Science and theology

Science and theology names the relationship between the natural sciences and Christian theology as two disciplines investigating the same created world. Reformed theology holds that theologians and scientists study “the same world” rather than two separate territories, one of material fact and one of private value, that can be divided between them.¹ On this view, rightly interpreted Scripture and an established scientific fact should not conflict, though Scripture may conflict with a particular scientific theory, just as theology’s own theories about a text may need correction.²

Confessional Witness

No Reformed confession addresses “science” as a category; the term names a set of modern disciplines the confessions could not have had in view. What the confessions do address is the underlying question of how God’s works in creation relate to his Word, and there the answer is the classic Reformed “two books” formulation. The Belgic Confession states that God is known “by two means”: the “creation, preservation and government of the universe,” which is “before our eyes as a most elegant book” testifying to God’s “power and divinity” (Rom. 1:20), and, “more clearly and fully,” his “holy and divine Word.”³ The same two means, and their ordering under Scripture’s higher authority, are the subject of natural theology. What the confessions never take up is the field-level question of how the modern practice of science relates to the practice of theology.

Historical Development

Christian roots of the scientific enterprise

Bavinck argues that Christianity’s affirmation of an orderly creation, governed by a rational Creator rather than by capricious deities, encouraged rather than obstructed the rise of systematic natural inquiry.¹ He cites the nineteenth-century physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, no defender of orthodoxy, conceding the same point against his own instincts: “Modern natural science, however paradoxical this may sound, owes its origin to Christianity.”⁴

Old Princeton and the Copernican lesson

Charles Hodge held that theologians, no less than scientists, can be the ones who err. “Romanists and Protestants vainly resisted the adoption of the Copernican theory of our solar system,” he wrote. “They interpreted the Bible in a sense contradictory to that theory… The theory proved to be true, and the received interpretation had to be given up. The Bible, however, has received no injury, although theologians have been taught an important lesson.”⁵ The lesson, on Hodge’s reading, was not that Scripture had failed but that a fallible interpretation of Scripture had been staked, needlessly, on a disputed question of natural science.

To keep that mistake from recurring, Hodge distinguished a science’s observed facts, “permanent” and binding on any interpreter, from its theories, “constantly changing” and carrying no comparable authority: “The facts of geology are to be admitted; the theories of geologists have no coercive authority… It has been admitted that revelation cannot contradict facts; that the Bible must be interpreted in accordance with what God has clearly made known in the constitution of our nature and in the outward world.”²

The nineteenth-century “warfare” thesis

Popular historiography of science and religion is often shaped by nineteenth-century polemical histories, most famously John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), which cast the church as a standing obstacle to scientific progress. Craig Carter identifies this narrative as one of several Enlightenment-era myths that arose to explain why educated people had ever believed Christian orthodoxy at all: “the rise of the myth of warfare between science and theology, in which progress in intellectual thought is held back by the forces of reactionary churchmen bent on stifling challenges to established ways of thinking.”⁶ On Carter’s account, the warfare narrative is itself a nineteenth-century ideological construction retrojected onto earlier history, not a description historians of science derived first and theologians resisted second.

Opposing Views

The conflict, or warfare, model

The view that science and religion are inherently and perpetually opposed, one gaining ground only as the other retreats, remains a popular framework outside as well as within the academy. Carter treats it as inheriting the Enlightenment’s own narrative about itself: “Human progress was said to require the triumph of reason over superstition, education over ignorance, and science over theology.”⁶

Methodological naturalism as a working framework

A more academically respectable position restricts science, by definition, to explanations that invoke only natural causes, “methodological naturalism,” while remaining officially neutral on whether nature is all that exists. Carter argues that some evangelical scholars have adopted this framework defensively, hoping “to evangelize the culture” and “win a hearing in the secular academy,” but that doing so concedes more than it appears to: “the philosophical naturalism that permeates the modern university setting cannot serve as the presupposition of theology because the God of the Bible cannot be conceived within the conceptual framework of methodological naturalism.”⁷

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the church’s own history, especially the Galileo affair, prove that Christianity has been an obstacle to scientific progress? Hodge, writing from within confessional Reformed theology rather than defending it from outside, treated the episode as a real failure, not one to be explained away: theologians of the day “staked the authority of the Bible on the correctness of their interpretation” of Scripture against the Copernican theory, and “the received interpretation had to be given up” once the theory proved true.⁵ What failed there was a fallible interpretation, not Scripture itself, which “received no injury.”⁵ The larger claim that this episode typifies a standing warfare between Christianity and science as such is a different matter: Carter identifies that broader narrative as a nineteenth-century construction, popularized by Draper and White well after the events it describes, rather than a conclusion historians of science reached first.⁶ It also sits uneasily with the historical origin of the scientific enterprise itself: even a critic of Christian orthodoxy could concede that “modern natural science… owes its origin to Christianity.”⁴

Doesn’t taking any scientific finding seriously mean theology must eventually yield ground to science, or vice versa? Bavinck’s answer is mutual respect rather than either side dictating to the other: “We should avoid apologetic approaches that find new scientific insights serving as easy explanations of biblical miracles. Nor should we be held hostage to what science declares to be possible or impossible in the natural world. Theologians and natural scientists should respect each other and acknowledge the respective limits of their work.”⁸ Hodge’s fact-theory distinction gives the same answer a sharper edge: an actual, established fact must be received, but a theory built on top of it need not be, and the same discipline applies to theology’s own theories about what a passage of Scripture teaches.²

Doesn’t objective inquiry require ruling out theological explanations from the outset, since methodological naturalism is simply what makes science work? That framework is a working convention, not a neutral default with no metaphysical cost. Carter argues it imports philosophical naturalism’s own picture of the world without saying so, one in which “the God of the Bible cannot be conceived,” and that adopting it as theology’s own presupposition rather than merely science’s investigative method concedes the very point in dispute rather than settling it.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth”: “We affirm that a theological perspective on the material world differs from but should not be isolated from a philosophic/scientific one… Theologians, philosophers, and natural scientists are dealing with the same world. For that reason we cannot divide the labor of scientists and theologians in such a way that science deals with objective, material reality and religion/theology addresses only matters of subjective value and ethics.” ↩ ↩²
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 58: “The facts of geology are to be admitted; the theories of geologists have no coercive authority… It has been admitted that revelation cannot contradict facts; that the Bible must be interpreted in accordance with what God has clearly made known in the constitution of our nature and in the outward world.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Belgic Confession (1561), art. 2, “By What Means God Is Made Known unto Us”: “We know him by two means: first, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely, his power and divinity… Secondly, he makes himself more clearly and fully known to us by his holy and divine Word.” ↩
Emil du Bois-Reymond, Culturgeschichte und Naturwissenschaft (Leipzig: Veit, 1878), 28, quoted in Bavinck, chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 57: “Romanists and Protestants vainly resisted the adoption of the Copernican theory of our solar system. They interpreted the Bible in a sense contradictory to that theory… The theory proved to be true, and the received interpretation had to be given up. The Bible, however, has received no injury, although theologians have been taught an important lesson.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Craig A. Carter, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 1. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Carter, chap. 9, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, chap. 4, “Revelation.” ↩