It can be intimidating when a teenager looks you in the eye and asks you a question about science and God:
Do you believe in evolution?
What does the Bible actually say about the age of the earth?
What about the fossil record?
If you’re not a scientist and you don’t have the knowledge to back up your opinions right at the top of your brain, it’s hard not to quail.
But sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t actually to attempt to get involved in a sticky debate about a specific question. Those questions are important and worth pursuing, of course. But before we can engage them, it’s worth considering some big-picture truths about the relationship between science and Christianity. Here are four you might offer to a young person in your ministry or home.
You can trust the Bible and still pursue science.
“Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done.”1 Sadly, quotes like this one from the theoretical physicist Stephen Weinberg are not difficult to find. It’s no surprise, then, that many young people growing up in the world today are operating from a baseline assumption that science is incompatible with faith in God. They’re constantly receiving the impression that science and religion are fundamentally in conflict.
But that just isn’t true. For starters, it’s evident that many scientists and religious people are actually one and the same person. Did you know that 72.5% of Nobel Prizes in Chemistry between 1901 and 2000 were awarded to professing Christians? Clearly they didn’t think there was a contradiction.
Francis Collins, an expert in genetics who served as the head of the Human Genome Project for many years, explains that this is how he sees the relationship between faith in God and scientific endeavor:
“From the time of my conversion [they] seemed incredibly complementary … They were two ways of knowing, but knowing different things and asking different questions. Science asking how, faith answering why.”2
We can share with students that although some scientists choose not to believe in God and some religious people dispute the findings of science, there isn’t a fundamental incompatibility. If there were, we wouldn’t find any scientists at all who believed in God.
Science gives us reasons to believe in a Creator.
We’re all used to marveling at the things science tells us. The number of stars in the galaxy, the way the water cycle works, the extraordinary uniqueness of a specific tiny creature… But we don’t often think about how amazing science itself is. You and I are just two people among billions, on a small planet that occupies a tiny fragment of the universe, and yet when we scribble down a few mathematical symbols on a piece of paper, we are able to say something that is true about the entire universe. Isn’t that incredible?!
Why should science work? The physicist Eugene Wigner famously called it “unreasonably effective.”3 Charles Darwin spoke of a “horrid doubt” about whether his own brain, if descended from apes, could really be trusted in the conclusions it made.4 We are so used to taking science for granted, but it’s actually astonishing that the universe is orderly, and it’s astonishing that we can comprehend it. That is, these things are astonishing if you’re a materialist who believes that everything is just atoms. But if you believe there’s Someone who set the world in motion and had a purpose in mind for it, the reality of science isn’t surprising at all.
When you take this observation, put alongside it specific questions such as “How did life on earth begin?” and “Where did the universe come from?”, and consider the sheer improbability of the world existing as we know it, you will start to realize why some have said that science itself suggests the existence of a Creator.
Students may object that God is simply one hypothesis among many. For example, one could instead choose to believe in the multiverse or intelligent aliens to explain how we and our universe got to be the way we are. But they must see that God is (at the very least!) a reasonable explanation for certain scientific questions that are very hard to answer.
Christianity is testable.
Teenagers may wonder, why do Christians believe so firmly in a Trinitarian God and not intelligent aliens? They might assume it would be better to remain agnostic, believing that there might be a God but we just can’t know for sure.
The apostle John admitted, “No one has ever seen God.” But he went on, “But the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18). We can know what God is like—and we can know he exists in the first place—because of Jesus.
In particular, the resurrection of Jesus, which the Bible repeatedly tells us is the proof of his identity as one person of the Trinity. The resurrection is hard to explain away. It’s a fact, acknowledged by historians, that Jesus existed and that he died. It’s also a historical fact that belief in him as the resurrected divine Son spread remarkably quickly and widely not long after his death. The first-century Roman historian Tacitus wrote complainingly that this belief was prevalent “even in Rome”! This means that there has to have been rock-hard certainty, somewhere at the very beginning, that Jesus really had risen from the dead.
This isn’t the place to explore all the evidence. The point is, we can confidently affirm to our students that Christianity is testable. We can’t exactly run an experiment to find out whether it’s true, but we can look carefully at the evidence and make up our minds what explanation best fits the facts—much as scientists do. This marks Christianity apart from other religions, and it’s what allows Christians to go further than a vague belief in “some sort of creator.”
The Bible is sufficient, not exhuastive.
Because the Bible makes statements about the natural world, some have viewed it as coming into conflict with science. There’s a lot to unpack and explore here about how we should best go about interpreting the Bible. Faithful Christians take every word of Scripture very seriously. Still, there’s room for conversation about how we should understand parts of it.
Maybe one reason why there’s room for debate is that the Bible isn’t a science textbook. This might seem obvious, but it’s worth pointing out. Although we should take seriously the statements that the Bible does make about the natural world, we can also recognize that these are rarely plain explanations of facts such as you might find in a modern scientific paper. The Bible’s statements about the natural world are not intended to set out for us exactly how the world works, with every aspect accounted for. More often, they are designed to make us sit back and marvel at God and at the world he made.
This is good news for our science-minded students, because it means that we have a lot to discover! Christian students can pursue science with a sense of security because the Bible tells us that God is the sovereign Creator. They can indulge their curiosity because the Bible reminds us that the natural world is an endlessly multifaceted evocation of God’s greatness.
So if you don’t have all the answers, that’s okay. Young people have been asking hard-to-answer questions for generations. It’s not a failure if you tell them, “I’m not sure about that.” It isn’t your job to know every detail of every sticky debate.
Instead, you can encourage students that Christianity is reasonable and that God doesn’t want us to switch off our brains. Most importantly of all, you can keep on telling them about the Savior we can trust, the Lord of heaven and earth.
“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.”(Psalm 19:1-4)
- Stephen Weinberg, “In Place of God,” New Scientist 2578, 18 November 2006. ↩︎
- Francis Collins, “Is There a God and Does He Care About Me? The Testimony of BioLogos Founder Francis Collins,” BioLogos, December 19, 2023, biologos.org/personal-stories/is-there-a-god-and-does-he-care-about-me-the-testimony-of-biologos-founder-francis-collins.
↩︎ - Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no.1, (February 1960).
↩︎ - Charles Darwin, Letter to William Graham, 3rd July 1881. ↩︎
Katy Morgan recently wrote a book with John Lennox called Science and God: Do You Have to Choose? (The Good Book Company). Science and God offers a Christian perspective for teenagers and explores topics such as creation, DNA, and evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
