Science and Faith Are Close Allies
If Christianity is true, we must do our scientific work in light of the truth that God reveals himself in creation (general revelation) and in Scripture (special revelation). We must be scientific realists, not anti-realists; we must be open to God acting supernaturally and not merely operate as methodological naturalists. Above all, we must reject any ultimate contradiction between the order of creation and the witness of Scripture. As the medieval thinkers used to say, God is the author of two books—the book of Scripture and the “book” of nature.
But is that not precisely where Christians get into trouble? We confess that Scripture is breathed out by God and is thus infallible. For this reason, we end up with conflicts between our cherished doctrines and accepted science. To put a fine point on it, are not creationists to blame for manufacturing the irresolvable tensions between science and faith?
When Creationism Gives You a Headache
First, creationist is an ambiguous term. We often use it to describe young-earth creationists, who interpret the Genesis creation account literally and believe the earth is six thousand to ten thousand years old. But here I want to use the term more broadly to mean Christians who believe God is the Creator. As Jim Stump observes, all Christians are creationists, but they disagree “about when things were created and whether current scientific theories are correct descriptions of the process of creation or whether they conflict with biblical affirmations on creation.”1 Young-earth creationists tend to handle conflicts between science and faith by resisting the scientific consensus. By comparison, old-earth creationists accept the conclusions of astronomy, physical cosmology, stratigraphy, coral reef study, glaciology, and related fields. Yet they reject macroevolution, especially the evolution of human beings. Meanwhile, evolutionary creationists see minimal conflict between evolutionary biology and the witness of Scripture.
This concise booklet explains science from a biblical perspective, helping readers see how faith and science can coexist to glorify God and help us praise our Creator.
The scientific and theological differences between young-earth and old-earth creationists are weighty, and the differences between both of them and evolutionary creationists are even weightier. We don’t have time to sort things out here.2 The more relevant point is that from the perspective of the majority scientific community, creationists as a whole—and young-earth creationists above all—are not worth taking seriously.
But don’t imagine mean-faced biologists cracking their knuckles to beat up on creationists. That would buy into the warfare myth again. Rather the typical scientist is focused on doing good science. Secular scientists often have no overt agenda against faith and couldn’t care less about creationists’ intramural debates.3 They simply dismiss Christian views of science, especially if they’ve encountered bad arguments—or bad attitudes—from uninformed believers.
Nevertheless, nonreligious scientists never truly escape the theological context of their scientific work. While they may not be openly hostile to creationists, they are certainly not religiously “neutral.”4 As scientists, they rely on unspoken Christian assumptions. They do science without acknowledging that doing science at all depends on God the Creator and an ordered creation. In fact, they are beneficiaries of God’s common grace.5 Scripture also tells us they are actively suppressing general revelation (Rom. 1:18–23). The bottom line: Western bias toward scientism has created persistent tension and controversy between mainstream scientists and creationists.
The intelligent design movement is controversial in academia because of its central thesis that the origin of some features of nature requires a mind—an intelligent designer. This movement emerged after Phillip Johnson’s book Darwin on Trial exploded onto the scene in 1991.6 Michael Behe made the case for “irreducible complexity” in Darwin’s Black Box (1996), and William Dembski defended concepts like the “design filter” and “specific complexity.”7 Since the intelligent design movement focuses on scientific rather than religious arguments, young-earth and old-earth creationists can work alongside atheists, agnostics, and evolutionists who embrace the design thesis.8
But here is what is most striking about these approaches: none of them assume science and faith are incompatible. Even the most ardent young-earth creationist believes Scripture is wholly consistent with natural science.9 Aside from their different convictions about the age of the earth and human origins, creationists have other beliefs that diverge from the scientific consensus, like the belief that humans have souls and that God performs miracles. Creationists are not rejecting science outright; rather, they question particular scientific interpretations of the physical evidence.
Well and good, yet many scientists still dismiss young-earth creationists as prime examples of scientific denialism. They lump young-earthers in with flat-earthism and other wild conspiracy theories. Many see Christians who reject evolution as ostriches with their heads in the sand, denying the facts and encouraging post-truth disinformation. But such judgments are uncharitable and too hasty. To be sure, young-earth creationists usually resist reinterpreting Scripture to resolve conflicts between science and faith. In their view, whenever our best science and core doctrines conflict, Christians must prioritize what the Bible teaches.
Regardless of what we think of the young-earth position, it’s important to see why disagreeing with the consensus on the age of the earth or evolution can be a rational thing for Christians to do. After all, how do scientists arrive at the belief that the earth is old, or that evolution happened? They examine physical data, carry out experiments, and then draw inferences about the distant past. For example, they look at tree rings to infer past climate conditions, or study fossils to infer the evolution of species over millions of years. These scientific claims about the remote past are based on indirect empirical evidence; scientists are drawing historical inferences from the empirical data.
Make no mistake, this kind of inferential reasoning is a perfectly legitimate mode of science. But compared with scientific claims based on direct empirical data, historical scientific inferences are more prone to error. Such inferences work at a higher, complex level that coordinates different theoretical ideas. As a result, they are more likely to carry unrecognized religious and philosophical baggage. In other words, claims by the historical sciences are less certain and more open to critique. Given the biblical testimony and the structure of Christian theology, youngearth believers are fully rational in their disagreement with an old-earth view, and in their conviction that God created a functional universe in six days.10
By contrast, flat-earthers are indeed irrational; they deny direct empirical evidence from our God-endowed senses; the earth’s spherical nature is empirically verifiable.11 Conspiracy theories are pernicious because they reject direct empirical evidence. Proponents of such misguided views essentially deny that “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). God gave us our five senses as a normal, rational mode of interacting with the world he created. Assuming I am functioning normally—my brain is not damaged, I am not hallucinating, and so on—I should trust what my senses are telling me. That is the power of good empirical science. This kind of empirical evidence is a special gift from the Creator that we must never carelessly disregard for the sake of our personal beliefs.
Notes:
- J. B. Stump, introduction to Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design, ed. J. B. Stump (Zondervan, 2017), 12.
- For extended analysis, see Todd Wood, Hans Madueme, and Paul Garner, Young-Age Creationism: Exploring the Science of Creation (P&R, forthcoming); Hans Madueme and Stephen Lloyd, eds., Young-Age Creationism: Restoring the Biblical Metanarrative (P&R, forthcoming).
- Anti-religious scientists like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne are not representative of all scientists.
- For example, see Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories, rev. ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).
- For an important treatment of this topic, see Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World, 3 vols. (repr., Lexham, 2016–2020).
- Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity Press, 1991).
- See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 2nd ed. (Free Press, 2006); William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press, 2004).
- If you wonder how an atheist could possibly embrace a designer, the relevant point in this case is that the designer is not a religious deity. Given the empirical evidence of design, such atheists speculate that a natural—not supernatural—designer exists, some even arguing that life on earth originated from aliens. For analysis, see Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview, 2009).
- In the nineteenth century, for example, creationists routinely attacked “science, falsely so-called”; they saw science itself as legitimate, just not old-earth or evolutionary science. See Ronald L. Numbers, “Science Falsely So-Called: Evolution and Adventists in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 27, no. 1 (1975): 18–23
- I cannot address all the epistemological issues here, but see a fuller analysis in Hans Madueme and Todd Charles Wood, “Bridging Ideological Divides: Why Christians Still Disagree about Evolution and What We Should Do about It,” Scientia et Fides 12, no. 1 (2024): 189–213.
- On the empirical evidence for the spherical earth, we need not belabor the point. We put satellites into orbit based on specific models of the earth’s shape and gravity. We see the shape of the earth’s shadow on the moon every lunar eclipse. We can circumnavigate, and the shortest distance between two points on earth isn’t a straight line. Radio signals can be blocked by the curvature of the earth. We see curvature in large bodies of water—like when we view the Toronto skyline across Lake Ontario. And, of course, astronauts and space probes have seen the earth from space.
This article is adapted from Does Science Make God Irrelevant? by Hans Madueme.
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