Is God against science?

Jesus called upon His followers to love God with all of their minds. This means that our brains are not entirely useless. But judging by the way some folk talk about faith nowadays, you’d almost be led to believe that you’ve got to be an intellectual nincompoop before you can come to Christ. What preposterous nonsense! God is not against books or learning or study. In fact, He’s not even anti-scientific. God- if the truth be told- is the Inventor of science.

God coded Himself into humanity and the universe, therefore biology, chemistry and physics have their place firmly established as natural means of God’s revelation (or what some call Natural Theology). God makes Himself known through His Son and the Spirit. This means that we can encounter Him in inspired Scripture and in the created world as well. After all, everything was breathed into existence by His sovereign breath.

It is no accident that the birth of modern science came about in our Western world in an explicitly Christian context. It was here in Europe where scientists expected to find order and laws in the natural realm because they confessed faith in an organizing and ordering God behind it all. It is no accident that modern science didn’t come into being in pagan Asia or Africa but only in Christian Europe (and the rest of the world followed our continent’s lead). Belief in a Creator God was precisely what gave rise to our current fascination with the scientific. 

In no way, then, can contemporary atheists justify their claim that faith in God halts science. Without such faith in the God of the Bible preceding them, atheists would have no modern science to appeal to in order to debunk the God Hypothesis. The discovery of stability and harmony in nature didn’t led Europe’s first generation of Christian scientists to do away with the Lord; rather it spurred them on to worship God all the more thanks to His astonishing handiwork. The mind-boggling mechanisms found in creation glorified the complexity and grandeur of the divine Artist who thus designed them.

Too often Christians have appealed to a ‘God of the Gaps’ i.e. if it can’t be explained it must be God. But my faith is not in the parts of science that I don’t understand; it’s in the parts of science that I do understand. Not only does nature enthrall me, but my subjective capacity to decipher and decode the objective laws at work in creation is nothing short of miraculous. Only a God could have knitted together the external world out there and the internal world deep within me so intricately.

Christians should not be afraid of science. They should only be weary of scientists who try to manipulate data into supporting atheistic theories which- in the long run- turn out to be anti-scientific. In such a case, the threat is not so much science as it is meta-science or philosophy. Science cannot deny God because science is God’s beloved offspring. Every movement pure science makes testifies to the glory of the Most High.