Issues: Science and Christianity

Introduction

'True science to an ever increasing degree discovers God as though God were waiting behind each door opened by science.' Pope Pius XII

Can a Christian person be a scientist?

Can a scientist believe in God and evolution?

Does scientific evidence mean you can't believe the Bible?

Questions like this are quite frequently asked. This is because some people think that science and Christianity are opposed to one another. They think that you can't believe in the Bible and be a scientist. Many scientists, however, are also convinced Christians. Christians who are scientists say that the more we find out about the world, the more we learn about God. Christianity and science may be two different ways of thinking but they are compatible.

While the media often give the impression that Science and Christianity are at loggerheads - scientists automatically being irreligious - the truth is very different. Christian belief encouraged science. Modern science was given birth to, and developed largely by, committed Christians. It was their belief in a personal God as creator that encouraged them to look for order and meaning in the universe. Sometimes their discoveries caused personal turmoil because they were opposed to the teaching of the Church (e.g. Galileo), but more often they revealed the work of God in creation, and his provision for the welfare of human beings through nature i.e. medical science.

This religious belief of God as creator, encouraged science, particularly through the 16th and 17th centuries, where nature was seen, not as a God, but as the work of a creator God. Nature was not viewed as an object of worship, but as the handiwork of one who should be worshipped. Nature needed to be subdued, not exploited, and science was the means to discover a greater understanding of it. People were to be responsible managers of their world, not owners without regard for it.

In the 18th century, James Maxwell, a famous mathematician and physicist, placed the following text from Psalm 111 of the Bible over the entrance of the new Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge:

'The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein!'

'Sometimes people ask if religion and science are opposed to one another. They are, in the sense that the thumb and finger of my hand are opposed to one another. It's an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.'

Professor Sir William Bragg

'Science is dealing with things that are given. Attitudes of awe and wonder and humility before the facts are essential if man is to be in harmony with both his environment and his creator.'

John Houghton, former Director General, British Meteorological Office

'There is but one God, the Father of whom are all things and we in him and one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things and we by him.'

Sir Isaac Newton (discoverer of Law of Gravity)

'Science ... Religion ... On the one hand there is the Law of Gravity and on the other the contemplation of the beauty of holiness. What one side sees, the other misses and vice versa.'

Professor A.N. Whitehead

'Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, religion gives man wisdom, which is control.'

Martin Luther-King

'If God didn't exist, we would have invented him.'

Albert Einstein

'Were there no other evidence at all, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence.'

Sir Isaac Newton