Faith and Science

One often hears that science and faith are at war, and that the progress of the one makes the other retreat. As science explains the world, God would become a hypothesis less and less necessary, soon dismissed. This idea has turned many minds away from faith, convinced that one must choose between believing and knowing. It rests, however, on a misunderstanding about what science and faith each seek. To consider them in their proper place shows that they answer distinct questions, and that the same truth joins them.

A false war

The story that is told sets conquering science against a faith in retreat, as if each discovery wrested a domain from God to hand it over to reason. According to this account, one once explained by God what one did not understand, the storm, illness, the course of the stars; science would have little by little explained everything by natural causes, and reduced the place of God until it was erased.

This account rests on a confusion between two questions: by what means a thing comes about, and why it exists. For faith, God is the cause of the very existence of the world, and the believer seeks in him the origin of all that is. Science seeks the detail of the means by which things come to pass. To hold God and natural causes as rival explanations of the same fact amounts to placing them on the same plane, whereas they answer questions of a different order.

Two orders of questions

Science seeks how things come about: by what process, what mechanism, what chain of causes. Faith, and the reason that questions the depths, seeks why anything exists, and who gives it being. These are two orders of questions.

There are causes within the world: one thing moves another, the seed becomes a tree, fire heats water. Science studies these causes, and deploys there all its rigour. But these causes suppose that something already exists: matter, forces, and laws constant enough to be described. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the world exist, and why does it obey laws? These questions escape science, for they bear on the very existence of what it studies, rather than on its working.

To create, in the proper sense, is to give being: the act that makes a world exist, deeper than any event occurring within that world. The cause of things in the world and the cause of the world’s existence stand at two separate levels. Science excels at the first; the second belongs to another inquiry, which reason approaches and faith enlightens. To know the workings of the universe leaves whole the question of why there is a universe. Scripture refers to God the existence of every thing: “All was made through him, and without him was made nothing of what exists.” John 1:3. And he keeps in being what he made to exist, for it is “in him that we have life, movement and being.” Acts 17:28.

The error of materialism

An objection arises: if science explains the world by natural causes, what need of God? This objection hides a premise it never proves, namely that matter alone exists, and that everything must receive a purely material explanation. This premise comes from outside science, brought to it rather than drawn from it.

Science deliberately limits itself to material and measurable causes; this limit makes its method and its strength. But a method that examines matter alone remains incapable of establishing by itself that matter alone exists. To pass from “science finds material causes” to “only material causes exist” is to confuse the limits of a method with the limits of reality. The mechanism by which a thing comes about leaves whole the question of whether it was willed, and by whom.

Further, the order science discovers leads toward God, far from setting him aside. To be open to study, the world must be ordered: constant laws, a matter that lets itself be measured, an intelligibility such that human reason finds a hold on it. This order calls for an intelligence that established it. The ordered world science explores bears the mark of its Author: “You have ordered all things by measure, by number and by weight.” Wisdom 11:20. Its hidden perfections let themselves be read in its work: “His invisible perfections, his eternal power and his divinity are, since the creation of the world, made visible to the intelligence through his works.” Romans 1:20.

One single truth

If science and faith each attain a part of the true, they cannot contradict each other, for truth is one. God is the single source of both: author of the nature science explores, and of the Revelation faith receives. What he has made and what he has said come from the same hand, and accord in the same truth. The knowledge of the world is itself a gift of God, who made man able to understand it: “It is he who gave me the true knowledge of beings, to make known to me the structure of the universe.” Wisdom 7:17.

Where science and faith seem to clash, the appearance deceives, and the conflict is resolved in two ways. Either what science advances remains uncertain, and holds for settled what will later be corrected; or Scripture has been read as a book of science, beyond what it means to teach. For Scripture transmits the truths of salvation: who God is, who man is, whence he comes and where he goes. It teaches that God created all things and that all he made is good, without giving the detail of the means nor the measure of time, which belong to human inquiry. To read Genesis as a treatise of physics is to ask of it what it does not say, and to miss what it says.

Thus faith welcomes science with confidence, and each serves the same quest for the true. The scientist who scrutinizes the laws of the world and the believer who adores their Author look upon the same reality, the one in its working, the other in its source. The more science discovers the depth and order of the real, the more it displays the wisdom of the one who gives it being. The reason that seeks and the faith that believes ascend toward the same God, who is truth itself.