Religion and Science are Incompatible

My wife and I rarely agree on what to watch. This is not, I’m told, unusual in a marriage. But I probably make it harder than it needs to be. I have a small collection of films and shows I revisit like familiar liturgies. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (the slow-burn 1980 BBC version), Cromwell (the 1970 classic with Richard Harris and Alec Guiness), Mad Men, Persuasion, Field of Dreams, and always, Contact. The 1997 adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel is not flawless, but it lingers. Jodie Foster plays a scientist driven by data, scarred by loss, and allergic to easy belief. Then she encounters something that resists proof but demands wonder. It is a film about science and faith that tries very hard not to be sentimental, and still ends up being just that.

One night not long ago, Contact was playing in the background of our house. The kids were half-watching and half-scrambling over blankies and dress-up costumes. I had put it on mostly for myself, letting it hum in the room while my wife and I moved about, tidying, pausing, listening. There is a quiet ache in the early scenes. A young girl obsessed with the sky. A father who believes in her. And then the rupture of sudden loss. It was that simple. A girl falls in love with the universe because her father opened it up for her. Then he is gone. And somehow the universe keeps speaking.

I thought of my eldest daughter. Ten years old, newly curious about biology, chemistry, and the scientific method. I wondered, not for the first time, if she might one day share some of my intellectual loves. I also found myself hoping that I would be around long enough to find out. So far, she’s said she wants to be a scientist, an inventor, and also a priest (heaven forfend). 

Not long after, someone asked my wife if that gave her pause. As a parent who still prays with his kids at night and believes that Jesus is not only real but risen. Would science pull her away from all that? It was a gentle question, maybe even well-intentioned, but it carried the weight of an assumption that still floats, largely unchallenged, through our cultural air. That science and faith pull in opposite directions. That the more one leans into the former, the more one must grow out of the latter.

But I have grown suspicious of obvious things.

There are excellent books and articles defending the compatibility of faith and science. I will not try to duplicate their work here. What interests me more is the shape of the assumption itself. Why does the claim that science makes religion obsolete still feel self-evident to so many smart people who have never actually examined it? Why does it live in the bloodstream of modern culture as though it were a settled thing, like gravity or taxes?

The philosopher Charles Taylor offers one answer. In A Secular Age, he argues that the decline of belief in our time has less to do with decisive arguments than with what he calls the social imaginary, a shared background picture of what is believable, adult, respectable. Modern people, he says, are shaped by a vision of the self that is buffered. Sealed off from transcendence. Protected against enchantment. Immune to spirits, myths, gods. This self is flattered by science not just because science explains things, but because it reinforces a way of being in the world that feels safe and sovereign and clean.

Science, in other words, becomes more than a method. It becomes a mood.

Taylor names this mood the stance of the disengaged reasoner. Detached. Objective. Unseduced by mystery. In this posture, belief becomes not so much false as unserious. Something you may once have needed but will surely outgrow, like fairy tales or fluoride pills. You begin to hear it in the way people say things like “I believe in science” with a tone once reserved for creeds. As though belief itself had to be transferred somewhere. As though faith did not disappear. It just changed clothes.

And yet.

Even within this culture of cool distance, there are still moments when the curtain twitches. In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner published an essay titled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. He marveled, no, he admitted to being bewildered, at the way abstract mathematics, developed for its own beauty or internal logic, ends up describing the physical world with eerie accuracy. Why should calculus or group theory or imaginary numbers correspond to anything real? Why should equations dreamed up on paper turn out to govern black holes and cell membranes and quantum fields?

Wigner called it a miracle. Not to make a religious point. But because it felt like one. He wrote, 

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” 

And again: 

“It is not at all natural that 'laws of nature' exist, much less that man is able to discover them.”

He concluded with this breathtaking line: 

“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”

And if you start there, not with creeds or catechisms but with that sense of eerie fit, you begin to see that the real question is not whether a scientist can believe in God but rather: why is the world intelligible at all? Why do our minds, tiny and temporary, have access to the inner structure of things?

From within a Christian framework, this strangeness feels not only explicable but inevitable. If the world was spoken into being by a rational Creator, and if our minds bear some trace of that rationality, then it is not surprising that the language of creation can be parsed and understood. Science does not unravel faith in this view. It deepens it. It reveals the structure of a cosmos already saturated with meaning.

This is not wishful thinking. It is history. Johannes Kepler believed he was thinking God’s thoughts after him. Isaac Newton wrote more about theology than physics. Robert Boyle. Blaise Pascal. James Clerk Maxwell. All Christians. Francis Collins, who helped map the human genome, is one today. The idea that belief and science are natural enemies is not a scientific finding. It is a story. One that has been repeated so often it no longer feels like a story. But it is.

And like many stories, it tells us more about the storyteller than the facts.

Alvin Plantinga is my favorite philosopher. I first heard his name in a sermon I wasn’t really listening to. I had started going to church mostly because some of my friends were going. I didn’t believe what was being said, and sometimes I wondered if they did, but it felt like something to do. I remember arriving late that Sunday and slouching into the back pew on the left. Whatever the preacher said that morning stuck just enough to make me curious. After the service, I walked across the street to the Hamilton Public Library and checked out a collection of Plantinga’s essays. One of them, “Reason and Belief in God,” challenged me in a way I wasn’t used to. It didn’t preach. It reasoned. It asked whether my deepest convictions had any grounding at all. And it made me want to become a reader.

Years later, I still remember that essay when I think about science and faith. Plantinga once asked whether naturalism, roughly, the belief that only physical reality exists, can provide a foundation for trusting human reason. If our minds are the result of blind evolutionary processes aimed only at survival, not truth, why should we trust them to give us knowledge? Why should we believe that our theories track reality rather than just help us get by?

Which brings us back to the deeper story. Why, if the historical and philosophical case for compatibility is so strong, does the myth of conflict endure?

Because it serves the modern self.

To believe is to be open. To be wounded, even. To admit the possibility that the world was made not just by equations but by love. And that requires more than data. It requires surrender. So we tell ourselves a different story. That faith is for children and scientists are the adults. That belief is what you shed as you grow into seriousness.

But even serious people can believe. David Albert, a philosopher of physics, famously dismantled Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing for its dishonest sleight-of-hand. Krauss claimed to show that the universe could arise from nothing. But as Albert pointed out, what Krauss called “nothing” was actually a quantum field governed by laws. Something very much like something. The book, Albert wrote in The New York Times, was not really about science. It was about using science to score points against religion. And it failed at both.

The last in the litany of reading materials, I swear. But it matters and you'll see why. I read The Last Word by Thomas Nagel during my honeymoon, which is to say I took in some of his ideas but I was also more than a little distracted and giddy. Still, one passage stayed with me. It felt, even then, like a rare kind of honesty. Nagel, a committed atheist and brilliant philosopher, wrote:

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

There it is. Not a refutation. Not a defense. Just a quiet acknowledgment that the world might be larger than we want it to be. That desire shapes our disbelief more than we would care to admit. And that the company of saints and scientists may not be as thinly populated as we were told.

I guess my whole point has been this: there’s no real conflict between an honest faith and science. That story is old. It echoes more of our desire for control in a world that often feels wild and uncertain than it does of anything science or faith actually say. But if (and since) the world is held in the love of God, then that old story simply isn’t needed.

So no, I am not worried about my daughter wanting to be a scientist. I am proud. I hope she learns to ask good questions. I hope she discovers things that astonish her. I hope she stares through a microscope or telescope and feels small in the best possible way. I hope she never mistakes detachment for wisdom, or clarity for certainty, or complexity for chaos.

And I hope she remembers, even when I am gone, that sometimes the things we cannot prove are the things that hold us together. That wonder is still possible. And that truth does not always shout. Sometimes it lingers, like a signal from deep space, just waiting to be heard.