Science and Faith: Two Sides of the Same Coin
I just had the opportunity to spend a weekend with my wonderfully curious nephews aged 23, 20 and 16. Gathering from around the world for a family wedding, it restored my faith in young people and the future of the next generation. More on that later.
One deep conversation that started over bagels and lox, and continued into the evening barbeque, was whether God exists. The youngest nephew, freshly released from his GCSE’s in London, stated more than once “I believe in science not God”. This is an all-too-familiar mantra in the 21st century and encouraged by those who don’t want you thinking too critically, especially people or organizations aiming to sell you the latest of their modern wares. While an easy rebuttal, the far more exciting truth is that science is the discovery of how God designed the universe.
Science and faith go hand in hand. Embracing both sides of this coin leads to the richest of experiences and leaves you in wondrous awe on a daily basis. Here we’ll examine 10 key scientific disciplines and whether or not they point to God. But first . . .
Curiosity in Short Supply
One of the biggest challenges I find in the world today is a lack of curiosity. The average young person gets their information from social media and Google, usually spending less than 5 minutes per topic. Information is consumed passively with little opportunity for questions or deep thought.
Nicolas Carr explained it best in his 2008 article “Is Google Making us Stupid?”.
The “screen inferiority effect” is a well-established phenomenon observed amongst adults and children alike, demonstrating lower reading comprehension when using screens compared to reading from paper books. Many studies have confirmed the finding with additional experiments looking at the effect on children’s brain connectivity and cognitive abilities faring far worse on screens.
Many schools exacerbate the problem with a focus on regurgitating core information rather than teaching critical thinking skills.
With the rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools in recent years, the problem is further compounded by the underlying algorithms of these programs, that deliver the worldview their big-tech sponsors want you to know. Their content manipulation has been evident from the start with any novice able to test their left-leaning anti-God bias.
So it was a breath of fresh air to spend a weekend getting questioned on all manner of topics from my fantastically intelligent nephews who I hadn’t seen in years, with the existential God question concluding the visit.
The Age of Scientism
For hundreds of years there was little distinction between faith and science. If you dig into the origins of various scientific disciplines, you will find that devout Christians led the way across a wide variety of subjects such as astronomy, mathematics, geography, medicine, chemistry, geology, botany, paleontology, and zoology to name just a few. Those who believed in God understood their world to be the product of a singular, orderly, rational mind and they were driven to better understand God through the natural world He created.
Many of the oldest universities operating today, and the most prestigious, were founded on Christian principles. Students were motivated by their desire to worship God through studying His universe.
Christians have also dominated the post-Darwin period despite Darwin’s theory of evolution providing an alternative explanation to God. Darwin himself even questioned his theories later in life, admitting some of the problems in his premier work, On The Origin of Species, where he remarked:
It’s worth noting that at the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes in 2001, statistics were gathered on religious affiliations of the over 1,000 total recipients since its inception. It was found that 65 per cent of all winners had identified as Christians. The next biggest group were Jews at 21 per cent, then atheists/agnostics at 7 per cent and other religions or movements at 3 per cent or lower.
It is only in recent decades that the notion of science as the only source of real knowledge has taken over, generating the mantra that science is somehow incompatible with faith and with the Judeo-Christian Bible (believed to be God’s Word to man).
To delve a bit further, I’ve listed a selection of some key scientific disciplines and how they provide supporting evidence for God. It is the wide variety of fields that independently build a case for God that gives us the strongest evidence for His existence.
10 Scientific Disciplines and Their Evidence for God
The study of life itself is the best place to start. God-deniers would like you to believe that life spontaneously started from non-living matter. The Father of Modern Biology believed in God, as did the individuals considered the Fathers of Parasitology, Toxicology, Neuroscience, Genetics and Bacteriology to name a handful.¹ Aside from the magic of DNA, which contains the “code” to pass information to our cells and to the next generation, we need only look at biological organisms to see their evidence of design by a higher being.
Here is a crude illustration of the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, H.pylori for short. It’s a bug that exists in your stomach and has been thought to contribute to stomach ulcers. It uses a flagellum to swim along. Under a microscope that flagellum motor and its 40 separate teeny-tiny parts, looks remarkably like the intelligently designed rotary engine that moves your car! Yet we are told the bacteria evolved randomly.
My favorite subject as a teenager includes the study of matter, motion and energy. The Fathers of Atomic and Nuclear physics, Kinematics, Acoustics, Astrophysics, and Cosmetology were all God-believers.¹
One of the fundamental laws of physics is the law of conservation of mass and energy. Matter cannot be created, it can only change form. This is the First Law of Thermodynamics. So if no natural process can create or destroy energy then neither the universe nor the basic laws of physics can explain the existence of our solar system. The most reasonable explanation is that something or someone outside the laws of physics and outside the universe, created it.
My hero, Albert Einstein, proved that E=mc2. This is a related concept showing that a small amount of matter (m=mass) can be converted into a large amount of energy (E) according to a fixed constant “c” which is equivalent to the speed of light. This enabled nuclear power and bombs to be invented. But neither matter nor energy can be created from nothing.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the entropy of a closed system (entropy can be thought of as a measure of chaos, disorder, or randomness) will increase or remain constant over time unless an outside force acts on it. This law would be broken if we assume the Big Bang resulted in an ordered universe.
Note these are proven “Laws” compared to the “Theory” of evolution (see call out box below).
Both Copernicus and Galileo have been referred to as the Father of Astronomy and both were God-believers.¹ The sun is 400 times bigger than the moon but also 400 times further away from the Earth (enabling us to enjoy the spectacle of eclipses). This exact setup is critical to our existence. If the sun were any closer to the earth we would die of heat, any further away, we would freeze.
While history will highlight that Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic church, his heliocentric model of the universe did not in fact contradict the Bible itself.
You’d be amazed how much scientific truth is in the Bible. For example, in the oldest book of the Bible – Job - estimated to have originated around 1500BC when it was commonly believed that the earth sat on a large animal or giant, it says “He hangs the earth on nothing” (Job 26:7). Science didn’t discover this until 3,000 years later.
Another Old Testament book - Isaiah - states “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22). The book of Isaiah is estimated to have been written between 740-680BC at least three hundred years before Aristotle suggested the earth might be a sphere.
Getting into the materials of the natural world and the elements that make up the universe, the Father of Modern Chemistry was also a God-believer.¹
The simplest unit of matter is the atom which consists of a nucleus containing protons (positively charged) and neutrons (electrically neutral) surrounded by a cloud of electrons (negatively charged). The number of protons in the atom dictates its chemical properties.
Hydrogen is the lightest element with just one proton and one electron. Over 85 per cent of the atoms in the human body are hydrogen or oxygen, most often connected as H20 (ie. water). If you include carbon and nitrogen you’ll be accounting for around 99 per cent of the atoms in the body. The rest includes some forty other elements such as calcium, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, magnesium, zinc, and iodine. We are all made up of the same elements that exist in any matter in the universe. But we humans, somehow, are able to think and feel and make decisions! Impossible to explain without God.
Another interesting example from the Bible: The book of Hebrews in the New Testament was written two thousand years ago, long before microscopes and the discovery of atoms. It says “the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible” (Hebrews 11:3)
The Fathers of Geology, Oceanography, Glacial Geology, and Crystallography were all God-believers.¹ The obvious evidence to focus on here is the plausibility of the global flood told in great detail in the Bible (Genesis 7-8).
There is plenty of evidence to corroborate the biblical account including: the fossils of sea creatures found well above sea level on all continents such as the Grand Canyon (a mile above sea level) and in the Himalayas; other evidence of rapid burial of plants and animals in the limestone layers of the Grand Canyon and the chalk and coal beds throughout Europe; and the lack of erosion between strata in rock formations indicating a rapid deposit with no “millions of years” in between. Read more about the geological evidence here.
Moving onto the study of human activity, and I’m going to include Paleontology here (the study of fossils) which might also be grouped under #5 or even #1 but I want to focus on human fossils. Yes, the Fathers of both were God-believers as were the Fathers of Egyptology and Anthropology.¹
I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity to visit Israel many times over my life. As a teenager I spent 6 weeks there in a youth program which included a day at a archaeological dig. I’ve also visited Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1940s. The scrolls have been dated back before Jesus’ day and include entire copies of the books of the Old Testament word for word as we read them today.
There is a huge treasure trove of findings by archaeologists (believers and non-believers) that confirm events in the Bible.
In terms of human fossils, there is no evidence of the “missing link” connecting humans to apes or other creatures in any way. I can recommend the thoroughly researched and comprehensive book Bones of Contention by Marvin Lubenow who sifts through the entire human fossil record and exposes it for the house of cards it is, including an excellent explanation and analysis of radiocarbon dating.
The study of plants and also mycology, the study of mushrooms, I find particularly fascinating. Many “Fathers” of Botany (in different countries) were God-believers, as well as the Father of Plant Classification.¹
The evidence of God’s design is all over the plant kingdom in the way chlorophyll (that causes the green pigment) enables the conversion of sunlight into energy through the process of photosynthesis. Plants then provide food for humans and animals and are thus required for all life on earth. The synergy of plants to human health is undeniable and the modern ignorance of this divine connection is to our detriment. See the side-bar on plants as God’s medicine chest in this earlier article on natural medicine.
Mushrooms are neither plant nor animal but are a mysterious organism that are part of the larger fungi family. Their health benefits have been known since ancient times but we are only just understanding their significance to both human health and the health of the planet. An accident of mutation? Highly improbable.
OK so stepping away from the natural sciences we get into the murky realm of psychology. Unsurprisingly, there have been no God-believers who have been considered secular leaders in this field. You see, the Bible outlines what ails man and what we can do about it.
Sigmund Freud took mental health in a rather strange direction in the 19th century. Carl Rogers then developed what we know today as client-centered therapy in the 20th century. Adding to the equation the increasing use of a pharmacological approach to mental health, you’d think we’d all be doing great. But in fact the deteriorating mental health of entire populations is considered a major world problem these days.
Taking a step away from modern psychology, we have actual science (experiments and data) that prove certain virtues lead to better mental health. These include gratitude, honesty, forgiveness, generosity, humility, and hope: all discussed and instructed extensively in the Bible. This is why there is a whole field in Bible-believing circles called Biblical Counseling.
I wrote about The Nature Cure for Mental Health which can only be explained with God in the mix. Read Rethinking the Mental Health Crisis for a broader perspective.
Back to our God-believing Fathers and you’ll find the Father of Modern Philosophy and of Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) in this category.¹ I’d just like to focus on the branch we call morality or maybe you know it as ethics.
How do we know it’s not cool to murder someone? While there are definitely legal justifications for homicide (police officers using deadly force to overcome resistance, a citizen protecting their home), it has never been legal or morally acceptable to kill someone just for the fun of it.
What about stealing or lying? Perhaps justified in certain circumstances but never just for the fun of it. Why is that? Where does objective moral truth come from? Why are certain virtues transcendent, accepted throughout history and applying to everybody on the planet?
Rather than facts, or laws of logic or of nature, moral truths are unique in that they describe how things ought to work between persons (humans).
If we try to defer to individual opinion or moral subjectivism, there would be no difference between Hitler and Mother Theresa. If morals are determined by the culture, then again we wouldn’t be able to determine the “rightness” of one moral position over another. What we find is that moral truth is distinct from the environment in which it exists and the only way to explain how it came to be is God.
Leaving the head-scratcher of #9 we will conclude this little list back on a subject I am intimately familiar with. My undergraduate degree was in math and as a qualified actuary numbers are my playground. I think it is the factual nature of numbers that gives me comfort. 1+1=2 is an unwavering truth.
The Fathers of Mathematics, Number Theory, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus, Logarithms and of the Fibonacci sequence were all God-believers.¹ Fibonacci is particularly interesting. He is credited with introducing our decimal numbers system to Europe and highlighting the interesting properties of the sequence of numbers that is formed as the sum of the preceding two: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13, 21, 34 . . . this sequence is found all over nature in the spirals of sea shells, the way petals bud on plants and what is known as the Golden Ratio creating beauty and practicality. A random mutation? I think not.
It is mathematics that gives us the concept of infinity itself: ∞ Something that goes on forever, has no beginning and no end. It is not simply really large, such as a Googol (a one followed by 100 zeros), but more of a concept. If you take the number 1/x where x gets bigger and bigger, we know that as x approaches ∞ the number 1/x gets closer to zero. This is how the human brain can attempt to fathom the concept of God.
There are obviously many more sciences we could explore. I haven’t even included the one I find most compelling – medicine – or the science of the human body and what makes it tick. I had to write a whole book (with over 300 scientific references) covering the majesty of our body and its interaction with the natural world to keep it healthy or restore it to health once sick.
When we delve into science with a God’s-eye view of the world it opens up a window of awe that will leave you inspired to discover more. It is when science is disconnected from God’s amazing design that we get into difficulties.
I was at a conference in 2023 and attended a 45-minute break-out session presented by Dr Christina Parks Ph.D on the Covid19 mRNA shots, their ingredients, molecular structure and what they do in the human body. It was absolutely shocking. At the conclusion there was stunned silence in the room until someone near me said to no one in particular “why would a scientist create such a diabolical substance?” to which I replied “because they don’t believe in God”.
Sidebar: For the young people needing a 5-minute summary watch this professor compare the 4 postulates of evolution compared to creation.
¹ J.Warner Wallace analyzed the fathers of various scientific disciplines in his book Person of Interest. The supplemental Case Notes (appendix) to the book can be found online here. Refer to pages 135-242 for the eminent scientists listings.
