Does Science and Christianity Conflict?

Let me start by asking a question: “How do you know that God exists?” We know God exists by some of His effects, such as creation. If there is creation, there must be a Creator. Creation is the effect; the Creator is the cause. If there is design—that’s the effect—you reason back to a cause or a Designer. Somebody mentioned morality. Morality is an effect. There is a moral law written on the heart, so we reason back to a moral lawgiver. If there is evidence that says a man predicted and accomplished His own Resurrection from the dead, that’s an effect. You reason back to a cause. Who could cause somebody to predict and accomplish His own Resurrection from the dead? Only somebody like God.

In fact, you do this personally. If you think God said something to you, or you had some answered prayer, you’re doing the same thing. The effect is the answered prayer; you’re saying the cause is God. So you always reason from effect back to cause. That’s what scientists do.

Actually the Apostle Paul tells us how we know that God exists. In Romans 1, after he does the introduction, Paul begins to talk about how all of us are fallen. He says, in verses 18-20, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”

There is no one who is honest with himself who doesn’t know that God exists. Everybody knows there is a Creator, because there is creation. Everyone knows there is a Designer, because there is design. Everyone knows if a cause is moral, because you have the moral law written on your heart.

But just from knowing this doesn’t mean you know Jesus as God. You need more information, like the Resurrection of Jesus to know this. But just from the natural world, you know there has to be a moral Creator out there. That’s because you’re reasoning from effect back to cause.

However, some atheists will say that this is not true. Richard Dawkins, probably the most famous atheist in the world and a big proponent of macro evolution, said, “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” What?! “Ignorant, stupid or insane”?! Maybe even “wicked”?! Either we were created or we weren’t. There’s no other possibility. Dawkins is saying that if you think you were created, you’re “stupid”!

So what I want to do is to ask this question: “Does science and Christianity conflict?” You often hear that it does, from people like Richard Dawkins. Much of what I’m going to say is in my book, Stealing From God; Why Atheists Need God To Make Their Case. I want to deal with the question of whether it is even possible that science can show that Christianity is true. Or is science and Christianity in conflict?

We’re going to deal with four questions. Number one, “What is science?” If we’re going to talk about science, we ought to define it. Number two, “What does science say about God?” I think you’ll actually be surprised at the answer to this question. Number three, “How does science and atheism conflict?” My thesis is not that science and Christianity conflict; actually science and atheism conflict. And number four, “Why does science need God?” My thesis is that science does need God. If there was no God, you couldn’t do science.

So we’ll start with the first question, “What is science?” If someone were to put a microphone in front of your face and ask you, “What is science?” what would you say? The definition, which is controversial, is “a method of inquiry to discover cause and effect relationships.” When you’re doing science, you’re trying to discover what particular thing caused a particular effect that you observe.

In fact, Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, said, “Science is a search for causes.” When we’re doing science, that’s what we’re doing; we’re trying to figure out what caused a particular effect. There are two types of causes, and only two: either intelligent, like as person; or non-intelligent, like a natural process.

Let me give you an illustration of both types of causes. If you’re a scientist trying to discover what caused the Grand Canyon, is it an intelligent Being who caused it, or is it possible that a natural cause created it? There are natural causes like wind, rain and erosion that can create a canyon. In fact, if we take a lot of water and put it on a dirt mass, we’re going to get a canyon. Even a great flood can create a canyon.

Now Mount Rushmore had a different cause. Certainly it was not caused by erosion. You could take a lot of wind, rain, erosion against the mountain and never get a depiction of the four Presidents on the mountain. You realize this requires an intelligent cause.

So what I’m saying is that the Grand Canyon had a natural cause, and Mount Rushmore had an intelligent cause.

In addition to there being two types of causes, there are also two types of science. This is very important if we’re going to uncover whether or not science and Christianity conflict, because a lot of the confusion comes in right here. The main type of science we talk about all the time is empirical science, as in how things operate. How does a Model T operate? We’ve got the laws of internal combustion, automotive engineering—that’s how it works. And there’s another type of science dealing with how things originated. Where did the Model T come from to begin with? That’s a question we need to answer.

Too often we confuse these two types of causes. And if we confuse them, we’re not going to come to the right conclusion with regard to science and Christianity. In fact, empirical science deals more with technology, how things operate. And Christians and atheists are not arguing over technology. Christians don’t have different theories about how the Model T works or how iPhones work or how air conditioning works. But we might have different theories about how things came into existence or how they were created. Where did this come from? Where did the Model T come from to begin with? That’s a different question than, “How does it operate?”

In fact, John Lennox, a brilliant philosopher/mathematician/apologist who taught at Oxford for many years, used to ask his students, “What caused the Model T?” There are two possible answers, “Henry Ford” or “The laws of internal combustion.” His students would say, “Both. You need Henry Ford to create the Model T, and then you need the laws of internal combustion to be what they are, because if they were to change every 10 minutes, the Model T couldn’t operate.” So you need both; you need a creator, like Henry Ford, and you also need an environment, like the laws of internal combustion and others in order to have a Model T at all.

And John Lennox said, “You’re absolutely right.” So why can’t atheists like Richard Dawkins and others like him see this distinction? To say that a scientist can disprove the existence of God is like saying that a mechanic can disprove the existence of Henry Ford! Can a mechanic disprove the existence of Henry Ford? No. No matter how well a mechanic understands how the Model T operates, that’s not going to necessarily tell him or explain why the Model T exists to begin with.

They’re going to say that because we’re really good at technology and we keep advancing in technology, that somehow there’s no creator. Those two things do not follow. Just because human beings are getting better and better through accumulated knowledge, how to use our accumulated knowledge and to basically harness the four, natural forces we know about to make technological advances, that doesn’t mean that there is no creator or sustainer of this natural world.

Just because Christians and atheists are not arguing over how Model Ts work or how iPhones work or how air conditioning works, we are arguing over three, big questions. The questions are: “Where did the universe come from?”; “Where did life come from?”; and “Where did subsequent life forms come from?” These are all questions for historic science or forensic science.

We know about forensic science when we do a murder investigation. You can’t go back into a lab and recreate the murders. You can’t go back in time and witness them. So it’s not empirical science; it’s forensic or historical science. You’ve got to put clues together to figure out what happened in the past.

And that’s the kind of science you need to do to discover how the universe came into existence or who created it or where life came from or where subsequent life forms came from. Those are the things we’re arguing over.

So science is a search for causes. There are two types of causes: natural and intelligent. There are two types of science: historical and empirical.

The next question is, “What does science say about God?” In order to answer this, we have to talk about O.J. Simpson. Back in the 1960s he won the Heisman Trophy as a running back for the USC Trojans. Then he went into the NFL and played most of his career for the Buffalo Bills as one of the best running backs of all time. Many years ago when the Bills used to play the Dolphins, announcer Howard Cosell would say, “Miami has the oranges, but Buffalo has the juice.” And after O.J. retired, he became a sideline reporter for the NFL.

Then in 1994, he was accused of two, horrific slash-and-dash murders in Brentwood, California. His ex-wife, Nicole Brown-Simpson, was murdered, as well as who many people at the time thought was her boyfriend, Ron Goldman.

I’m going to give you the evidence, and you’re going to be the jury. You’re going to tell me whether you think O.J. was guilty or not guilty.

Simpson’s blood was at the scene of the crime. The trail of blood literally lead right to O.J. There was only a 1-in-a-170-million chance it wasn’t his blood. Goldman, Brown and Simpson’s blood was in Simpson’s Bronco. There was a low-speed case on the L.A. freeways—not because of traffic—with O.J. in the back of the white Bronco. He apparently had a gun to his head. His friend was driving the Bronco, the cops were overhead on a speaker saying, “Pull over O.J.! We’re taking you to prison!” They finally stopped and O.J. was taken into custody, and he eventually went to trial.

The blood found at the scene of the crime had blood from all three and matched the glove found at Simpson’s house. When Simpson was a sideline reporter for the NFL, in the colder months he would wear a pair of Isotoner gloves. You would see him holding the microphone with the Isotoner gloves on. And one of those gloves was found at the crime scene drenched in the blood of all three. The other glove was found at his house.

You might remember his defense attorney, Johnny Cochran, had O.J. try to put the glove on his hand, and the attorney said, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” O.J. couldn’t quite get the glove on his hand over a tight surgical glove. Why didn’t it fit? Why couldn’t he get it on? It had shrunk due to the blood. And, of course, he didn’t want to get it on! Would you?

Then there were bloody footprints found at the scene of the crime that were made by a rare brand of size-12 shoes that Simpson owned. There had only been 199 pairs of these shoes sold in America at that time, and O.J. had a pair of them. And those prints were at the crime scene.

Finally, Brown’s blood was on Simpson’s socks. There is only a 1-in-21-billion chance that it was not her blood. In fact, she was probably the only one in history who had that exact blood.

Now my question to the jury is this: “Does science show that O.J. was guilty?” Don’t answer; it’s a trap. That’s because science doesn’t say anything; scientists do. All data needs to be gathered, and then all data needs to be interpreted. And who does that? Scientists.

And as the jury, you have to figure out if all I shared with you is good evidence. Maybe it was planted. Some people thought this evidence was planted. But if it is good evidence, does it point more to guilty or not guilty? You can’t prove someone innocent; all you can do is say that the prosecution didn’t prove their case, so he’s not guilty.
Now here’s the interesting thing. Do you remember where you were when the verdict was announced? It happened in 1995, and O.J. was found not guilty. Later, CNN did an exposé on the whole thing. They interviewed all the jury members, and it was discovered that they never would have convicted O.J. Simpson, no matter what the evidence was! They had decided beforehand that he was not guilty.

But the prosecution didn’t do itself any favors. Mark Firman was a racist; they had him on tape talking about that. Marcia Clark, the prosecutor, didn’t do a good job.

In any event, a survey 10 years after the murder, an NBC survey of 1,186 people, found that 77% believed that O.J. Simpson was guilty. But there was an ethnic divide. While 87% of whites thought O.J. was guilty, only 29% of blacks did. Why is that? World view. While blacks may have seen people framed and even had it happen to themselves in the past, they were more open to saying, “Maybe Furman did all this. O.J.’s a good guy; he wouldn’t do all this! They’re just trying to frame O.J.!” Whereas whites said, “I don’t see that kind of history.”

So there is a difference, because world view may determine how you interpret evidence. If you are open to this being a frame case because of your own experience, you might say that he is not guilty. If you are not open to that, you say, “This is obvious! He’s guilty!” See how world view influences how you interpret the evidence?

Personally, I think he was guilty. In fact, that bumbling LAPD had no motive to frame O.J., and this is too intricate to do. They couldn’t even run the case. They don’t have that kind of ability to frame somebody. And for what reason?

After O.J. was found not guilty, he later went to prison over armed robbery. Then he got out of prison and died about two years ago.

Now let’s apply this case to evolution. It’s the same world-view issue. Piltdown man was discovered in 1912 in Piltdown, England. The British museum reconstructed fragments of the skull and jawbone and then hailed it as a link between ape and man. However, it wasn’t true. It was revealed as a hoax in 1923 as a combination of a human skull, orangutan jaw and chimpanzee teeth. But the scientific community didn’t concede it until 1953, 30 years later!

Why did it take 30 years for the scientific community to admit it was a hoax when they knew it was a hoax? Because their world view was that evolution has to be true. It was the only theory they had that didn’t include God, so it had to be true. This is called “confirmation bias.” No matter what they saw, it would be evidence of evolution. Again, world view may determine how you interpret evidence.

And the same thing is true today. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionist, was asked a question by Phillip Johnson, an attorney at UC Berkeley, a number of years ago. Johnson was actually a conservative, and he had written a book titled Darwin on Trial, in which he pointed out that the evidence for Darwinism didn’t work. He e-mailed Dawkins the question, “Bottom line, what is your best evidence for macro evolution?” Dawkins replied, “The reason we know for certain we are all related, including bacteria, is the universality of the genetic code and other biochemical fundamentals.” All living things have a genetic code, so that’s evidence for a common ancestor.

He is actually not right about that; there are many genetic codes. But he is right that there is one, big, dominant code, so we’ll give him some grace for that.

He is saying that we all have this code, DNA, that shows we have a common ancestor. Dawkins could be right about that. But he’s leaving something out. There is another possible cause. (Remember the two causes? Natural and intelligent causes.) The other possible cause that could explain a common genetic code is a common Creator or common Designer.

In fact, when you try to answer the question, “Where did we come from?”—if you boil down the arguments for macro evolution, the two main arguments for macro evolution are DNA and homology, which means “structure.” Yes, we do look like we could be related to apes because of a common structure. But what they never tell you is that we look like apes, because we don’t look like trees or snakes, and we’re supposed to be related to them as well. They say we have this common genetic code and we look like apes, so we have a common ancestor.

But when you ask them, “Why couldn’t that be evidence of a common Designer?” they’ll say that “Because of evolution, it’s true.” Then when you ask them, “Why is evolution true?” they’ll say, “Because of DNA and homology.” This is circular reasoning.

You would need evidence outside of DNA and homology to let you know which way the evidence points, because DNA and homology can be true for either cause potentially. And there is evidence outside of that that shows it’s a common Designer, not a common ancestor.

So let’s sum up our second question, “What does science say about God?” It says nothing about God, because scientists say things. And you have to determine if the scientist is interpreting the data properly.

Our third question is, “How does science and atheism conflict?” I’m going to put out there what many atheists believe today, because they’re naturalists and don’t think there is any supernatural or immaterial realm. They think everything is made of molecules. You’re just made of molecules; you have a brain and not a mind, a body and not a soul. You’re just a molecular machine, just a “moist robot.” Every thought you have is the result of the laws of physics. That’s one of their claims: “All thoughts are determined by the laws of physics.”

If someone were to say to you, “All thoughts are determined by the laws of physics, ”what question would you ask? “If you’re no different than a Coke can fizzing, why should you believe anything you think? Why should I believe anything I think?” If we’re just molecular machines, just moist robots, we shouldn’t be able to think. We shouldn’t be able to figure out what’s true outside of our skulls. But we can.

What you have to do is turn the claim on itself. When people say things like, “There is no truth,” you should ask them, “Is that true? Is it true that there is no truth? Because if it’s true that there is no truth, then to claim that ‘There is no truth’ can’t be true, but it claims to be true.” So this is a self-defeating statement.

It’s like if I said, “I can’t speak a word of English,” what would you say?”

“You’re using English to say it.”

It’s the same thing here. If you’re saying, “All thoughts are determined by the laws of physics,” then that thought is too, so why should I believe it?

Nobody pointed this out better than C.S. Lewis. He pointed out that atheism makes reason and science impossible. That’s because if we’re only molecular machines, reason and science don’t exist. C.S. Lewis said, “Suppose there were no intelligence behind the universe. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. Thought is merely the by-product of some atoms within my skull. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course, I can’t trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can’t believe in thought; so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.” You can’t say it better than that.

If we’re molecular machines, we can’t believe anything we think, including the thought that atheism is true. In fact, an atheist by the name of J. B. S. Haldane, an actual evolutionist, realized this. He thought that if robots can’t reason, why believe anything? He said, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

You see the problem? In fact, Daniel Dennett, who recently passed away, was a new atheist. He believed that consciousness is an illusion. And one wonders if he was conscious when he said this. Consciousness is an illusion?! In order to know that consciousness is an illusion, you have to get outside of your own consciousness.

For example, how do you know that a dream is just a dream? You have to wake up. That’s the only way you can say, “Oh, that was just a dream.” But when you’re in the dream, you don’t know if it’s a dream. You have to get outside the dream to know that it was just a dream. So for Dennett to say that consciousness is an illusion, he would have to get outside his own consciousness. He would have to get outside the matrix, so to speak. He would have to be God to know this.

Do you see the crazy extent that some atheists will go to in order to try to explain things that are self-evident; such as, that you have consciousness? Don’t say that consciousness is just an illusion.

Here’s the main problem: atheists exempt themselves from their own theories. They think everybody’s a molecular machine—except themselves; they’re not molecular machines. Some of them say that consciousness is an illusion—except they don’t think they’re consciousness is an illusion; just yours is, “You ignorant Christian!” They’re defeating themselves by their own theories.

Another self-defeating statement you’ll hear is that “All truth comes from science.” The problem with this one is that if you turn the claim on itself, and ask, “Does that truth come from science? Can you go in the laboratory and prove that all truth comes from science?” the answer is “No; that’s not a scientific conclusion. That’s a philosophical assertion.” That’s not even a statement from science; that’s a statement about science.

And by the way, most of what you know has nothing to do with science. The most important things in life have nothing to do with science.

“Honey, do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know; let’s run an experiment.”

“No!”

So what you have to do is turn the claim on itself.

But you say, “Wait, Frank! What can’t science explain?” Whenever you’re doing science, there are a lot of non-science, philosophical presuppositions that are brought to the table. When you do science, you first have to figure out, “How am I going to frame this experiment or historical investigation?” Then you have to figure out, “How am I going to conduct this investigation or historical investigation?” Next, you have to ask, “How am I going to interpret this evidence?” (It’s just like the O.J. trial—“How do you interpret the evidence?”)

And whenever you’re going through this process, you’re bringing principles to the table that you can’t prove by science, for example, the laws of logic. Can you prove them by science? No; you need them in order to do science. How about the laws of math? Can you prove them by science? No; you need those laws in order to do science. How about free will? Can you prove that by science? No; you have to assume you have free will in order to do science. How about realism? That’s the idea that your mind can tell you the truth about what’s outside your skull. Can you prove that by science? No; you have to assume that in order to do science. How about orderly, natural laws? Can you prove them by science? No; you have to assume they exist already in order to do science.

And this is the one I want to talk about: orderly, natural laws. Where do they come from?

Let’s sum up question three, “How does science and atheism conflict?” They conflict because if atheism is true, you can’t follow your own reasoning, because you’re just a molecular machine. And if you can’t reason, you can’t do science. So science and atheism conflict; not science and Christianity.

Now the fourth and the key question is, “Why does science need God?”

In order to answer this, we have to go all the way back to you in the womb at 11 weeks of gestation. Is this animal, vegetable or human? Human. Let’s go back to even further than 11 weeks. Let’s go all the way back to when your mother and your father got together to conceive you. When your mother and your father got together to conceive you, your mother unconsciously perfumed her egg to attract your father. And then your father sent the entire population of the United States, 300 million soldiers, toward your mother’s egg. There was a race and you won. (Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re not special. You beat out 300 million others!)

Your soldier was 20-30 times smaller than a grain of salt, yet it contained half of the 3.2 billion-letter gnome, your software program that we call DNA. All the letters were in the right order. And your mother’s egg was about the size of a period at the end of a sentence, and it contained the other half of the 3.2 billion-letter gnome with all the letters in the right order. And when your soldier and your egg came together, a 100%-new, genetic human being was created!

From that point until right now you have not received any more genetic information. Your genetic information has just duplicated itself. And there were only four things separating you from adulthood: time, air, water and food.

Does this have implications on the abortion issue? Yes; we don’t kill the two-year-old, so why do we kill the unborn child in the womb? Genetically, it’s the same.

You say, “But you can’t legislate morality.” All laws legislate morality. Every law declares one behavior right and the opposite behavior wrong. You can’t think of a law that doesn’t legislate morality. The only question is, “Whose morality will we legislate?” When people say, “Don’t impose your morality on me!” I say, “Why not? Would that be immoral? Because you’re imposing your morality on me right now. Why do you get to impose ‘ought-nots’ on me, but I don’t?”

But when somebody says, “Don’t impose your morality on me!” the better response is, “This isn’t my morality; I didn’t make this stuff up! I didn’t make up the fact that murder is wrong, that abortion is wrong, that rape is wrong, that theft is wrong, that you ought not mutilate the sexual organs of children. I didn’t make up the fact that men were made for women, and women were made for men, and the best way to perpetuate and stabilize society—which is the reason government is involved in marriage to begin with—is to legally recognize the man-woman relationship over every other relationship. And this isn’t your morality. This just happens to be the morality.”

The morality is the one that Thomas Jefferson said was “self-evident,” the one that the Apostle Paul, in Romans 2, said that the Gentiles, who are not of the law, have the law written on their hearts.

“If you don’t have a problem with the morality, you don’t have a problem with me; I didn’t make it up. You have a problem with the Creator upon whose nature this morality is derived.”

Upon your conception, an astonishing construction project began taking place. Your cells began multiplying at a rate of 4,000 cells per second. Brain cells began multiplying at a rate of 100,000 cells per second. Some cells became brain cells, some heart cells, some lung cells—how did they know how to do this? Nobody knows. Some cells went so far across you to become what they needed to become that it was equivalent to you walking across the United States. And that construction project continues to this very moment; you just made 4,000 new blood cells.

How is this happening? Aristotle noticed something 2,400 years ago. Of course, he didn’t know anything about blood cells, but he noticed that all of nature is going in one direction. For example, why does an acorn, if it’s properly nourished, always go in the direction of becoming an oak tree? Why doesn’t it become an elm tree? A birth tree? Or a seahorse?

You say, “Well, it’s programmed to become an oak tree.”

“Who programmed it?”

By the way, is an acorn conscious? Is it in the ground thinking, What do I have to do to become an oak tree? No; it’s not conscious. If it doesn’t have a mind of its own but it reliably goes in a direction, there must be an external mind directing it toward an end. That’s what Aristotle called “the unmoved mover.” Thomas Aquinas came along in the 1200s AD and said—this is going to be my fifth way to argue for God—that “All of nature is going in a direction, and if it’s going in a direction, it’s consistent and persistent going in this direction, there must be a mind directing it.”

This is not a historical cause, like a “big-bang” cause or God-created-the-universe cause. This is not that cause. This is the cause that exists every single second the universe exists. It’s being directed by a Mind. In fact, God is to the universe what a band is to music. Earlier in the service, the band was creating, playing and sustaining the music. The second the band stopped playing, the music was over.

The same thing is true here. God creates the natural laws that govern the universe, He creates the universe, He creates you and then He sustains the universe, He sustains you and then He sustains the natural laws that govern it. If God were to pull His hand away, the universe would go out of existence—and so would you.

This is why the Apostle Paul said things like, “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and “In Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17). And the writer of Hebrews said that God is “upholding all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3).

There is a sustaining cause right now. Science requires nature be goal-directed. Why is nature goal-directed? Why are there natural laws? Why do they do what they do over and over again, consistently and persistently?

One agnostic physicist by the name of Paul Davies, who teaches at Arizona State University, basically asked his atheistic colleagues, “Why are there orderly natural laws?” Almost 20 years ago he wrote a column in the New York Times, which he called Taking Science on Faith. He said that we talk about natural laws doing all these things, but “Where do the laws come from?” He got a lot of hate emails for that from his atheistic colleagues.

He summarized their response by saying, “Over the years, I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from ‘That’s not a scientific question’ to ‘Nobody knows.’ The favorite reply is, ‘There is no reason they are what they are—they just are.’”

Where do laws come from? Laws come from lawgivers. There are no laws without lawgivers.

In fact, here’s what God does. Not only does God create the universe, He sustains the universe and also intervenes occasionally through miracles. The only way we could detect when God was intervening through a miracle is if He consistently sustained the natural laws, because without natural laws, you wouldn’t be able to detect a special act of God. If things were chaotic—first of all, we wouldn’t exist—we wouldn’t be able to predict reliable cause and effect. So we wouldn’t be able to discover a miracle. Miracles presuppose the backdrop of regular events that happen over and over again.

So God creates, sustains and intervenes at certain points to tell us this person speaks for God. Paul was right. How do we know that God exists? We know through His effect. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:18-20).

We understand, from what has been made, that there has to be a Creator, and there has to be a Sustainer. And that’s why science needs God; there would be no way to do science unless God existed. There would be no way to detect reliable cause and effect, unless there was reliable cause and effect, and our minds weren’t just molecular machines. Our minds could actually know the truth outside of our skull.

So let’s sum it all up. “What is science?” A search for causes. There are two types of causes: natural causes and intelligent causes. There are two types of science: historical science and empirical science. Historical science is what we’re talking about here. What happened in the past?

“What does science say about God?” Nothing; science doesn’t say anything about anything. Scientists say things. There is evidence from science, that properly interpreted, points to God. But science itself doesn’t say a word.

“How does science and atheism conflict?” If atheism is true, we’re just molecular machines. We couldn’t even reason, much less do science. Science is predicated on a reasonable human being and orderly, natural laws that can be detected.

“Why does science need God?” For that very reason.