Second in the “Got Questions?” series

In the first article of our “Got Questions?” series, we asked: how can we know God exists? We considered the Bible’s claim that God has not left Himself without witness: in creation, in conscience, and supremely in Jesus Christ.

A natural follow-up often sounds like this: “I trust science. I trust airplanes. I trust the laws of nature. I do not need to add God.”

Let me say something plainly at the start. Christians are not anti-science. We are grateful for careful observation, honest experimentation, and true discovery. The historian James Hannam has documented in detail how much modern science owes to the Christian Middle Ages, and how the familiar story of a long war between faith and science was largely manufactured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by men with an axe to grind. [1] Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and James Clerk Maxwell were not doing their work in spite of their faith. They expected the universe to be orderly and intelligible because they believed a wise Creator had made it.

Science and naturalism are two different things

Here is a distinction that governs everything else in this article. Most arguments about God and science go wrong because this gets skipped in the first thirty seconds.

Science is a method. It investigates how things work within the natural order. It measures, tests, predicts, and revises, and it is extraordinarily good at what it does.

Naturalism is a philosophy. It claims that the natural order is all there is and that nothing exists beyond it.

Science by itself cannot establish naturalism, because naturalism is a claim about everything, advanced from inside a method that only examines things within the world. When someone says that science has made God unnecessary, what has usually happened is that a method got quietly swapped for a philosophy and nobody noticed the substitution.

So here is my answer to the question in the title, stated up front. Science does not make God unnecessary, because science investigates processes within creation. It does not address why there is a creation to investigate, why the world holds together in a law-governed way, or why our minds can grasp it at all. Those questions arrive the moment you stop doing science and start asking what science assumes.

Trusting the airplane assumes more than aerodynamics

When you step onto a plane, you trust that it will fly and land safely. You trust the engineers, the pilot, the maintenance crew, and yes, the laws of aerodynamics. You trust them because you have seen patterns. Planes have flown many times before, and experience teaches you to expect they will fly again.

That everyday confidence rests on something we rarely stop to examine. It depends on your mind being able to reason from repeated experience. It depends on the world being stable enough that patterns can be found at all, and on those patterns holding tomorrow as they did yesterday. Step onto the plane and you are trusting that your mind can know real things about a real world.

Now a skeptic may reply, “Evolution explains why our brains work well enough to survive.” That reply has some force, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than brushed aside. Faculties that track the environment accurately would plainly help a creature survive. It matters a great deal whether you judge correctly the distance of a cliff edge or the intentions of a predator, and beliefs that get such things right will tend to keep you alive.

But notice how far that gets us, and where it stops. Natural selection selects for successful behavior, not for the truth of beliefs as such, and the two can come apart precisely where the stakes are highest for this conversation. Whatever advantage accurate perception of cliffs and predators may confer, it tells us very little about whether faculties shaped for survival are generally reliable when they range out into abstract mathematics, formal logic, metaphysics, and sweeping claims about the ultimate nature of reality. And here is the sharp edge of it: naturalism is itself one of those sweeping claims. If our reasoning can be trusted only where survival was at stake, then the reasoning that produced naturalism is exactly the kind we have least reason to trust.

The difficulty here belongs to evolutionary naturalism, the philosophical addition that the whole process is blind, unguided, and aimed at nothing. Evolutionary biology by itself does not generate the problem, and a Christian who accepts some form of common descent is not committed to the claim that the process is purposeless.

Christianity offers an answer that fits the world we actually inhabit. The universe is intelligible because a rational God made it, and our minds can grasp reality because we are made in His image (Genesis 1:26-27). That is why investigation works, and why it is worth pressing further.

Looking for God inside the machine is the wrong category

Some people say, “I do not see God in the laws of aerodynamics, so God is unnecessary.”

But you never find the maker of a thing as a component inside the thing. You could take a car apart for a lifetime and never find the inventor sitting under the hood. That would tell you nothing about whether there was an inventor. You would simply have asked the wrong kind of question.

God is the Creator of the system, not an object within it. So the useful question runs deeper: why is there an intelligible, law-governed world at all, and why do we have minds capable of discovering it?

This deserves saying carefully, because Christians have sometimes argued badly here. God is not a gap filler, a name we write in wherever science has not yet reached, to be erased when the research catches up. He is the foundation that makes the whole scientific enterprise possible in the first place, so Christianity has no interest in setting Him against aerodynamics, chemistry, or physics.

Hold on to that, because it disciplines what comes next.

The design discussion goes deeper than complexity: it goes to meaning

Many debates about God and science orbit around design. People argue over whether some biological structure is too complex to have arisen by evolutionary processes. Those conversations turn detailed and technical quickly.

There is another layer underneath, more basic than questions about biological machinery. It is the layer of information and meaning.

Modern genetics shows that DNA is an ordered sequence carrying biological information, written with a four-letter alphabet: A, C, G, and T. [2] One copy of the human genome contains roughly 3 billion base pairs distributed across 23 chromosomes, and most of your cells carry two copies, one inherited from your mother and one from your father. [3] A base pair is two complementary DNA letters joined together, adenine with thymine and cytosine with guanine, like a single rung on a ladder. [4]

Consider what happens with seven letters. If you see F-R-E-E-W-A-Y on a sign, you do not treat them as random shapes. They communicate because an agreed language already exists, and because you have a mind that can read it. Something parallel holds in the cell. DNA’s letters function as information because there is a code and a translation process that reads and applies them. So the question runs past the letters to the language system itself. Where did that come from?

And that system is not hypothetical. Within protein-coding genes, the DNA sequence is first copied into a working message. A molecular machine then reads that message in three-letter words. Helper molecules act as carriers, bringing the right building blocks at the right time, so the cell can assemble proteins. [5] The cell has a built-in reading and translating system that turns a stored message into working parts.

Chemistry is obviously involved in all of this. The point is that coded information and an interpreting system are a different sort of thing from chemistry alone. Words and languages are not the same kind of thing as ink and paper.

So how far does this take us? Less far than some Christians claim, and further than many skeptics will admit.

It does not take us here: “Science cannot explain the origin of the genetic code, therefore God.” That argument would contradict everything I have just said about gap filling, and I am not going to make it. The origin of the code is a genuinely open question in origins research. Naturalistic models have been proposed, involving chemical affinities, early replication systems, selection, and coevolution. They are debated and incomplete, but they exist, and honest apologetics does not pretend otherwise. If someone hands me a full account of the code tomorrow morning, nothing in the Christian faith falls over.

Nor does it help to point to computer simulations where code evolves solutions, or to genetic algorithms that optimize designs. Such programs can show what selection accomplishes once a replicating system and a fitness measure are already in place. They do not explain where those prerequisites came from, because a programmer supplied them. That is the very thing the origins question is asking about the natural world.

Here is what the genetic code actually contributes. It is an exhibit, not a gap. This article has been claiming from the start that the world is intelligible, that it is the kind of place that can be read, and that Christianity accounts for this while naturalism helps itself to it without explanation. The cell is that claim in miniature. At the base of biological life there is a message, a code, and a machine that reads it. Whatever process produced that arrangement, the arrangement is there. Naturalism must account for it as the outcome of unguided physical processes. Christianity can treat it as entirely at home in a world made by the eternal Word.

Francis Collins is worth mentioning here, though not for the reason he usually gets cited. Collins led the international Human Genome Project. He was raised with little religion and was an atheist by graduate school. His movement toward faith did not begin with DNA. It began in medical school, where seriously ill patients and their convictions forced open questions he had dismissed, and it went forward through C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and the argument from the moral law. He came to Christ around the age of twenty-seven, more than two decades before the genome draft was announced. [6] What his genomic work did was give an existing faith something to worship over. Standing at the White House in June 2000 to announce the first draft of the human genome, Collins said he found it humbling and awe-inspiring to realize that “we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” [7]

I give the sequence because the sequence matters. Collins is no evidence that DNA converts atheists. His value here is different: a first-rate scientist found the Christian faith intellectually serious, and the further he read into the genome, the more the language of worship struck him as the natural language for what he was looking at.

A brief note for clarity

Some Christians believe God used evolutionary processes as His means of creating life over long ages. That is a discussion for another time, and faithful believers hold different views on it.

But notice that even on that understanding, evolutionary mechanisms would describe processes within creation. They would not explain why a law-governed creation exists at all, why those processes possess the capacities they possess, or why the world is intelligible to the human mind. The questions this article is asking sit underneath the biology rather than alongside it, and they are still waiting whichever way the biology goes.

Christianity says the universe is word-shaped because it comes from the Word

Here is where the Christian answer becomes both bold and coherent.

In Scripture, matter is never ultimate. The Bible opens with God creating by His word, and John’s Gospel identifies the eternal Word through whom everything was made:

“In the beginning was the Word … and all things were made through him” (John 1:1-3).

And Scripture adds that this same Christ sustains what He originated:

“By him all things were created … and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17).

Christians are therefore not surprised to find order, meaning, and intelligibility woven through reality. We expect it. It is what you would expect of a world created and upheld by the eternal Word.

You might reasonably suspect that all this is elegant philosophy and nothing more, unprovable in principle. But Christianity does not rest on philosophy alone. It makes a public historical claim, open to investigation: the Word who made everything entered history at a particular time and place, performed public miracles, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and rose bodily from the dead. Paul staked the entire faith on that event and invited the test: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). The evidence for the resurrection deserves an article of its own, and it will get one.

Then the claim becomes concrete:

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

The heart of the matter

If all of that is true, an obvious question follows. Why are these arguments not simply decisive? Why does a case that looks clear to one person look thin to another?

Scripture answers directly, and the answer is uncomfortable. Our difficulty is moral before it is intellectual. Paul says that what can be known about God is plain, that God has shown it to us, and that men suppress the truth by their unrighteousness (Romans 1:18-20). We do not lack evidence. We resist a claim, because we do not want to honor Him as God.

This tells you what an argument like this one can and cannot do. An argument can answer real questions, clear away genuine misunderstandings, and expose how thin our excuses are. It cannot cure the heart’s resistance to God. That work belongs to grace alone. Arguments have their place, and this one is worth making. We should not ask more of it than it can give.

Which means we need more than arguments. We need grace.

That is precisely what God has given. He has not confronted us with evidence and left us to sort ourselves out. The eternal Son, through whom all things were made, became flesh, died for our sins, and was raised for our justification. He came to reconcile rebels, to seek and to save the lost.

If you sense not only questions but resistance in yourself as you read this, you are not alone. That is simply the human condition, and it is exactly why the gospel is good news.

A word to the Christian who has felt outnumbered

Some of you reading this are believers who have felt intellectually cornered: by a professor, by a colleague, by a son or daughter home from university with hard questions. You have wondered privately whether the clever people know something you do not.

Hear this. The Christian faith has nothing to fear from honest investigation and never has. You are not holding a fragile position that survives only so long as nobody examines it closely. The eternal Word, whose wisdom stands behind the reading and translating systems within the cells of your body, took on flesh so that you could know Him. Ask your questions. Read widely. You will not lose Him at the bottom of the enquiry.

An invitation

If you are wrestling with these things, here is a step you can take this week. Read the Gospel of John slowly and honestly, with an open Bible and an open mind. Ask God to show you the truth. Christianity does not ask you to silence your questions. It asks you to bring them to Christ.

Christianity is an announcement: God has made Himself known in His Son, and He now calls you to come to Him.

If you would like to talk any of this through, come and speak with us. We would be glad to.

Footnotes

[1] James Hannam, “Modern Science’s Christian Sources,” First Things, October 2011 (Issue 216). Hannam is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Regnery, 2011), published in the United Kingdom as God’s Philosophers (Icon, 2009).

[2] “ACGT,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Genetics Glossary, Genome.gov.

[3] “Human Genomic Variation,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Fact Sheet, February 1, 2023, Genome.gov. In simple terms, DNA is written using four chemical letters (A, C, G, and T), often called bases or nucleotides. A chromosome is a long, packaged DNA molecule. Humans have 23 chromosomes in one complete set, and most human body cells carry two complete sets, one inherited from the mother and one from the father. This two-set arrangement is why we speak of pairs of chromosomes. (A note for curious readers: some cells are exceptions. Mature red blood cells, for instance, have no nucleus and so do not carry nuclear DNA in the usual way.)

[4] “Base Pair,” National Human Genome Research Institute, Genetics Glossary, Genome.gov.

[5] Bruce Alberts et al., “From RNA to Protein,” Molecular Biology of the Cell, 4th ed. (Garland Science, 2002), NCBI Bookshelf. In standard biological terms, the DNA sequence of a protein-coding gene is transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA). A ribosome, itself a molecular machine, then reads the mRNA in three-letter units called codons. Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) act as adaptors, matching codons to specific amino acids, which the ribosome links together to form a protein.

[6] Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006), especially the opening chapters, where Collins recounts his atheism, the patient who challenged him, his reading of Lewis, and his conversion at twenty-seven.

[7] Remarks on the Completion of the First Survey of the Entire Human Genome Project, June 26, 2000, transcript, National Human Genome Research Institute, Genome.gov.