Can science contradict the Bible?

Question 60088.

Science and Scripture are widely assumed to be locked in permanent conflict, and the assumption does a great deal of quiet damage. It shows up in newspapers, in lecture theatres, and in the private worries of Christians who feel caught between the faith they hold and the world the sciences appear to describe.

I want to take the question seriously rather than wave it away, because the honest answer is not a simple no. There are places where the tension is real, places where it is entirely manufactured, and it is worth being able to tell them apart.

Defining the Terms Before We Argue

Science, properly speaking, is a method: observation, hypothesis, testing, revision. It works superbly on things that are repeatable and measurable in the present. Scripture is a collection of documents claiming to be divine revelation, addressing who God is, what human beings are for, what has gone wrong and what God has done about it.

Those are different kinds of claim, and much of the supposed war between science and Scripture evaporates once you notice that. A chemist describing combustion is not competing with a theologian describing providence. They are answering different questions about the same world.

The trouble starts when either side steps outside its competence. When a theologian pronounces on the age of a rock stratum from a devotional reading, or when a physicist announces that the universe has no purpose, the discipline has stopped doing its own work and started doing philosophy under another name.

What Science Can and Cannot Address

The method cannot, in principle, address whether God exists, whether human life has value, whether a given act is wicked, or whether beauty is real. These are not gaps in current knowledge that better instruments will close. They are outside the reach of a method restricted to the measurable.

There is a second limit that matters here. Science and Scripture are often set against each other over past events, but historical events are not repeatable, and studying them means reasoning from present evidence to a most likely explanation. That is a legitimate exercise, and it is a different and more fragile thing than testing a hypothesis in a laboratory.

This is where the assumption of methodological naturalism does its heaviest lifting. If the investigator has decided in advance that no divine action can be part of any explanation, then no amount of evidence will ever produce one, and the conclusion was fixed before the work began.

Where Apparent Conflicts Actually Come From

A great many alleged clashes between science and Scripture turn out to be clashes between science and a particular interpretation of Scripture, and the difference matters enormously. The Galileo affair is the standard example. The church of the day had absorbed Ptolemaic astronomy from Aristotle and read the biblical language of the sun rising through that lens.

But Scripture uses ordinary observational language, exactly as the weather forecast does when it gives the time of sunrise. Nobody accuses the Met Office of geocentrism. Reading phenomenological description as scientific assertion is a mistake in interpretation, not a defect in the text.

It works the other way too. Some conflicts are between the Bible and yesterday’s confident consensus rather than the evidence. Scripture was mocked for referring to the Hittites, who were then unknown to historians, until excavation turned up an empire. See how archaeology confirms Scripture for more of that pattern.

Science and Scripture on Origins

I am not going to pretend the whole question dissolves. Origins is where science and Scripture are hardest to reconcile, and Christians who take the text seriously disagree with each other about it. The mainstream account of a universe some fourteen billion years old, life developing over deep time, and human beings emerging from earlier hominids does not sit easily beside Genesis read straightforwardly.

My own convictions are firm at the points the New Testament makes load bearing. Adam and Eve were real individuals, the first human beings, specially created; the fall was a historical event; death entered through sin. Paul’s argument in Romans 5 collapses into nonsense if Adam is a symbol, and Jesus treated the creation of male and female as historical fact.

On the age of the earth and the mechanism of creation I hold my views with a looser grip, because Scripture is less explicit there than we sometimes pretend and godly interpreters have differed for a long time. I have set out the interpretive question at does literal interpretation require a young earth and the wider issue at what about evolution.

The Limits of Consensus

Scientific consensus is valuable and it is not infallible, and both halves of that sentence need saying. Continental drift was ridiculed for decades. The steady state universe was orthodoxy until it was not. Consensus is a snapshot of the best current explanation, and revising it is a feature of the method rather than a failure of it.

This cuts against triumphalism in both directions. A Christian who dismisses every finding he dislikes as only a theory has misunderstood what a scientific theory is. A sceptic who treats current consensus as beyond question has misunderstood the history of his own discipline.

Where science and Scripture appear to collide, I would rather sit with an unresolved tension than force a resolution. Some of my questions have been answered by better exegesis, some by better data, and a few are still open after thirty years. That is an honest place to stand.

Faith Built the Laboratory

It is worth remembering how odd the conflict thesis is historically. Modern science grew in a Christian intellectual soil, and it did so for reasons that were explicitly theological. If the universe is the ordered work of a rational Creator, then it will have regularities worth looking for, and human minds made in His image are fitted to find them.

Kepler spoke of thinking God’s thoughts after Him. Newton wrote more on Scripture than on physics. Faraday was a serious believer, as were Maxwell, Boyle and Pasteur. The idea of a long war between science and Scripture is largely a late nineteenth century invention, popularised by writers with a case to make.

Nature itself is presented in Scripture as a witness. Psalm 19:1 says the heavens declare the glory of God, and Romans 1:20 says His invisible attributes are perceived in the things that have been made. On that account, studying the creation is a form of attention to the Creator. See how does creation reveal God.

Answering the Question Directly

So, can science contradict the Bible? Genuine findings, properly established, cannot contradict genuine revelation, correctly interpreted, because both come from the same God and truth does not fight itself. What can and does happen is that a scientific interpretation contradicts a biblical interpretation, and at least one of them is wrong.

That leaves real work to do, and no shortcuts. Sometimes the interpretation of Scripture needs correcting, as with the flat earth reading of the firmament. Sometimes the scientific claim needs correcting, as with the confident nineteenth century dismissal of biblical history. Sometimes we do not yet know, and saying so is not weakness.

What I refuse is the demand that I choose between an honest mind and a trusted Bible. I have never found that trade necessary, and I have looked.

Where Christians Get This Wrong

I want to be even handed, so let me turn the criticism inward. Christians have contributed to the supposed war between science and Scripture in three recognisable ways, and each of them is avoidable.

The first is treating a particular interpretation as though it were the text itself, so that anyone questioning the interpretation is accused of questioning Scripture. The second is quoting scientific findings we have not read, from sources that exist to reassure us rather than to inform us. Nothing destroys credibility faster than a confident claim that collapses under a single follow up question.

The third is fear. A believer who avoids a documentary because it might unsettle him has already conceded the argument in his own heart, whatever he says out loud. Truth is not fragile, and a God who made the universe is not endangered by anything we might find in it. See Proverbs 18:17, which is as good a rule for reading science journalism as it is for hearing a court case.

So, now what?

If you are wrestling with this, resist the pressure to settle it quickly in either direction. Learn some actual science rather than the version that appears in comment threads. Learn some actual exegesis rather than assuming your church’s reading is the only possible one. Notice which questions are load bearing for the faith and which are not.

And keep the centre where the New Testament puts it. Christianity does not rest on a theory of geology. It rests on a man who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and walked out of a tomb, and that is a historical claim open to historical investigation. If science and Scripture worry you at the edges, spend a while at the centre and see whether it holds. What would it take to convince you that it does?

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Psalm 19:1 (ESV)