Does Science Disprove God?
"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands." — Psalm 19:1 CSB
"For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made." — Romans 1:20 CSB
Science does not disprove God. It cannot — not because the question is off-limits or too sacred to examine, but because science is a methodology for investigating natural causes, and God is not a natural phenomenon subject to scientific investigation. The conflict most people sense between science and faith is usually not a conflict with science itself. It is a conflict with something else entirely, and sorting that out changes the conversation significantly.
Why the Question Misunderstands What Science Can Do
Science is a methodology, not a philosophy. It is a systematic way of investigating the natural world through observation, hypothesis, and repeatable experiment. It is extraordinarily good at what it does — it has given us antibiotics, space travel, the ability to sequence a human genome, and a so many wondrous discoveries about the universe. These are extraordinary achievements.
But the scientific method is a tool, and every tool has a specific domain. A metal detector is excellent at finding metal. It cannot tell you whether the water table is high this year. That is not a failure of the metal detector. It is simply not the right instrument for the question. Asking science whether God exists is the same kind of category error. Science investigates natural phenomena through physical evidence. God is supernatural by definition, meaning He exists outside the natural order He created. A methodology designed to study natural causes cannot be used to rule out the existence of a cause that operates outside the natural. This is not a theological evasion. It is a logical constraint on the instrument.
The Difference Between Science and Scientism
Most of what people call a conflict between science and faith is actually a conflict between faith and scientism — and the distinction matters enormously. Science is the methodology I just described. Scientism is a philosophical position, not a scientific conclusion, and it claims that science is the only valid source of knowledge about anything. On this view, if something cannot be measured, observed, or repeated in a laboratory, it does not count as knowledge and probably does not exist.
The problem with scientism is that it collapses under its own weight. "Science is the only valid source of knowledge" is not itself a scientific statement. You cannot run an experiment to determine whether love is real, whether beauty has value, or whether human beings have inherent worth. These questions are not amenable to the scientific method, and yet most of us are quite confident we know the answers to them. Scientism, taken seriously, would require us to be agnostic about everything that makes human life meaningful. Very few people actually live that way, including most scientists.
What Scientists Actually Believe
The loudest voices in the public conversation about science and faith tend to come from a particular position on one end of the spectrum, and the result is a distorted impression of where scientists as a whole actually stand. A 2009 Pew Research survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that 51% believe in some form of God or higher power. Among younger scientists (18-34), the percentage was higher. Among chemists, it was 41% who specifically believe in a personal God. These are not people unfamiliar with the evidence. They are among the most rigorously trained scientific minds alive, and half of them believe in God.
This is not an argument that majority opinion determines truth. But it is a meaningful data point against the assumption that engaging seriously with science inevitably erodes belief in God. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project — one of the most significant scientific undertakings in human history — is an openly evangelical Christian who has written extensively about how his scientific work deepened rather than diminished his faith. He is not an anomaly. He is one representative of a substantial population of serious scientists who hold these two things together without contradiction.
What Modern Science Has Actually Found
If anything, several of the most significant scientific discoveries of the past century have made the existence of a creator more plausible rather than less. The Big Bang theory established that the universe had a beginning — that there was a moment before which there was nothing, and from which time, space, matter, and energy emerged. A universe with a beginning requires an explanation for that beginning, and a cause outside the universe itself is one serious candidate for that explanation. This was uncomfortable enough for Albert Einstein that he initially added a mathematical constant to his equations specifically to avoid the conclusion of a beginning, which he later called his greatest mistake.
The fine-tuning of the physical constants is a related phenomenon. The values of the fundamental constants of physics — the gravitational constant, the cosmological constant, the strength of the electromagnetic force — are extraordinarily precisely calibrated. Small changes in any of them would produce a universe incapable of supporting any form of organized matter, much less life. Physicists and cosmologists have proposed various explanations for this, including an infinite multiverse in which every possible set of constants exists somewhere. That may be a legitimate scientific hypothesis—though it’s been at best difficult to test. It is worth noting that it is, in its own way, a remarkable act of faith in an explanation for which we have no direct evidence.
What It Looks Like from Inside Both Worlds
I teach science in a classroom. I walk into that room and teach what the evidence supports, because that is what honest science requires and what my students deserve. And I walk into a church and preach the Word of God, because that is where I find the questions that science is not designed to answer: why is there something rather than nothing, what are human beings for, why does love matter, what makes a life worth living. Both rooms feel like home to me, not because I have learned to ignore the tension between them, but because the more deeply I have engaged with both, the less genuine tension I actually find.
The heavens that David described in Psalm 19 are more vast and intricate than any ancient person could have known. The cosmological constants that physicists now describe in extraordinary mathematical detail are in the same universe Paul said reveals God's invisible attributes through what He has made. I do not think those two descriptions are in conflict. I think they are describing the same reality from different angles, using different instruments, and arriving at complementary rather than competing accounts of what is true. The same God whose peace the neuroscience of stress points toward is the God whose existence the origin of the universe makes more rather than less plausible. That is my experience of living inside both conversations, and I find it more intellectually satisfying, not less, the further into each of them I go.
If you are someone who has felt that accepting science requires abandoning God, I want to offer you something gently: that choice is not required by the science. It is required by a philosophical assumption about the limits of knowledge that the science itself does not establish and that many serious scientists do not hold. The God who created the universe that science investigates is not threatened by the investigation. Psalm 19 says the creation has been declaring His glory since it began, which means the astronomers and the physicists and the geneticists have been listening to that declaration, whether they knew it or not, every time they looked carefully at what is actually there.