Problem

Many people believe that faith and science are incompatible. According to these people, faith in something is required when the facts prove otherwise—a sort of blind leap in the dark. Likewise, science is the study of the world that we see and is therefore concerned with provable and observable facts.

Christianity says…

Faith and science are not incompatible. God has granted us the ability to make observations about the world around us. Faith in God is essential to recognizing the truth about God, ourselves, and our response to God.

Important Terms

• Empiricism: “the belief that all human knowledge is derived ultimately from sense experience”*

• Faith: “that which we believe on the testimony of another”; “trust or commitment to a person or belief in the presence of some warrant”*

• God of the gaps: “a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence”; tends “to relegate God to the leftovers of science: as scientific knowledge increases, the dominion of God decreases.”∞

• Naturalism: “a worldview that denies the supernatural, anything existing ‘outside’ of the natural order. The universe is self-explanatory.”*

• Rationalism: “the theory that some human knowledge does not arise from sense experience”*

• Reason: “(1) the laws of logic; (2) human reasoning.”*

• Science: “systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.”§

• Scientific method: “a method of research in which a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated from these data, and the hypothesis is empirically tested.:” §

• Scientism: “the belief that the assumptions, methods of research, etc., of the physical and biological sciences are equally appropriate and essential to all other disciplines, including the humanities and the social sciences.”§ 

Science Points to the Existence of God

1. The universe has a beginning. º

2. The universe is knowable. º

3. The universe is regular. º

4. The universe is finely tuned for life. º

Baloney Detector

• “Science proves that…”: it depends on what is being proven and the evidence use to prove it; can the claim be proven by the scientific method of observation, theorization, and experimentation?

• “Faith versus science”: What is the faith claim? What is the science claim?

• “Believing in God is like believing in the tooth fairy”: the faith assumption here is that “the burden of proof for belief in God must be higher because God is such an extraordinary option” º

• “This claim contradicts/supports the science”: to refer to “the science” sounds as if science is a monolithic entity; science cannot be understood apart from assumptions; remember the scientific method!

Sources

* Ronald Nash, “Glossary,” Life’s Ultimate Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 386-392.

§ www.dictionary.com

∞ www.wikipedia.org

º Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale, Jesus Among Secular Gods: The Countercultural Claims of Christ (New York: FaithWords, 2017).