Do Science and Christianity Conflict?
It’s complicated. But less so than Christians would like.
Modern Christians enthusiastically insist that science and (their) religion can coexist peacefully, at a time when a perceived hostility to science is seen as one reason that young people are leaving the faith.
The Colson Center’s YouTube channel spoke on the matter. Tim Keller (author of The Reason for God) has put a lot of digital ink into reconciling science and faith. Meanwhile, Biologos (“bless” them!) formed as an entire apologetics organization devoted to advocating for harmony between the two.
My own youth leaders talked about the issue too, way back when. One made a point about how God’s statement of “Let the land bring forth living creatures” allows for evolution to be true while still accepting God’s creation of life. Another still puts on science demonstrations for his church community’s children (who particularly enjoy holding fire in their hands), making sure to tie it back into the God who “created science” and allowed us to learn about his creation.
Do science and Christianity conflict? It really depends on what you mean.
As we’ll see, Christianity and science can harmoniously exist in certain contexts, but only in the broadest sense. The more specific the concepts, the more the balance falls apart.
Let’s start with where I personally can make concessions to Christianity:
Christians view modern discoveries in physics, chemistry and biology as explanations for exactly how God chose for his universe to work. This goes along with their point that science and religion have different aims — science explains the natural mechanism of how things work, while religion explains topics such as what gives our lives meaning and what we should value (topics also addressed by social sciences such as philosophy and sociology, by the way). As Christians will put it, “science explains ‘how,’ and religion explains ‘why.’”
Broad scientific discoveries abound which most Christians accept: the size of the universe and the existence of countless other galaxies, the makeup of atoms, how chemical reactions work, and how DNA works, just to name a few. It’s especially worth noting that a strong majority of Christians now accept that humans evolved over time.
These exhaustively-tested scientific explanations (theories, if you will) for how the universe works, and why the natural word is the way it is, generally don’t appear to conflict with today’s Christian teachings. (We’ll get to that “generally” caveat further down).
Keeping the above in mind, we can see how many scientific professionals can also be devoted Christians.
People of faith can easily go their entire educational journey, up to and including a Ph.D., without their faith being challenged. The purpose of advanced education in science is to train its graduate students with the knowledge and the practical skills needed to analyze information, design experiments, and draw reasonable conclusions from data. In other words, it’s high-level job training. No more, no less.
I can say this from experience. I once dove into graduate-level coursework in biology, as a means of bolstering my application for grad school. While I ultimately was not admitted, the experience was fulfilling nonetheless. I took a laboratory-based class in practical molecular-biology methods, and a lecture course in cell biology. To cap it off, I even attended my classmates’ public presentations of their Masters projects when they reached the end of their program.
At no point in this process did spiritual beliefs even come up as an issue; literally no professor or student cared.
So it is entirely possible for someone to believe both that 1) the scientific method is a reliable way to determine truth, and 2) a personal god, even the Christian one, exists. This is how a Christian can also be an accomplished and brilliant scientific professional, with both aspects of their life in balance. In fact, in a recent survey of 10,000 scientists in eight countries, three-quarters of them said that science and (general) religion are not in conflict.
Here’s where it gets trickier.
In some cases, scientific knowledge is applied in such a way that it challenges or even directly contradicts parts of Christian doctrine which an individual learned when they were young.
Drew McCoy of the YouTube channel Genetically Modified Skeptic provides a strong example of this process in his own deconversion story. Drew’s family hailed from a fundamentalist tradition that explicitly taught, among other things, that the universe was only about 6,000 years old, that evolutionary theory was pseudoscience, and that all life was created in its current form.
However, Drew’s chosen college education included scientific coursework that firmly debunked those claims. His astronomy class allowed him to deduce the age of the universe for himself, and he found that the evidence and explanatory power of evolution overcame his intent to oppose it (i.e. learning “the other side” so as to better argue against evolution).
These discoveries about the scientific method’s reliability were only a small part of Drew’s deconversion process. However, they demonstrated to Drew that the religious teachings of his youth were fallible, and represented the first substantial challenges to his beliefs. Drew’s story illustrates that the scientific method can be used in specific circumstances to look at religious claims — claims that, if true, should be reflected in the natural world, and in a specific, observable way. (Which, by the way, is basically how scientific experiments work.)
Now we get to the big problem.
I will grant that Christians can accept the scientific process as a valid way to determine natural truths, while also believing in God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They can perform brilliantly in their scientific education and career while also affirming doctrines like original sin and Jesus’s resurrection.
What they cannot logically do is accept every single truth claim from the Christian Bible while also accepting specific, evidence-backed scientific findings.
I’ll focus on an issue I’ve discussed before: the stories of Adam, Cain and Noah cannot have occurred as written in the Bible.
According to the genealogy of Adam’s descendants as outlined in Genesis 5, roughly 1,556 years separate Adam’s creation from Noah’s sons’ births, with the great flood coming 600 years after Noah was born. Finally, Noah’s grandson (i.e. Ham’s son) Cush built the city of Nineveh, no more than 1,700* years after Noah’s birth.
So the Biblical narrative makes a naturalistic claim about human history: that humanity’s very beginning and the founding of the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh are separated by no more than about 3,300 years.
What do the scientific findings say?
- Anatomically-modern humans existed at least 40,000 years ago (a wildly generous estimate in Christians’ favor), yet the area that would become Nineveh has no evidence of being settled until the 6000’s BCE — a disagreement with the Bible of over 28,000 years.
- Cain and Abel, supposedly the second generation of humans to exist, were agriculturalists who lived in a time of sheep domestication (indicated by Abel’s “keeping of flocks.”). And yet, the earliest evidence of sheep domestication falls into the 9,000’s BCE, showing another multi-millennial discrepancy with the Bible.
- God supposedly sent a flood to wipe out humanity after Cain and Abel were born — again, no earlier than the 9,000’s BCE. And yet, evidence from paleontology shows that humans were continuously living on the American continents from at least 12,000 BCE, millennia before the supposed Biblical flood.
“Science” in general never set out specifically to disprove these points about the Genesis narrative. Nonetheless, here we have a case where scientifically-obtained knowledge directly contradicts Christian claims. Both cannot be true at once.
Science and Christianity don’t necessarily have to conflict, but it all depends on how both of them are defined. One might refer to “science” in terms of its explanatory theories, such as the laws of physics, or gravity, or even evolution. Or maybe “science” refers to the professionals who expand our knowledge of the natural world for a living. Meanwhile, “Christianity” might refer to belief in God’s existence and Jesus’s resurrection, or perhaps the moral values that Jesus’s followers should live by. Put in those terms, I see how the two can coexist.
But when put under the metaphorical microscope, we see that certain pieces of scientific knowledge and certain Christian claims are genuinely in conflict. For all of apologists’ claims that one doesn’t have to choose between science and religion, here the individual does actually have to decide which one is right.
Or they can look the other way, squelching any inkling of doubt and pretending that the issue doesn’t exist. Perhaps many can live this way, but not everyone can. Nor should they.
For additional reading on critiques of the Bible, I recommend the Patheos blog, Godless in Dixie, written by trained-theologian-turned-secularist Neil Carter. He has discussed the disqualifying lack of evidence for certain Old Testament events, and testable claims of the Bible, among many other topics.
*How did I get 1,700? To start, Noah was 600 when the flood came, and his sons had already been born. (We’re obviously putting aside there being no evidence that humans could ever live for hundreds of years — human lifespans appear to be fairly unchanged throughout time.) We are not given Cush’s age when he founded Nineveh, but before his birth, God had already decreed that humans will no longer live past 120. We’re not given Ham’s life span, either, and he appears to have been born before this decree. So to be generous, let’s say that he could have lived about 969 years — Methuselah's life span and the longest that the Bible gives precedent for. So, 600 years for Noah + 969 for Ham + 120 for Cush = 1,689, rounded to 1,700.
