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Science has discredited Christianity?

The question is not one of proof, but of credibility. Which story is more credible: the old story or the new story? So the new story goes like this. Scientists who build upon the philosophical tradition of naturalism (aka materialism) assume that all that exists is matter, or “stuff”. Scientific materialists assume that because all there is is matter, there is nothing else. Belief in anything requiring faith, doctrine, or mystery is illogical and irrational because all that exists can be observed by the human senses. There is no invisible realm, no supernatural, only superstitious people who create primitive and irrational schemes to control people. Science claims that it is the purest form of knowledge, and though science is incomplete at the moment, science will one day produce a "Theory of Everything" to explain all reality in terms of physical characteristics. Once the grand "theory of everything" is established religion and all of its friends will wither away under the heat of a rationalist's world. What scientists claim then is not verifiable knowledge (all that exists is matter) but a grand story of life written and marketed by white-robed scientists.


Science is not the problem, the stories scientists tell are. One scientist wrote, "You can't accept one part of science because it brings you good things like electricity and penicillin and throw away another part because it brings you some things you don't like about the origin of life." (Donald Johnson quoted in Phillip E. Johnson's Reason in the Balance, p 68). Alvin Plantinga responds to this mentality, “Naturalists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of science, as if science in some way supports, endorses, underwrites, implies, or anyway is unusually friendly to naturalism” (Francis Collins, ed., Belief, 300 [HarperOne, 2010]).

The underlying assumptions of naturalism's worldview is the problem. The "grand metaphysical story of science" is en vogue in modernity, yet according George Marsden, "As a claim about reality, however, naturalism, is unsubstantiated and unfalsifiable" (Quoted in Phillip E. Johnson, p. 170). Most naturalistic scientists explain that all that exists is the product of physical processes. There is no "God" option because all answers come from scientifically explainable processes. If science does not yet know the answer, then optimistic spirit of science will soon discover the answer because the answer is found in the material world of mechanistic processes. Phillip Johnson summarizes his chapter on The Grand Metaphysical Story of Science by saying, "Modernism rests on the grand metaphysical story of science, and the degree to which the story has been successfully told rests largely on the Darwinian theory of evolution. For scientific naturalists the story and the theory are virtually sacrosanct... (Phillip E. Johnson, p. 70) Evolutionists would agree here. Atheistic Physicist Steven Weinberg admits, "the only way that any sort of science can proceed is to assume that there is no divine intervention and to see how far one can get with that assumption" (Phillip E. Johnson, p. 92).

Has science discredited Christianity? Is it science or the prevailing philosophy of science that is causing all the ruckus? Has reason displaced revelation? Or is it that the claims of a particular philosophy of science have gone far beyond the available evidence?

Scientific Naturalism tells one story. God tells another. God’s is a Story you can believe in. Steven Barr, professor of Physics and Astronomy writes, "As we examine some of the arguments for materialism later, we shall see that ultimately all of them are completely circular. They all seem to boil down in the end to 'materialism is true, because materialism must be true.' The fact seems to be that the philosophy of materialism is completely fideistic in character" (Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, p. 16. [University of Notre Dame Press, 2003]). He continues, “However, a closer look at the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century reveals a very different picture. We find that the human mind is perhaps, after all, not just a machine. We find that the universe did perhaps, after all, have a beginning. We find that there is reason to believe, after all, that the world is the product of design, and that life is perhaps part of that design” (Steven Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, p. 29).

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