Science has disproved Christianity

Science, as a method, looks only for natural causes. That is a rule of the discipline, and it works: a biologist studying a disease looks for a virus, not a curse. Philosophers call this methodological naturalism. A Christian scientist follows the same rule in the laboratory as an atheist does.

Philosophical naturalism is a different claim: that natural causes are all there are, and nothing exists beyond nature. Science cannot establish that, because every experiment takes place inside nature. You cannot run a test that would detect the absence of anything beyond what tests can detect.

The pastor and writer Tim Keller, in a piece published by BioLogos, marks the line this way: when a scientific theory is turned into an account of “absolutely everything we believe, feel, and do,” then “we are not in the arena of science, but of philosophy.”

Explaining how something works does not settle whether someone intended it. Why is the kettle boiling? Because heat is making the water molecules move faster. Also because someone wanted tea. Both answers are true, and the first does not rule out the second.

The picture of science and religion as enemies in a long war was popularized in the late nineteenth century, in books by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Historians of science now regard that picture as misleading. The real history is mixed: there were conflicts, such as the trial of Galileo, which involved church politics and a mistaken reading of Scripture as well as astronomy. There was also deep cooperation.

Many of the founders of modern science were devout Christians, including Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell. The theory that the universe expanded from an extremely dense early state, now called the Big Bang, was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist who was also a Catholic priest. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project, is a Christian and founded BioLogos to show that faith and evolutionary science can be held together.

None of this shows Christianity is true. Scientists can be wrong about religion as anyone can. It does show that the claim “science has disproved Christianity” is not a result science has produced. Many people who know the science best have not drawn that conclusion.

The strongest case for conflict usually involves Genesis: a six-day creation set against a universe 13.8 billion years old and life that evolved over billions of years. Christians do disagree about how to read Genesis. Some read its days literally and reject evolution. Many others, including the scientists at BioLogos, accept both the age of the universe and common descent, and read Genesis as an account of who made the world and why, not how.

That second reading is not a modern retreat. Around AD 400, long before geology, the North African bishop Augustine argued that the days of Genesis need not be read as ordinary days. He also warned Christians that talking nonsense about the natural world in front of non-Christians would bring their faith into disrepute.

If your objection is to a strictly literal reading of Genesis 1, you are objecting to one view that many Christians also reject. That is a real debate about how to read an ancient text, and its outcome does not decide whether God exists or whether Jesus rose from the dead.

Christianity rests on a claim about a particular event. Paul, writing to Christians in Corinth in the mid-50s AD, put it plainly: “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14).

Science tells us that dead bodies do not return to life by any natural process. Christians agree. That is why they call the resurrection a miracle: a claim that God acted on one occasion, not that nature did something unusual by itself. Whether God did act is not something a laboratory can test, because it is not a repeatable process. As the Christian writer Amy K. Hall puts it, such a claim is evaluated “not through scientific investigation but through historical investigation.”

So what decides the matter is whether a resurrection best explains the evidence about what happened after Jesus’ execution. The first step is whether miracles are possible at all.

Science depends on some things it cannot itself explain: that nature is orderly, that its order can be described in mathematics, and that human minds can understand it. In 1960 the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” Physicists also find that several basic constants fall within narrow ranges that allow life, a feature the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls fine-tuning.

Early modern scientists often said they expected an ordered world because they believed a rational God made it. You do not have to share that belief to see that it is not a gap argument. It does not point to something science cannot explain yet; it points to the fact that science can explain things at all. The more science succeeds, the more striking that fact becomes.

Naturalists have serious replies, including the possibility of many universes with different constants, and this page does not claim to settle the question. Science has not removed the question of why there is an orderly, understandable universe. It has sharpened it.