Science and Faith

For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the scientific consensus was that the universe was eternal, it had always existed. An eternal universe was preferred precisely because a beginning implied a Beginner. Fred Hoyle, who coined the term "Big Bang" mockingly, opposed it for this reason.

Then the evidence converged: Edwin Hubble's observation of galactic recession (1929), cosmic microwave background radiation (Penzias and Wilson, 1965), and the precision of general relativity all pointed to the same conclusion, the universe had a beginning. All matter, energy, space, and time came into existence at a finite point in the past.

Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth", was written by a culture surrounded by creation myths that assumed an eternal cosmos. The Enuma Elish, the Egyptian cosmologies, all eternal. The Hebrew Scriptures alone posited a beginning, caused by a personal Creator. The cosmological evidence arrived at the same conclusion 3,000 years later.

Robert Jastrow, an agnostic astronomer who founded NASA's Goddard Institute, wrote: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

The universe has around 26 fundamental physical constants, numbers not calculated from any deeper theory but simply found to be what they are. A number of them turn out to be strikingly fine-tuned for matter, chemistry, and life to be possible.

The cosmological constant (vacuum energy density): calibrated to one part in 10^120. If it were slightly larger, the universe would expand so fast that matter could never clump into galaxies or stars. If slightly smaller, gravity would dominate and the universe would collapse back on itself almost immediately. There is no known reason why this constant should be what it is.

The balance between gravity and the other forces is strikingly delicate. If it were substantially different, stars could not burn steadily and forge the heavier elements that chemistry and biology require. The exact tolerances vary by source, so I cite the result rather than a single decimal.

The ratio of the electromagnetic force to gravity: if it differed by 1 in 10^40, no chemistry would be possible.

The probability of all these constants being in the life-permitting range by chance is not just small, it is not meaningfully a probability at all. The multiverse hypothesis attempts to invoke chance at scale (with enough universes, one will land in the life-permitting zone), but the multiverse is unobservable, unfalsifiable, and itself requires fine-tuning to produce life-permitting universes. It replaces one mystery with a larger one.

Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and a committed Christian: "The moral and spiritual nature of our universe is perhaps the most fundamental question humans can ask. To me, the fine-tuning of the universe to the conditions that permit life is the most striking evidence for the existence of a Creator."

Darwin's natural selection presupposes self-replicating life, it has no mechanism for explaining how life began. Abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-living chemistry) remains unsolved. The fundamental problem is information.

DNA is a digital information storage system of extraordinary density and precision. The simplest self-replicating cell contains information equivalent to a library of several hundred thousand books. In every other domain where we observe complex specified information (books, software, machines), the cause is always a mind, never unguided chemistry. The inference to design is the same inference we always make when we encounter information systems.

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's structure and a committed atheist, wrote: "The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going." A committed critic conceded how daunting the problem is. Crick's own answer was not God but panspermia, the idea that life was seeded here from elsewhere, which only pushes the question back a step. I find design the better explanation, but the difficulty he names is real.

John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The Logos: rational, communicative, informational. The universe is written in mathematical language (Galileo's insight). Life runs on genetic language. The Christian worldview expects this, the universe is the creation of a God who is himself rational and communicative.

Through the 19th century, critics pointed to biblical people, places, and events with no external confirmation as evidence of legend. The archaeological record has consistently reversed this.

Confirmed in the New Testament era: the Pool of Bethesda (John 5), long dismissed as symbolic, excavated in Jerusalem; the Pool of Siloam (John 9) excavated in 2004; Pontius Pilate's inscription found at Caesarea Maritima in 1961, the first extrabiblical confirmation of Pilate; the Ossuary of Caiaphas, the high priest who presided over Jesus's trial, found in 1990; the site of crucifixion (Golgotha area) consistent with Roman execution practices outside city walls.

Old Testament confirmations: the Hittites (once thought legendary) have been extensively excavated in modern Turkey; the Mesha Stele (840 BC) corroborates events in 2 Kings 3; the Tel Dan Stele (about 840 BC) refers to "the House of David", strong evidence that a Judean dynasty traced itself to a founder named David within roughly a century of his lifetime; the Cyrus Cylinder confirms the Babylonian Captivity account and Cyrus's decree of return (Ezra 1:1-4).

I will not overstate this. Some cases are genuinely disputed, the date of Jericho's fall among them, and I hold those loosely rather than claim them as proof. But the long trend has strongly favored the reliability of the text: again and again, people and places once dismissed as legend have turned up in the ground.

The idea that science and Christianity are inherently in conflict is a 19th-century narrative, popularized by John William Draper (1874) and Andrew Dickson White (1896), both of whom had institutional and personal reasons to argue for the separation of science from religious influence. Historians of science have largely repudiated the conflict thesis.

The founders of modern scientific disciplines were largely devout Christians: Copernicus (astronomy), Galileo (physics, who was opposed by the Aristotelian establishment, not simply the church), Kepler (planetary motion), Newton (mechanics and optics), Faraday (electromagnetism), Mendel (genetics), Pasteur (microbiology), Maxwell (electrodynamics). They understood their work as "thinking God's thoughts after him."

The conflict is not between science and Christianity. It is between methodological naturalism (a valid scientific practice: explaining natural phenomena through natural causes) and philosophical naturalism (the metaphysical claim that nature is all there is). The first is good science. The second is a philosophical position that goes beyond what science can establish.