blaise Pascal - mathematician, physicist, and pioneer of probability theory - "those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him." That is not the language of someone hiding his unbelief. That is the language of a man whose science and whose faith were a single integrated act.

Michael Faraday, the father of electromagnetic theory, said the book of nature "is written by the finger of God." Max Planck, who pioneered quantum theory, framed the work this way: "Religion and science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: 'On to God!'" Even Albert Einstein - whose God was more the God of the Deists than the God of the Bible - wrote, "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for support of such views."

So when a culture tells you, casually and without argument, that to be a serious Christian is to be a scientific ignoramus - remember that the actual founders of the modern scientific enterprise would not recognize that culture's voice as their own. Their voice is on record. It is the voice of awe, of wonder, even of worship.

What Does the Anthropic Principle Say About God?

The anthropic principle is the idea that the universe appears to be precisely fine-tuned to support human life - and the fine-tuning is so precise it strains every alternative explanation other than design. The term was popularized by the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who was himself an atheist. He used it not as an argument for God, but as an honest acknowledgment that everywhere we look in the cosmos - and especially in our own solar system and on our own planet - the universe behaves as though it had been made for us.

Consider just four examples.

The angle of the earth, relative to the sun, is approximately 23 degrees. If it were tilted slightly more, or slightly less, the resulting temperature swings would wipe out life as we know it. The position of the earth in its orbit is similarly tuned. Slightly closer to the sun and the planet is too hot to inhabit. Slightly farther and it is too cold. We live, in the now-famous phrase, in the Goldilocks zone - not too hot, not too cold, just right.

The moon, our closest celestial neighbor, sits about 240,000 miles from earth. If it were only 50,000 miles away, the tides it generated would be so enormous they would submerge every mountain range on the planet. Life, as we know it, would be impossible.

But the most astonishing example involves the rate at which the universe itself is expanding. We know now - discovered only in about the last seventy years - that the universe is expanding outward in all directions at the same rate. Roll that cosmic clock backward, and there must have been a moment of beginning. Cosmologists call it the Big Bang. The opening chapter of Genesis calls it something else.

Here is the part that should completely astound any honest observer. If the rate of expansion of the universe, one second after the moment of creation, aka the Big Bang, had been slower by one part in a hundred thousand million million - that is, one part in a one followed by seventeen zeros - the entire cosmos would have collapsed back on itself before reaching its current size. We would not exist. The galaxies would not exist. The stars would not exist. The expansion was so finely tuned, at the very first second of the universe's existence, that the slightest variance would have ended everything before it began.

Picture a control panel with hundreds and hundreds of dials, each one set to a specific position. Move any of them slightly to the right or left, and life is impossible. The universe looks like that. Someone was doing some impressive engineering at the very first moment of creation.

As the psalmist put it, three thousand years ago:

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge."

Psalm 19:1-2 (ESV)

Science as we know it did not exist when David wrote those lines. The conclusion did.

Does the Complexity of DNA Point to a Designer?

The DNA molecule contains as much encoded information as an average library - and information, in every other context we know of, requires intelligence. The argument from cosmic fine-tuning stems from the unimaginably large. The argument from biological information stems from the unimaginably small. Both point in the same direction.

Here is the basic chemistry. Inside every cell of your body sits a twisted strand of molecules called DNA. DNA functions as the headquarters of the cell. Every DNA molecule contains a four-letter code - A, T, C, and G - and that code is unique to you. No one else has your genetic code. Identical twins do not share the same code. This is why DNA evidence is so decisive in a courtroom: the code is one-of-a-kind.

But here is the staggering part. Every single strand of DNA in every single cell of your body says exactly the same thing. From the cells on the top of your head to the cells in your big toe, the genetic information is identical. How does a chemical compound communicate like that? Stephen Hawking himself observed that if a class of students all hand in identical answers on a test, you can be very confident they communicated. Cells do communicate, somehow, with extraordinary fidelity. And the question that science cannot answer is: how did the information get there in the first place?

Information, in every other context we know of, requires intelligence. Random processes do not generate functional code. Wind blowing through a print shop does not produce a dictionary. Lightning striking a junkyard does not assemble a smartphone. Yet inside every one of the trillions of cells in your body sits the equivalent of a small library's worth of working code - and the working assumption of much of contemporary biology is that this happened by accident.

Three thousand years before the discovery of the genetic code, King David - the same David who marveled at the heavens - wrote one of the most arresting lines in Scripture:

"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well."

Psalm 139:13-14 (ESV)

He had no microscope, no knowledge of chromosomes, DNA, or cell structure. He could not have told you what an A-T-C-G nucleotide was. But he had what every honest reader of the genetic code now has - the unshakeable sense that something this exquisite had to have been designed.

What Can Science Not Tell Us?

Science can describe what the universe is and how it works. It is, by its own definition, incapable of telling us who made it or why. This is not a knock on science. It is a description of what science is. Science is the disciplined investigation of what can be measured, repeated, and observed. It deals with the physical, the material, the mechanical. It deals brilliantly with those things. But it has a hard limit at the threshold of meaning.

Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist John Lennox illustrates this with a story. Imagine your aunt - call her Aunt Gertrude - bakes a chocolate cake for your birthday. You take the cake to a laboratory and hand it to a team of scientists: biologists, chemists, and physicists. They could undoubtedly tell you what is in the cake: flour, eggs, sugar, butter, cocoa, and so on. They could tell you how the molecules of those ingredients interact at temperature. They could probably tell you how long the cake was baked and at what oven setting. They could give you a complete physical and chemical description of the cake.

What they could not tell you - is who baked it, and why. That answer is not in the cake, and it won't be found in the laboratory. It is only to be found in the person who made the cake to begin with, and for whom.

Science can tell us a great deal about what and how. It can tell us nothing about who and why. For the questions that matter most - Who am I? Why am I here? Is there a God? Does my life have meaning? - the laboratory has no means of discovery. For those answers, we need more than a microscope. We need the One who made us, and we need him to speak.

This is the central claim of the Christian faith. The God who spoke the cosmos into being is not silent. He reveals himself - in nature, in Scripture, and most fully in his Son, Jesus Christ. The opening words of the Gospel of John deliberately echo the opening words of Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The same God who fine-tuned the expansion of the universe at one second after creation is the God who took on flesh, walked the dust of Galilee, died for the sins of the world, and rose from the dead.

Christianity is not anti-science. It is the worldview that made modern science thinkable in the first place - and the only worldview that has any answer to the questions modern science is, by its nature, unable to answer.

Where This Leaves You

You do not have to choose between trusting Scripture and trusting your reason. The earliest scientists did not. The cosmos and your own body do not require you to. And the historical Christian faith has never asked you to.

If you have been quietly wondering whether becoming a Christian - or staying one - means switching off your mind and operating on blind faith, hear this clearly: it does not. The Christian faith invites you to think. It rewards careful study. It is unafraid of evidence. It welcomes the honest questions of skeptics and the honest awe of scientists, because it claims that the same God who is the object of worship is also the author of the rational order the scientist studies. There is one universe, made by one God, given to be discovered.

Take this week and consider what you've read here. Walk outside at night and look up. Look at your own hands and remember what is encoded in every cell of them. Read Genesis 1, Psalm 19, and John 1 - and watch the same God speak through every page. Bring your questions to Scripture. Bring your questions to a pastor. Bring them to your church community. None of them will be threatened by your honest questions. Those are the kind of questions Christianity is uniquely equipped to handle.

If you are new to Christchurch, or new to Christ, this is your invitation: come and ask. Come on a Sunday at 11 AM, or join a community group during the week, and bring the question that has been sitting in the back of your mind. We will not ask you to leave your reason at the door - because the One we worship is the One who gave it to you in the first place.

Frequently Asked Questions: Science and the Christian Faith

About Pastor Kent Keller

Pastor Kent Keller is the Teaching Pastor at Christchurch Miami, a church in Miami, Florida. Kent's preaching is marked by careful exegesis, historical and literary depth, and a Reformed conviction that the Christian faith engages every aspect of life - including the laboratory, the library, and the lecture hall. His teaching draws regularly on the apologetic tradition of C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Chuck Colson, John Lennox, and Os Guinness, and on Reformed theologians such as John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Francis Schaeffer, and J.I. Packer - together with the patristic fathers who shaped the church's intellectual life across the centuries.