The Greatest Myth About Science
Almost everyone today has heard some version of the same story. Religion belongs to the past, science belongs to the future. Faith asks us to believe; science asks us to observe. One relies on ancient texts, the other relies on evidence. And for generations, we've been told that Christianity is fighting a losing battle against science. That every discovery pushes God a little further into the shadows of make-believe and fairytale folklore.
But what if the exact opposite were true?
It just so happens that the worldview that gave birth to modern science wasn't atheism or secularism, but Christianity itself. Not only were the godfathers of science driven to discovery by devout faith, but the very foundations of science are predicated on the presuppositions of absolute truth, discernible order, a mind capable of knowing it, and a First Cause beyond the categories that cause created.
This article isn't an argument against science. It's an argument for it. And, before we're done, an argument for something more than a peace treaty between science and faith.
Scientific discovery illuminates faith in God. Science, like faith, is a hopeful pursuit of truth, and the more we discover about our universe, the human mind, biology, and the earth beneath our feet, the more we encounter a reality that is astonishingly ordered, intelligible, and worth investigating. When we look through the microscope or the telescope, we are simply discovering the fingerprints of an Intelligent Designer, plastered undeniably across His creation.
Science does not disprove the supernatural. It can't. In fact, science relies on concepts it cannot itself establish just to get off the ground. Ideas such as logic, mathematics, the trustworthiness of the mind doing the observing. To believe that science and faith are fundamentally opposed is to misunderstand what science actually is.
So let's start there. Let's clear the myth away first. Then we'll ask a harder question: once the myth is gone, should faith and science simply keep a respectful distance from one another? Or was that distance always a mistake?
I. Science Isn't a Worldview
One of the greatest misconceptions in modern culture is treating "Science" as though it were a competing religion.
Science is not a worldview. It isn't an ideology. It isn't even a collection of empirical facts. Science is a method. It is a systematic process of observing reality, forming hypotheses, testing them against evidence, and refining our understanding of the natural world.
Science cannot oppose God any more than Newtonian physics can oppose the invisible force of gravity. People can be opposed to God. Scientists can be opposed to God. Philosophies can be opposed to God. But methods can't. This distinction matters, because many people unknowingly substitute scientism for science.
Science says: let's observe the natural world and see what the evidence tells us.
Scientism says: only that which can be discovered through the natural sciences can be known to be true.
Those are radically different claims. And ironically, scientism cannot be scientifically demonstrated. No microscope, telescope, or laboratory experiment can prove that science is the only legitimate pathway to truth. That very claim is philosophical, not scientific.
Which uncovers something important: the conflict isn't really between science and Christianity. It's between competing worldviews. These are two diametrically opposed explanations for what reality is, where it came from, and why it behaves the way it does. One of those worldviews, as we'll see later, has quietly smuggled itself into the scientific community under false pretense of academic validity.
Once we recognize science as a method rather than a worldview, a more interesting question emerges: why does that method work so remarkably well?
II. Science Works Because Reality Is Intelligible
Every scientific experiment assumes something extraordinary: that tomorrow's universe will behave like today's. We assume gravity won't reverse tomorrow. We assume electrons won't behave differently on Tuesdays. We assume water will keep boiling under the same conditions, and that equations describing nature today will still be true tomorrow.
Science cannot function without believing that nature is orderly, predictable, and governed by consistent laws. But why should that be true? If the universe is ultimately the product of blind, unguided accidents, there's no reason to expect that kind of regularity. Instead, the scientific method quietly rests on several philosophical assumptions that science itself cannot establish:
Reality exists independently of our minds.
Our minds are capable of understanding reality.
Logic is universally valid.
Mathematics accurately describes nature.
Cause and effect are real.
Absolute truth exists and can be discovered.
The laws of nature remain consistent over time.
Science doesn't prove these. It presupposes them. Which leads to a deeper question: what worldview best explains why they're true in the first place?
The Dependency Chain
Consider the implications. If the universe is merely the accidental product of chaotic happenstance, why should we expect order? If our minds are merely random output of blind evolutionary processes, why should we trust our own reasoning? If logic is nothing more than a biological illusion, why should we believe our scientific conclusions are objectively true?
Science doesn't create rationality. It depends on it. Christianity offers a coherent explanation for why both the universe and our minds are intelligible: a structured universe reflects an orderly Creator, and rational minds are possible because we were made in the image of that same rational God.
The universe isn't merely something that happens to exist. It is creation. And creation can be investigated because its Creator is not irrational, arbitrary, or chaotic. This is one of the great ironies of the modern debate. The Christian worldview doesn't merely inspire scientific investigation. It gives us a reason to expect that scientific investigation should work. It provides the very logical and philosophical foundation that undergirds our scientific observations.
III. Christianity Pioneered Modern Science
"Chronological snobbery" is the fallacy that ancient people were wildly ignorant and technologically hopeless, and paled in intellectual comparison to today’s generations. But the reality is that we sit atop the shoulders of giants when it comes to our capabilities and understanding of the universe. Nearly every ancient civilization possessed remarkable intelligence. The Egyptians built pyramids. The Greeks developed philosophy, geometry, and formal logic. The Romans engineered roads, aqueducts, and massive infrastructure. The Chinese pioneered paper, printing, and gunpowder.
Human beings have always been curious. But modern experimental science emerged specifically within a Christian intellectual framework. Why? Because Christianity taught something fundamentally different about the natural world. The universe was not itself divine. It was creation.
The sun wasn't a god. The moon wasn't a god. The stars weren't gods. Nature wasn't something to worship; it was something God had made. And because it was made by a rational God, creation was expected to be lawful, consistent, and intelligible. Studying nature wasn't considered competing with God. It was identifying His craftsmanship. Genesis describes humanity as made in God's image and commissioned to exercise dominion over creation. That mandate provided an intellectual foundation for exploration, classification, measurement, and discovery.
For many of the pioneers of modern science, the laboratory wasn't a place where they tested or doubted God. It was a place where they expected to encounter Him. And, as we'll come back to, not just as a private comfort separated from their hard science, but as an integral part of how they actually made sense of the natural world.
The Hall of Fame
Take a handful of the figures who helped shape modern science — and notice that design wasn't a footnote to their work. It was frequently part of the method itself.
Physics: Isaac Newton
Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, laying the foundations of classical physics. He wasn't merely a scientist who happened to believe in God. He was deeply interested in theology and regarded the order of the universe as evidence of an intelligent Creator. Understanding that the Creator was far more worthy of admiration than the creation, Sir Isaac Newton wrote significantly more about Christian theology than he did about science and mathematics.
“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being”
Astronomy: Johannes Kepler
Kepler's laws of planetary motion transformed our understanding of the heavens. He didn't describe his work as a hobby alongside his faith; he called it "thinking God's thoughts after Him" — a literal statement of research method. He expected the universe to be mathematically intelligible because it had been authored by an intelligible Creator, and he went looking for the math on that basis.
“The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”
Electromagnetism: Michael Faraday
Faraday's experiments with electricity and magnetism helped lay the foundation of modern electromagnetism. He was a devout Christian and an elder in his church, and for Faraday, investigating creation and worshiping its Creator were never competing exercises.
“The book of nature which we have to read is written by the finger of God.”
Genetics: Gregor Mendel
Mendel discovered the fundamental principles of heredity through years of careful experiments with pea plants. He was also an Augustinian friar. The father of modern genetics wasn't operating from a worldview that expected nature to be meaningless or chaotic.
“So natural and supernatural must unite to the realization of the holiness to the people. Man must contribute his minimum work of toil, and God gives the growth.”
Thermodynamics: Lord Kelvin
Kelvin made foundational contributions to thermodynamics and physics, and was an outspoken critic of the notion that scientific progress required atheism.
“If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.”
Microbiology: Louis Pasteur
Pasteur's work revolutionized microbiology and helped establish germ theory. His experiments also helped overturn the idea that life could spontaneously arise from nonliving matter — a conclusion that fit naturally with his conviction that life reflected purpose rather than accident. His scientific rigor and his Christian belief moved together, not on separate tracks.
“A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him."
“The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.”
Cosmology: Georges Lemaître
Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and Catholic priest, developed what became known as the Big Bang theory through his primeval-atom hypothesis — one of the first scientists to demonstrate mathematically that the universe had a beginning. He held that science and religion were both searches for truth and saw no conflict between them.
“Does the Church need Science? Certainly not. The Cross and the Gospel are enough. However, nothing that is human can be foreign to the Christian. How could the Church not be interested in the most noble of all strictly human occupations, namely the search for truth?”
Genetics: Francis Collins
Collins led the Human Genome Project and became one of the most prominent geneticists of his generation. He converted from atheism to Christianity in medical school, and came to see his genetics work as a way of reading God's handiwork rather than explaining it away.
“The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful – and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles.”
Quantum Physics: Max Planck
The Nobel Prize-winning Planck was the founder of the field of quantum theory, discovered the specific number, called Planck’s Constant (h), used in math and physics to measure units in which energy, light, and matter transfer and exist.
“Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations.”
These weren't merely brilliant men who happened to be Christians, doing science in a vacuum over here and separately having faith over there. Their belief in an orderly Creator gave them a reason to expect discoverable laws in creation — and in several cases, gave them the actual premise their science ran on. That when we examine the cosmos, chemistry, or biology, we should expect to find providential order and intelligent encoding, because "even the rocks cry out." Their faith didn't make them less curious about creation. It made creation worth being curious about. And that faith stayed in the room while they worked, rather than waiting outside the lab door.
IV. Science Borrows From Christianity
Methodological naturalism often celebrates science while quietly borrowing the intellectual capital outside of science that makes the field possible in the first place. Science cannot produce logic. It cannot manufacture mathematics. It cannot explain why consciousness exists by assuming consciousness away. It cannot scientifically establish objective morality, put beauty under a microscope and explain why we experience it, quantify love and thereby explain its meaning, or define the motivation for altruism.
Yet science depends on several of these things before the first experiment even begins. To hypothesize, observe, test, or document a single finding, a scientist has to:
trust his ability to reason.
rely on mathematics.
assume logic is valid.
believe their observations correspond to an external reality.
believe that truth is worth pursuing.
None of these things is the product of science or the scientific method. These aren’t findings; they are prerequisites. The very foundations of scientific observation presuppose the axioms that truth is constant, self-evident, and capable of being known (and when we replace “truth” with “God” in the previous sentence, we find a striking parallel).
And these presuppositions of science impose a fascinating irony. Naturalism depends upon rational thought while ultimately describing human reasoning as the unintended product of unguided random processes. But if our brains are haphazardly optimized solely for survival rather than truth, why should we trust the conclusions they produce? Why trust any reasoning that leads us to naturalism? Why should we expect the mechanisms of survival to reliably produce minds capable of discovering objective truth?
And this isn't only a Christian objection. Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel makes essentially the same case in the closing chapter of The Last Word, arguing that evolutionary naturalism is self-refuting; if reason itself is just a downstream byproduct of non-rational physical forces, there's no solid ground left underneath reason's own verdicts, including the verdict that naturalism is true. Nagel isn't reaching for God as the answer. He's simply honest enough to admit the problem is real.
Christianity provides an answer; reason exists because Reason Himself exists. Logic reflects the rational nature of God, and truth exists because God is truth. And human beings can discover truth because we were created to know our Creator and understand His creation. In fact, our word “logic” comes from the Greek “logos” which means “reason” or knowable “word” of truth. Just as logic cannot be explained by naturalistic processes, it’s no coincidence that when we try to trace back to the origin of the natural universe, we logically must invoke the supernatural.
John's Gospel opens by declaring that "In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." God is logical. To know Jesus is to know Truth. And God Himself is the very Truth that science, without quite realizing it, has been chasing all along.
Mathematics: The Language Beneath Science
Beneath almost every scientific discovery lies something stranger still: mathematics. Science is impossible without it, and yet mathematics itself is strange to the point of being suspicious. Numbers aren't physical objects. They have no mass, no location. You can't put the number seven in a test tube, and you can’t slice pi. Yet mathematical relationships describe everything from planetary orbits to electromagnetic fields to the double helix of DNA. Why should abstract concepts conceived in the human mind map so precisely onto the physical universe?
Physicist Eugene Wigner famously described this the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics. It stops looking unreasonable, though, once you consider that the same Mind may have authored both the universe and the minds capable of understanding it. We go deeper on this in [Mathematics: The Language of God], because the mathematical intelligibility of the universe deserves an entire discussion of its own. For now, simply notice what mathematics reveals: the universe isn't merely there; it’s describable. And describable in a language that somehow exists both in the mind and in the structure of reality itself.
V. Science Explains How — Not Why
Science is extraordinarily powerful. But it was never designed to answer every question. Science can ask: How do stars form? How does DNA replicate? How does gravity behave? How does a cell divide? How did a particular organism develop a particular trait? These are legitimate scientific questions with scientific answers.
But science cannot, by observation alone, answer: Why is there a universe at all? Why are there laws governing it? Why does anything exist rather than nothing? Why is the universe intelligible? These aren't scientific failures. They're different categories of questions.
Science is extraordinarily good at describing how things happen. But "how" and "why" are not interchangeable. And this becomes particularly important when we talk about the origin of the universe.
The Beginning of Everything
Eventually, every scientific explanation reaches the same boundary: The beginning. Modern cosmology points toward a universe that is not infinitely old but had a finite past. The universe had a beginning. And if time, space, matter, and energy all came into existence with the universe, then asking what happened "before" it becomes philosophically strange rather than scientifically answerable.
This is where the Kalām Cosmological Argument enters the discussion.
It can be stated simply:
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
If the universe contains all of physical reality—space, time, matter, and energy—then the cause of the universe cannot itself simply be another physical object or force inside the universe. The Cause must transcend the categories it created. Therefore, in the case of the universe, the cause must be:
Timeless.
Spaceless.
Immaterial.
And ultimately uncaused. This isn't a scientific experiment proving God. It is a philosophical inference from what science tells us about the universe. And the description is striking: The universe has a beginning. And its Cause transcends time, space, and matter.
Thousands of years before modern cosmology, Scripture presents God introducing Himself to Moses with two of the most profound words imaginable:
"I AM."
The Cause of all causes. The necessary Being upon whom every contingent thing depends.
VI. Where the Story Usually Ends
Here's where most of these conversations stop. Myth debunked, presuppositions named, Kalām delivered, everyone shakes hands: science and faith were never really enemies, so let's each go back to our own rooms and coexist peacefully.
But peaceful coexistence isn't actually what Newton, Kepler, or Pasteur practiced. None of them treated faith as a private comfort that stayed politely outside the laboratory door while "real science" happened without it. For them, the conviction that creation had a Designer wasn't a hobby alongside their research. It was reasoning they were willing to use inside their research, the same way they'd use a mathematical axiom.
Somewhere between their era and ours, that stopped being allowed. And it's worth asking not just whether science and faith are compatible, but whether the terms of their current, apparent truce are actually still working.
VII. The Trial Separation
For most of the history of Western science, investigating final causes — purpose, design, intention — wasn't considered unscientific. It was considered part of the job. William Paley's Natural Theology, published in 1802, was standard reading precisely because inferring a designer from design was treated as a live scientific conclusion, not theological trespassing.
That began to change in the decades after Darwin. It's not that evolutionary biology alone forced the split, but a newer generation of scientific professionals, most visibly T. H. Huxley and the circle around him, spent real effort establishing a rule that would come to be called methodological naturalism: whatever the evidence, a scientific explanation has to stay confined to unguided physical causes. Not because the evidence always pointed that way, but because allowing design, intelligent agency, or purpose as permissible scientific conclusions was ruled out by definition, before a single experiment ran. As Richard Lewontin stated, “We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism… We cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” Sounds completely objective and unbiased, right??
Obviously that's a philosophical opposition, not a scientific one, as discussed in [Dogmatic Darwinism]. That general framework may have been intended to prohibit a “God of the gaps (of our understanding)” excuse from being used as a lazy stand-in for questions we simply hadn't investigated hard enough yet. But a rule that was meant to sharpen scientific humility slowly hardened into something else: a boundary that quietly decided in advance what kind of answer was allowed to win, no matter what the data eventually showed. Yes, methodological naturalism had devolved into a dogmatic faith itself.
Call it a trial separation, but in the world of scientific discourse it appeared that natural mechanism and intelligent agency decided to live in separate residences. And the two have kept a polite, respectful distance ever since, each conceding the other might have something going for it, so long as they never have to work in the same room again.
Trial separations are supposed to be temporary and diagnostic. You take the distance to see whether the relationship can survive, not to make the distance permanent by default. So it's worth actually checking: has this one worked?
VIII. When the Separation Failed
Sometimes it hasn't — and not in some abstract, philosophical sense. In very concrete, dollars-and-decades sense.
Consider "junk DNA." As scientists began mapping the human genome, large stretches of DNA that didn't code for proteins were classified as evolutionary leftovers — debris from millions of years of undirected mutation. That conclusion made sense if you'd already ruled out the possibility that the genome was designed for a purpose worth investigating. But as research progressed, those "junk" regions turned out to be loaded with regulatory function — switches, timers, and structural elements essential to how genes actually get used. When evidence is interpreted through an expectation of purposelessness, the truth about features and functionality are often overlooked. And in this case, the findings didn’t just turn out to be wrong; they delayed serious research into that portion of the genome for over a decade, because there was little incentive to dig for function you'd already decided wasn't there.
The same pattern shows up with so-called vestigial organs. For years, certain structures in the human body were described as useless remnants of our evolutionary past. Scientists assumed organs like the appendix, the tonsils, the tailbone, and other structures were evolutionary leftovers that served no purpose in human beings. But as our understanding of physiology improved and our pursuit of truth continued, we found out that silly appendix provides critical value to gut health and immune system tissue. We discovered that those worthless tonsils are actually the frontline to the immune system to fight off invading bacteria and viruses. Oh, and that useless tailbone that was meant for a monkey… yeah it turns out it’s one of the most vital structures for human posture and bowel control. Think about it; if that were just a useless, leftover tail then we’d all be defecating ourselves.
The same principle appears in some of the more embarrassing episodes in evolutionary history.
Piltdown Man is perhaps the most famous. A supposed "missing link" between apes and humans was announced in the early twentieth century, only to be exposed decades later as a deliberate forgery. Nebraska Man followed a different path: a human ancestor was inferred from a single tooth that was later discovered to belong to an extinct peccary (basically a pig tooth). Archaeopteryx, Haeckel’s Embryos, the Peppered Moth… the list of philosophically biased blunders goes on and on (as explored in [Darwinian Deception: From Proof to Spoof]).
The clearest example, though, might be the cell itself. Darwin was honest enough to build a trapdoor into his own theory; he wrote that if any complex organ could be found which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, his theory would absolutely break down. His successor Thomas Henry Huxley, along with the naturalist Ernst Haeckel, thought that trapdoor would never open, because they believed the cell itself was little more than a simple, homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm — jelly that chance and raw chemistry could plausibly stumble into. It was a small, manageable thing to explain away. We now know, with microscopy they never had access to, that the cell is one of the most staggeringly intricate structures in the known universe! It’s a self-repairing, self-replicating factory of molecular machines, coded instructions, and quality-control systems that we're still only partway through mapping. "Simple protoplasm" wasn't just an understatement. It was the trapdoor Darwin himself said would sink his theory, quietly propped shut by an assumption nobody bothered to check. And it's worth remembering that this is the same Haeckel who, faced with a gap between his theory and the evidence, didn't wait for the cell to cooperate — he fabricated his famous embryo drawings to make the evidence look like the theory needed it to look. If naturalism has been getting this wrong at the most foundational level of life itself, and the trapdoor has been battering-rammed open by unimaginable complexity and unexplainable cellular agency… then it's fair to ask why we're still referring to the removal of the possibility of Intelligence as “science," rather than the fallible assumption it's always been.
And this isn't only a twentieth-century problem. In 2016, the Royal Society in London hosted a conference bluntly titled "New Trends in Evolutionary Biology," where evolutionary biologists themselves stood up and admitted the current framework doesn't adequately account for how entirely new body plans arise, how fundamental transitions in living systems happen, or where the additive, non-deleterious information packed into DNA actually comes from. That's not a fringe complaint from outside the field. That's the field's own leading researchers saying, on the record, that the theory is in genuine need of repair. This is precisely why the concept of naturalism without an intelligent designer is often referred to as a theory in crisis.
None of this is an indictment of science itself; quite the opposite, actually. Good observation-based science is exactly what eventually exposed every one of these errors. What it indicts is the assumption running underneath the observation: that purposelessness gets the benefit of the doubt by default, and that a design-open framework isn't allowed to compete on equal footing. When that assumption goes unquestioned, the temptation to preserve a philosophy (or protect funding, or defend a career built on a vulnerable theory) starts to outrank the plain pursuit of truth. The trial separation didn't just fail to help here. In each of these cases, it actively got in the way.
IX. When Scripture Ran Ahead
If ruling purpose out in advance can slow discovery down, staying open to it has, at many points, pushed discovery forward. The Bible is not a modern science textbook that was written to teach us chemistry, biology, or astrophysics. But Scripture does contain observations about the natural world that have proved remarkably interesting in light of later scientific discovery.
Consider Job's ancient description of the "springs of the sea." For centuries, humanity knew remarkably little about the deep ocean. Yet thousands of years after Job was written, modern oceanography has discovered vast systems of underwater springs and hydrothermal vents.
Or consider Job's description of the earth as being suspended upon nothing (when every other religion at that time proposed a flat earth being held up by a foundation or being). Or the biblical imagery of how the Creator “stretches out” the heavens (in present tense which would later match our discovery of Hubble’s Law). Or the numerous archaeological discoveries that have confirmed people, places, kingdoms, and cultural practices once dismissed or questioned by skeptics (hence the historical reliability with which archaeologists use to cross-reference and guide excavations with the Bible’s well-documented kings, families, building projects, wars, and events).
Scripture has repeatedly encouraged Christians to look at the natural world as something intelligible and worth investigating. We explore this in greater detail in a four-part series on the Bible’s foreknowledge of [Physics, Earth Science, Biology, and Psychology].
Ultimately, the scriptures pointed us in the right direction to discover the fingerprints of a Creator. In the cosmos, in the creation of logic and mathematics, the pursuit of truth, in the oceans, across the animal kingdom, and even the rocks under our feet. Creation speaks. And since the universe is God's handiwork, then studying it is a way of attempting to learn more about God.
As Paul wrote, “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” –Romans 1:20
X. Ending the Separation
So where does this leave us?
Not at "science and faith can coexist," which is where this conversation usually stops. Coexistence was never really the goal; it was the consolation prize handed out after the separation. The peace treaty two estranged parties sign when neither one is ready to admit the split was a mistake.
The trial separation between science and purpose has run its course. Separating natural mechanism from intelligent agency doesn't produce a cleaner, more objective science. It produces reductionism. And reductionism has had a century and a half to make good on its promise to explain away meaning, consciousness, logic, and information in purely mechanical terms. It hasn't even come close.
Meaning still resists explanation by particles in motion. Consciousness (the plain fact that there is something it is like to be you, reading this sentence) remains what philosophers still call the "hard problem," precisely because no arrangement of unguided matter has ever been shown to produce subjective experience out of nothing but its own complexity. Logic, as we've already seen, can't be generated by the very physical processes it's used to evaluate. And information (like the specified, functional, symbolic kind of information stored in a single strand of DNA) has never once been observed to arise from unguided physical processes alone. And in every attempted experiment, has been shown to flatten or degrade over time (in DNA this is called Genetic Entropy), not actually produce further complex information. In every other context we know of, that kind of information comes from a mind. The moment DNA is involved, we're asked to make an exception, not because the evidence changed, but because the rule against agency was written in before the evidence was ever allowed to speak.
The standard objection at this point is "God of the gaps. “ This is the charge that we're just parking God in whatever corner current science hasn't gotten around to explaining yet, and that the corner will shrink as research continues. But look closely at what the objection is actually asking us to do instead: trust that time and random chance will eventually explain it, once we've done a little more digging. That's not a rebuttal. That's the same gap-filling move wearing the other uniform. "God did it, we just don't understand how yet" and "chance did it, we just don't understand how and there will never be enough time to prove it” are both promissory notes, not evidence, and neither one is good enough for someone actually trying to follow the truth wherever it leads. They’re both insufficient responses and examples of protecting a biased, predetermined solution based on philosophical (not scientific) persuasion.
None of this is an argument to abandon methodology or mechanism. Mechanism is real, and Newton, Faraday, and Pasteur used it brilliantly. It's an argument to stop treating mechanism and agency as if they were incompatible tools that can't both sit at the lab table. We don't actually believe they're incompatible anywhere else. When an investigator walks a crime scene, they don't stop at the physical evidence (e.g., the fingerprints, the trajectory, the timeline of who was where and when). At some point they ask for a motive, because a body on the floor has never fully explained itself; somewhere in that causal chain, an intending mind entered the picture, and good investigators go looking for it. Nobody accuses them of abandoning forensics for asking what the purpose was. Biology may be the one place we've been told, by definition, to leave that second question unasked. Newton didn't check his theology at the laboratory door, and his physics didn't suffer for it; instead he provided the foundation that classical mechanics still stands on today. Kepler didn't quarantine his conviction that a rational Mind had authored the cosmos; he built his entire research program on it, and discovered three laws that are still taught as fact.
The remarriage being called for here isn't a suggestion of superstition dressed up as science. It's a return to the posture these men actually held: mechanism and purpose working the same problem from the same lab, because a designed universe was always going to reward looking for the design.
Thank God for Science
We started with a myth: that science and Christianity have always been at war. That myth doesn't survive when we observe the evidence. The men who built the scientific method weren't neglecting their faith to do their work; they were working from it. Order, logic, mathematics, the trustworthiness of the human mind: these weren't obstacles Christianity had to apologize for. They were gifts it handed science before science even had a name.
But clearing away a myth was never going to be enough, because the myth was never the real problem. The real problem was the quiet redistricting of the scientific landscape. One in which all the faculties and presuppositions of intelligent agency were borrowed, but where the possibility of Intelligence itself was forcibly removed from the discussion. A trial separation that told mechanism and purpose to keep to their own rooms, and called that arrangement progress. It wasn't progress. It was a retreat dressed up as neutrality, and it has left some of the most important questions we can ask (e.g., what things mean, why we're conscious, why logic holds, where information comes from) sitting unanswered at the door, because the rules of the separation wouldn't let anyone go looking for the answer that actually fits.
Science does not create truth. It discovers it. Every equation solved, every galaxy observed, every genome sequenced is another glimpse into a universe that is almost unbearably intelligible for something that supposedly has no reason to be. And the most remarkable discovery in all of it may not be any single finding; it may simply be that the method works at all.
Christianity has an answer for why. Because the universe isn't an accident. It is creation. And behind creation is a Creator who is rational, purposeful, and true. The same Creator Newton and Kepler assumed was still in the room with them while they worked, because He was.
The heavens aren't silent. They're speaking, and they always have been.
"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge." — Psalm 19:1-2
Thank God for science. It's time we let it become complete again.
