Do science and faith conflict?

What the Bible says

The Bible says the world did not just happen. It was made.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Gen 1:1

At the end of the creation account God looks back over his work: "And God looked upon all that He had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Gen 1:31). Many historians hold that this conviction, that the world is good and ordered, helped science to grow. If the world comes from wisdom and not from a god's whim, its laws are worth looking for. The psalmist sings:

How many are Your works, O LORD! In wisdom You have made them all; the earth is full of Your creatures.

Ps 104:24

Jeremiah speaks of "the fixed order of heaven and earth" (Jer 33:25), and in Job God asks, "Do you know the laws of the heavens?" (Job 38:33). The Bible assumes that nature has regularities and that God set them. Proverbs seems to encourage investigation.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out.

Prov 25:2

Psalm 111 says that "Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them" (Ps 111:2). This is one reason many pioneers of modern science, such as Kepler, Boyle and Faraday, saw their work as a form of devotion. Not every scientist did, but the idea that faith and science were enemies from the start is too simple.

Scripture also deals with questions science does not. Looking at the stars the psalmist asks, "what is man that You are mindful of him?" (Ps 8:3-4). Science can explain how stars form and move. It cannot by its methods say why there are persons, what is good, or where the world is going. The Bible says that "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Ps 19:1) and that human beings were made in God's image (Gen 1:27). These are less explanations of how the universe works than testimony about what it means.

The church's witness

The Nicene Creed confesses God as maker of heaven and earth and of all things seen and unseen The Nicene Creed. What the church has confessed is that God is the source of everything, not one particular account of how creation was carried out.

Matthew Henry praises close observation of nature in his comment on Psalm 104: "The works of art, the more closely they are looked upon, the more rough they appear; the works of nature appear more fine and exact" Matthew Henry. And on Hebrews 11:3 he writes, "All that we see of the works of creation, were brought into being by the command of God" Matthew Henry.

Augustine warned that when a Christian talks nonsense about the natural world as if it were Christian teaching, unbelievers laugh at the faith itself. He also taught that some passages in Genesis cannot be read in a plainly literal way, and he asked interpreters for humility.

In the original languages

"Created" in Genesis 1:1 is the Hebrew bara (בָּרָא). In its basic form its subject in the Old Testament is always God. It points to something only God does, and Genesis 1:1 speaks to a question beneath the processes science studies: why there is anything at all.

The "search" of Proverbs 25:2 is chaqar (חָקַר), "to probe, to explore." Scripture does not treat inquiry with suspicion. It calls it a glory.

Faith in the New Testament is pistis (πίστις). Its root idea is trust, entrusting yourself to someone who can be relied on. It is not accepting anything without evidence. It is trusting someone for whom there are grounds for trust.

Common objections

"Faith is believing without evidence." This objection has force. The word "faith" is sometimes used for stubbornness that ignores evidence, and some believers do use it so. Christians reply that biblical faith is different. Luke says he wrote his Gospel "having carefully investigated everything from the beginning" (Luke 1:3). John writes his signs down "so that you may believe" (John 20:31). The Bereans "examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true" (Acts 17:11). Paul says, "test all things" (1 Thess 5:21). Faith does not ignore evidence. It entrusts itself to the one the evidence points to. But there is something to concede. Believing in God is not as undeniable as a mathematical proof, and faith includes trust beyond what proof gives. It is like trusting a friend, which is not only calculation but coming to know and relying. Such trust can also be mistaken, which is why honest faith does not fear questions.

"Genesis 1 contradicts science." This is among the commonest worries today, and Christians disagree about it. This essay does not choose a side but sets out the best reasons each view gives.

Some Christians read Genesis 1 as historical narrative, with ordinary days and a recent creation. They respect the plain sense of the text, point to Exodus 20:11 where the Sabbath rests on "in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth," and worry that interpretation should not bend to current scientific theory. Others take the "days" as long periods and see God at work at each stage. They note that the Hebrew "day" can mean a longer time ("in the day that the LORD God made them," Gen 2:4) and that the seventh day has no closing evening and morning, and they hold that creation's own record, read well, cannot contradict Scripture. Still others see Genesis 1 as carefully structured literature and not a chronicle. In their view the pattern of six days and a Sabbath teaches that God ordered the world like a temple and rests in it. They note that such forms were common in ancient writing and that the sun and moon appear only on the fourth day. On evolution too, some Christians believe God worked through it, and others do not accept it.

All of these views hold that God made the world, that it is good, that human beings bear his image, and that Genesis is God's word. Where they differ, it is wise not to call one another unbelievers. One more honest word: in the Galileo affair, whatever its other causes, church leaders confused the cosmology of their day with Scripture itself. The distinction between what Scripture says and how we interpret it is still needed.

"Science tells us the laws of nature, so miracles are impossible." At its strongest, the objection says that all our experience shows the dead do not rise, so it is more reasonable to think a report of such a thing is mistaken than that it is true. This deserves serious treatment. But its force depends on what we already think likely. If there is no God, or he never acts, a miracle report will always lose; if God exists, the question is open and each claim must be weighed on its evidence. In the Bible, nature's regularities are not a cage for God but a promise he faithfully keeps (Jer 33:25). Paul says that in Christ "all things hold together" (Col 1:17). Natural law describes how God ordinarily works, and a miracle is God working in an unusual way. If God exists, one cannot say beforehand that miracles are impossible. Nor must every miracle story be believed. For the resurrection, see Did Jesus really rise from the dead?.

Going further

There is an old tradition of two books, nature and Scripture. God wrote both, so if both are read well they will not contradict each other. We can misread either, but God's two books do not disagree. It gives a reason not to fear questions.

You might ask yourself some questions. What exact question makes me feel that faith and science collide? Is the trouble in Scripture itself, or in a way of reading it that I was handed? Have I ever looked at a star-filled sky and asked, with the psalmist, "what is man?"

To read further, see Does God exist?, How should we read the Bible? and What is faith?.