Where Science Has Landed

There is a popular story in which religion once ruled a superstitious world and science has steadily driven it into retreat. The story is not accurate. Most of modern science was built by Christians because the biblical idea of a rational Creator made the world predictable enough to be worth studying. Kepler called his astronomical work "thinking God's thoughts after him." Newton wrote more theology than he did physics. Mendel was an Augustinian monk. The real question is not whether science and Scripture can coexist — they have coexisted in the same minds for centuries — but whether the actual findings of modern science lend weight to or against the biblical view of reality.

The Universe Had a Beginning

Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." For most of human history, Greek and Eastern thought defaulted to a universe that was eternal — uncreated, static, without beginning. The Bible stood almost alone in insisting on a definite beginning. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the scientific consensus was firmly on the side of an eternal universe. Einstein's own general relativity originally included a fudge factor (the cosmological constant) to preserve the stability of a universe he assumed had no beginning.

Then came Hubble's observation of red-shifted galaxies (1929), Penzias and Wilson's accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (1964), and the steady tightening of the Big Bang model. By the end of the twentieth century the scientific consensus had flipped: the universe had an absolute beginning, roughly 13.8 billion years ago. Space, time, matter, and energy all sprang into existence together. Einstein reportedly wrote that the cosmological constant had been "the greatest blunder of my life."

Robert Jastrow, the agnostic founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute, famously summarized the moment: "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 mountain 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."

The Universe Is Exquisitely Fine-Tuned

The constants governing physical reality — the strength of gravity, the electromagnetic force, the mass ratio of proton to electron, the cosmological constant, the strong and weak nuclear forces — are calibrated with absurd precision for the existence of matter, chemistry, and life. Physicists have enumerated more than thirty such constants. A change of one part in 10³⁷ in the cosmological constant would have rendered the universe sterile. A change of one part in 10⁶⁰ in the initial expansion rate would have meant recollapse or runaway dispersion.

Paul Davies: "The seemingly miraculous concurrence of these numerical values must remain the most compelling evidence for cosmic design." Fred Hoyle, a lifelong atheist, after computing the fine-tuning required for the production of carbon in stars: "A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics."

Earth Is Improbably Habitable

Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, in The Privileged Planet, catalogue over two dozen independent factors that make Earth capable of hosting advanced life: the mass and type of our star, the position within the galactic habitable zone, the stabilizing role of Jupiter, the moon's size and distance, the rate of Earth's rotation, the ratio of land to water, the plate tectonics that cycle carbon, the earth's magnetic field, and the distance to the galactic center. The probability of a planet drawing all these parameters is so low that even in a universe of 10²⁴ stars, the expected number of habitable planets with complex life is very small.

The Cell Is an Information-Processing Marvel

Nineteenth-century biology imagined cells as "blobs of protoplasm." Modern biology has shown them to be densely engineered nanofactories — each human cell containing the literal equivalent of six feet of digitally encoded information (DNA) spooled inside a nucleus too small to see, along with molecular machines (ATP synthase, the ribosome, the flagellar motor) whose engineering sophistication far exceeds anything humans have designed.

Francis Collins — head of the Human Genome Project, former director of the NIH, and a Christian — wrote in The Language of God: "When one has for the first time spread out before one this 3.1-billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can't survey that going through page after page... without a sense of awe. I can't help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God's mind."

The Origin of Life

The question of how the first self-replicating cell arose from non-living chemistry remains one of the deepest unsolved problems in biology. Every proposed mechanism — RNA world, metabolism first, clay templates, hydrothermal vents — faces crippling difficulties in getting past the chirality problem, the information problem, and the thermodynamic problem. The gap is wide enough that secular scientists like Francis Crick seriously proposed panspermia (life seeded from elsewhere) simply because the terrestrial origin appeared so improbable. The biblical claim that life comes from a living God who spoke it into being is not scientifically unreasonable; it is, at minimum, on the same epistemic footing as competing origin scenarios — and arguably better supported by the evidence of information content.

Human Exceptionalism

Genesis says humans are different in kind from the rest of creation — made in God's image, granted moral agency, conscious of death, hungry for meaning. Modern biology has struggled to collapse this difference. No other species engages in recursive language, generates abstract mathematics, builds civilizations, writes moral philosophy, produces art for its own sake, buries its dead with hope, or asks about its own origins. Whatever the precise evolutionary history, the gap between humans and the next most cognitively advanced creature is enormous and unexplained on purely Darwinian grounds — as Alfred Russel Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) himself acknowledged.

Biblical Knowledge Ahead of Its Time

• The earth is spherical. Isaiah 40:22, "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth" — roughly 700 BC, in a world that pictured the earth as flat.
• The earth is hung upon nothing. Job 26:7 — centuries before Copernicus.
• Innumerable stars. Genesis 15:5, Jeremiah 33:22 — at a time when ancient astronomers catalogued around 1,026 stars and thought they knew them all.
• Water cycle. Ecclesiastes 1:7, Job 36:27–28 — described evaporation, condensation, and precipitation millennia before they were formally modeled.
• Life is in the blood. Leviticus 17:11 — at a time when medicine believed in the four humors.
• Sanitation and quarantine. Leviticus 13–15; Deuteronomy 23 — germ theory applied ritually centuries before microscopes.

Is it not remarkable that the book most maligned by scientific sophisticates in 1850 is the book scientific sophisticates in 2020 increasingly find themselves sharing a room with? — Paraphrase of Alvin Plantinga's observation

On the Age-of-the-Earth Debate

Christians disagree on whether Genesis 1 describes a young earth (thousands of years), an old earth with long creation periods, or a framework meant to be read theologically rather than scientifically. Good Christians read the same Hebrew words differently. What they all share is the conviction that the universe was created, that humans are made in God's image, that the Fall is a real historical event with real consequences, and that the resurrection is not a metaphor. Those are the non-negotiables. The age of the rocks is a family conversation among people who agree on the Rock of Ages.