Day 7 — Faith and Science

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. Without speech or language, without a sound to be heard, their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

— Psalm 19:1–4 (BSB)

Maybe you’ve picked up the idea, from a teacher, a documentary or a comments section, that you have to choose: either science or God. Smart people pick science. People who need comfort pick God.

It’s a popular story. It just isn’t true.

Psalm 19 was written about three thousand years ago by someone looking up at the night sky. He didn’t know about galaxies or light-years. But he knew the sky was saying something. Day after day, it says, they “pour forth speech.” Every star is a word about the One who made it.

Think about what science actually does. It asks how the universe works: how cells divide, how stars burn, how a virus spreads. Those are wonderful questions. But there are other questions science isn’t designed to answer. Why is there a universe at all? Why does it run on laws we can understand? What is a human life for? Imagine explaining a song by measuring its sound waves. You’d learn something true, but you’d miss why the composer wrote it.

Modern science actually grew up among people who believed in a Creator. They expected the universe to be orderly because it had a lawgiver, and they expected to be able to understand it because they were made in the image of a reasoning God. That tradition didn’t end long ago. The scientist who first proposed that the universe began from a tiny, dense starting point, the idea now called the Big Bang, was Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist who was also a Catholic priest. Francis Collins, who led the international project to map human DNA, was an atheist until his twenties, when he started reading C. S. Lewis and became a Christian.

That doesn’t mean every question is easy. Christians who love God and respect science sometimes disagree, for example about how to read the opening chapters of Genesis. That’s fine. Those debates are worth having, and they don’t touch the centre of the faith: that God made all things, and that Jesus died and rose again.

So don’t be afraid of your science lessons. Study hard. Ask questions. Every true thing you learn about how the world works is something true about how God made it. The Bible even says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out.” Discovery is a kind of treasure hunt God set up on purpose.

The heavens are still declaring. The more you understand them, the more there is to hear.

Think about it: Have you ever felt that believing in God and loving science don’t fit together? What would change if you saw science as studying what God made?

Try this: Tonight, look at the sky for a few minutes. Or look up one amazing fact about the universe or the human body. Then thank God for it.

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of C. S. Lewis — explains Lewis’s argument in Miracles that if nature were all there is, we’d have no reason to trust our own reasoning, and that the laws of nature describe the world God made rather than forbid Him to act in it. Start with chapter 15, “The Grand Miracle”.

Creator God, the heavens declare Your glory, and the more we learn, the more there is to wonder at. Thank You for my mind and for the chance to study Your world. Keep me curious and honest, and let every true thing I learn lead me back to worship You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.