In my previous article, I discussed the nature of the “Christian Faith” and highlighted two different senses in which Faith could be said to be in conflict with science. So, what actually is science? The word is derived from the Latin scientia, meaning simply “knowledge”. This was once the standard meaning of the word in English and this sense will be familiar to readers of the King James Version of the Bible. The Apostle Paul, for example, warns Timothy to avoid “oppositions of science falsely so called”, rendered in modern versions as “contradictions of what is falsely called ‘knowledge’” (1 Timothy 6:20). This broader usage encompasses a wide range of systematic, scholarly disciplines. In the Middle-Ages, major thinkers included theology among the sciences.[1] What is now typically called “science” is mostly confined to what is more precisely called the “natural sciences”. The shift in language no doubt reflects modern notions of the priority of the natural sciences, as though it was the only discipline worthy of being called “knowledge”.

Let’s ask the question again: what is science, in this modern sense? The term is difficult to define because it is commonly used in a variety of ways, and the intended meaning is not always clear. The fundamental question of what constitutes true science is a matter of ongoing philosophical debate, but I will not attempt to explore those issues here. Rather, I simply want to identify a few ways the term is frequently used.

The most pure, straightforward definition of “science” takes the term as a synonym for the scientific method. This is an approach to investigating the natural world that involves observation, experiment, and reasoning by induction. The scientist first makes observations, formulates hypothesis based on these observations, and then tests said hypothesis with rigorous experimentation. The hypothesis ought to be empirically falsifiable (i.e., it could in principle be proven false by observation). If a hypothesis is falsified, the hypothesis must be revised or replaced, taking the new data into account, and method thus starts over again. In practice, much of what scientists actually practice will not follow this formula exactly, but it serves as an idealised generalisation of the basic principles. Notice that this is a fundamentally negative process. Hypotheses are not proven but disproven. A hypothesis is “accepted” with greater confidence as it survives ongoing rigorous testing and proves useful in its explanatory and predictive power. This means that the scientific method never exactly attains to “truth”. Rather, it produces an approximation or a “best guess” given the current data. For example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity has proven to be an immensely useful and accurate model for predicting the effects of gravity, but we don’t know with certainty that gravity actually works like that. Nevertheless, the scientific method has proven to be highly successful. There is nothing about this process, in principle, that is incompatible with Christianity.

Now, when someone makes a claim like “science says …” they are obviously not referring to the scientific method. Methods say nothing. This brings us to a series of alternative definitions for the term “science” worth considering.

Sometimes, “science” is used to mean any rigorous, empirical observation or measurement. This could include observations about the positions of stars, the temperature of a certain patch of ocean, or the speed of sound in a specific medium. Observation is just one element of the “scientific method” described above, and again there is nothing here objectionable for the Christian. Committed as we are to objective truth, we fully expect that any accurate observation[2] of the natural world will be perfectly reconcilable with a correct understanding of Biblical revelation.

“Science” can also refer to the various explanations and theories that result from the practice of the scientific method, and currently find popular acceptance in the community of practising scientists. We must always be careful to distinguish between scientific observations and interpretations. It is with the interpretations of the evidence that genuine conflict with Christian doctrine can occur. Scientific interpretations, of necessity, are made on the basis of a complex array of presuppositions, including previously established theories and philosophical frameworks. This is usually not a problem, because many of the basic presuppositions of science are themselves direct implications of the Christian worldview. I hope to discuss this in future articles. For the typical scientist, however, many of their most fundamental presuppositions go entirely unacknowledged and unexamined. It should not surprise us when some of these turn out to be rooted in unbelief, producing predicably anti-Christian interpretations. When engaging with scientific interpretations opposed to Christian doctrine, our task is to first identify the faulty presuppositions and then seek to re-interpret the evidence in light of sounder principles.

Finally, the term “science” has also been used for what I will call the “scientistic worldview”. This is when the scientific method and scientific consensus is elevated from its humble position as a useful tool for exploring the material creation, to an all-encompassing epistemology serving as the ultimate standard of truth. Some have called this attitude “scientism” and noted its almost religious quality. At its core, scientism assumes naturalism (or materialism): the belief that natural substances and causes explain all reality, and hence that all reality is in principle explicable in terms of the natural sciences. The supernatural is excluded, and the universe is understood in purely mechanistic terms. All notions of design and purpose in nature (teleology) are rejected. When unbelievers, rather than claiming science has contradicted some specific Christian doctrine, instead attack Christian faith itself as intrinsically anti-science, some form of the “scientistic worldview” is usually at play. We should not be alarmed by such attacks. The reasoning is circular. If naturalism is assumed at the outset, of course an atheistic conclusion will follow. Moreover, the worldview is self-contradictory. Scientism makes all truth claims dependent on empirical evidence and scientific methods, and yet its central assumption (naturalism) is a philosophical belief that cannot be established scientifically. The supernatural is, by definition, inaccessible to the natural sciences.

With these various definitions in mind, we should be in a much better place to analyse areas of supposed conflict between science and Christianity. We should be wary of equivocation on the term “science”, where one definition is surreptitiously swapped out for another part-way through an argument. Unbelievers will often do this without realising it, especially when they want to force us to either accept everything that calls itself “science” without exception, or reject science completely. When we fail to do so (i.e., by taking antibiotics while questioning evolution), we are accused of inconsistency and hypocrisy. Christians have sometimes accepted this false dilemma and taken an anti-science and anti-intellectual stance. This is entirely mistaken. Within the Christian worldview, we have good grounds for embracing experimental science, while also rejecting interpretations rooted in false assumptions. In his first epistle to the Thessalonians, the apostle Paul instructs the first century church not to reject all prophecy. Similarly, I want to say: do not despise science, “but test everything; hold fast what is good.”

Science and the Christian Faith (Part III): Human reason after the Fall