Big questions
Can I be a Christian and believe in science?
Yes. Science and Christian faith answer different kinds of question, and many leading scientists, past and present, have been committed Christians. You do not have to choose between them.
Different questions
Ask why the kettle is boiling and there are two true answers. One is that the element is heating the water until its molecules have enough energy to turn to steam. The other is that someone wants a cup of tea. The answers do not compete. Science is very good at the first kind of question: how things work. It cannot answer the second kind: why anything exists, what we are for and how we ought to live.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Science grew in Christian soil
Many founders of modern science were convinced Christians, among them Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. They expected nature to be orderly and open to investigation because they believed a rational God had made it. When the Cavendish Laboratory opened in Cambridge under Maxwell, words from Psalm 111 were carved over its entrance: the works of the Lord are great, and are studied by all who delight in them.
The same is true today. Scientists who are Christians work in every field, and in the UK groups such as Christians in Science exist to bring them together.
What about evolution and Genesis?
Christians hold a range of views. Some read the opening chapters of Genesis as a literal account of creation in six days. Many others, including a great many scientists who are Christians, understand those chapters as teaching who made the world and why, and not as a scientific description of how. They accept the mainstream scientific account of the age of the universe and the development of life as a description of the way God worked.
You do not need to settle that debate before you become a Christian. All Christians agree on what Genesis is chiefly saying: God made everything, it was good, and human beings are made in his image.
The New Testament adds that Christ himself was at the centre of it:
For by him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.
What about miracles?
The laws of science describe what normally happens. They do not rule out the possibility that the God who made the world might act in it in an unusual way for a particular purpose. Whether a miracle such as the resurrection actually happened is a question of historical evidence, and science cannot settle it in advance.
The limits of science
Science is one of humanity’s great achievements, and Christians have every reason to value it. But it cannot tell us whether a human life has worth, whether love is more than chemistry, or what is right and wrong. For those questions we need another kind of knowledge, and Christians believe God has given it.
The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse shows his handiwork.