Faith and Science

The author of Hebrews tells us that “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Heb11:1). Many “Enlightenment” philosophers attempted to achieve this certainty by giving ironclad “proofs” of the existence of God, comparable to the deductive proofs found in mathematics. The perceived failure of their arguments, together with Darwinism’s claim that the divine attributes people have always “seen” in nature is only an “appearance,” left religious believers with no rational basis for their faith. Many believers were not troubled by these developments, concluding that we don’t need evidence anyway. All we need is faith. After all, Paul tells us that “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” Galileo’s saying that, “Science tells you how the heavens go, and the Bible tells you how to go to heaven,” gave a neat summary of the separation between science and faith. The late Stephen Jay Gould carried the disconnect further, saying that science and faith are two distinct domains of inquiry that should be kept separate. He called his philosophy NOMA, which means ”non-overlapping magisteria.” Science gives us facts, and religion gives us morality and values. However, Bible believers cannot maintain this separation of fact and value because our worldview intersects with the scientist’s worldview. The two perspectives cannot be kept separate because the Bible makes many factual claims about the same world as that studied by science – claims such as the fact that the universe had a beginning, that God created it, and that Jesus Christ was an actual historical person. Our faith hinges on the fact that Jesus was actually God clothed in human flesh, he was crucified dead and buried, and he arose bodily from the grave. The only way you can maintain a separation between science and Biblical faith is if you agree with certain mainline denominations that have given in to the NOMA philosophy of Gould and go along with the naturalistic bias of academia today – a bias that is depicted dramatically in the recent Ben Stein movie, “Expelled.” A far better alternative is to recognize the fact that the most recent developments in science point to God, giving compelling evidence (even if not mathematical proofs), for the Biblical worldview. It is true that faith is a gift of God, but God himself will enable the believer to whom he has given this gift to be free of the Satanic lies that hold the unbeliever in bondage to the philosophy of naturalism.