Hasn’t Science Disproved God?

The short answer: No. Science studies how the natural world works, and it’s brilliant at that, but whether there is a God behind the world is a different kind of question. Many of the great scientists of history were Christians, and many are today.

You may have heard it put like this: “Once people needed God to explain lightning and disease. Now we have science, and God has nowhere left to hide.” Science and faith, on this view, are enemies, and science has won.

It’s worth taking that seriously, because science really is amazing. It has cured diseases, put people on the moon and put a computer in your pocket. Christians should love science. But the idea that it has disproved God rests on a misunderstanding of what science is.

What science can and can’t do

Science asks how things work. It measures, tests and predicts. Why does water boil at a certain temperature? How do cells divide? How old is that star? Those are great questions, and science answers them well.

But some questions aren’t the kind you can put in a test tube. Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Why does the universe follow orderly laws in the first place? Is human life valuable? Is cruelty actually wrong? Science can’t answer those, not because it’s weak, but because they aren’t scientific questions. A science that tried to answer them would have stopped being science.

Think of a car. An engineer can explain how the engine works without ever mentioning who designed it. Her explanation is true and complete on its own level. But it doesn’t prove there was no designer. “How it works” and “who made it and why” are different questions, and both can have true answers.

Science grew out of faith

Here’s something that surprises many people: modern science was born largely among Christians. Scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell believed in God, and many of them said their faith was a reason to study nature. If the universe was made by a rational God, then it would make sense, and it would be worth investigating. As the Psalm says, “Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them” (Psalm 111:2). Or Proverbs: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out” (Proverbs 25:2).

That’s still true today. There are Christian physicists, biologists, doctors and astronomers all over the world. If science had disproved God, you’d expect them all to have quit believing. They haven’t.

The “God of the gaps” mistake

There is a mistake some Christians have made: using God only to explain what science hasn’t explained yet. “We don’t understand thunder, so God must do it.” Then, when science explains thunder, God seems to shrink. That’s sometimes called the “God of the gaps”.

But the Bible never puts God only in the gaps. It says God is behind everything, the parts we understand as well as the parts we don’t. “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). When a scientist explains how rain forms, she isn’t pushing God out. She’s describing how God waters the earth. Finding out how something works doesn’t remove the One who made it work.

Where the evidence points

In fact, some of the discoveries of modern science fit very naturally with belief in God. The universe appears to have had a beginning. Its basic laws and constants seem balanced on a knife-edge, so that if they were even slightly different there could be no stars, no planets and no life. Many scientists, not all of them religious, have found that striking. It doesn’t prove God the way you prove a maths problem, but it’s exactly what you might expect if Paul was right that God’s “eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship” (Romans 1:20).

So you don’t have to choose between your science lessons and your faith. Study hard. Ask questions. Follow the evidence. You’ll be thinking God’s thoughts after Him.

Think about it: Can you think of a question that’s really important to you but that science, by itself, couldn’t answer?

Go deeper: Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton — Chesterton argues that the regular patterns science describes are a wonder rather than a final explanation, and wonders whether God, like a child who shouts “Do it again”, says “Do it again” to the sun every morning. Start with chapter 5, “The Ethics of Elfland”.