Has Science Disproved God? — Science & the Bible

Hasn't science disproved God and made faith obsolete?

Religion was humanity's first, failed attempt at science. Now that we have the real thing, God is an unnecessary hypothesis — the two are at war, and science won.

The idea of an age-long war between science and religion is itself largely a 19th-century myth. The historian of science Ronald Numbers calls it “the greatest myth in the history of science and religion,” and traces it above all to two polemical books, John William Draper’s (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s (1896). Modern science grew up largely in a Christian world, and many of its giants (Kepler, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendel) were devout believers who studied nature as the work of a rational Creator — and a third of the scientists Pew surveyed in 2009 said they believe in God. Science is brilliant at describing how the machinery runs; it was never equipped to answer why there is a universe at all, or whether it means anything.

Doesn't the Big Bang — an ancient, expanding universe — contradict “In the beginning”?

Science says the cosmos is 13.8 billion years old and began in a Big Bang. Genesis says God made it in six days. They can't both be right.

Strikingly, an absolute cosmic beginning met emotional resistance from leading scientists for years; the agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow, who documented it, called the result a development “unexpected by all but the theologians.” That the universe had a beginning fits “In the beginning” remarkably well. The age of the earth is where Christians genuinely differ — young-earth and old-earth readings (the day-age view among them) both have serious defenders, and it isn't a salvation issue (our Deluge and Book of Generations exhibits lay out the young-earth case). What Scripture insists on is the Beginner, not a stopwatch.

astronomer · Robert Jastrow (agnostic astronomer), God and the Astronomers (W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 116“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.”

Doesn't evolution disprove the Bible and make God unnecessary?

Darwin explained the design of life without a designer. Once you have evolution, you don't need God for anything.

Christians hold a real range here — young-earth creation, old-earth/progressive creation, and evolutionary creation (God working through the process) — and thoughtful believers land in each camp. The non-negotiable isn't a mechanism but a claim: that God is the Creator, and that human beings uniquely bear his image, not merely rearranged molecules. And even granted as biology, evolution describes how living things change; it can't explain why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe is rationally intelligible, or where the moral law comes from. It would describe how God's world unfolds, not remove the God who made it.

Isn't the universe's “fine-tuning” just luck, or the multiverse?

Yes the constants allow life — but in a big enough cosmos (or a multiverse), someone has to win the lottery. It only looks designed.

The fine-tuning is striking: a number of physical constants and starting conditions appear to sit in narrow life-permitting ranges, where modest changes would mean no stable stars, no carbon, no chemistry, no life. Design is a serious, rational inference — and the multiverse, invoked to escape it, is itself unobserved and arguably untestable, faith of a different kind. Even Fred Hoyle, no friend of religion, concluded the numbers looked rigged: a “superintellect has monkeyed with physics.”

astronomer · Fred Hoyle (astronomer and self-declared atheist), “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science 45, no. 2 (Caltech, November 1981), p. 12“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

Aren't miracles unscientific — didn't Hume settle that?

Science shows nature runs by fixed laws. Miracles violate those laws, so by definition they don't happen — Hume proved testimony can never establish one.

Hume's famous argument, C. S. Lewis observed, ends up “arguing in a circle”: it counts the “uniform experience” against miracles as the reason to reject any testimony that one happened — but we could only know that experience is uniform if we already knew every such report was false. Science observes the regular patterns of nature; it cannot prove the box is closed, that no Author of those patterns could ever act within them. If God exists, a miracle isn't a violation of the system but the free act of the One who wrote it. The question isn't whether miracles are possible, but whether God is real.