The Reason for God
By Pastor Timothy Keller
Chapter 6: Science Has Disproved Christianity
“My scientific training makes it difficult if not impossible to accept the teachings of Christianity,” said Thomas,
a young Asian medical resident. “As a believer in evolution, I can’t accept the Bible’s pre-scientific accounts of
the origin of life.”
“And the Bible is filled with accounts of miracles,” added Michelle, a med student. “They simply could not
have happened.”
Richard Dawkins, in his book, “The God Delusion,” argues that you cannot be an intelligent scientific thinker
and still hold religious beliefs. He says it’s one or the other, and cites a survey that showed only 7% of scientists
in the National Academy of Sciences believe in a personal God. This proves, according to him, that the more
intelligent, rational, and scientifically minded you are, the less you will be able to believe in God. (pg. 84)
Keller points out that as we’ve been seeing all along, this seemingly negative feeling of doubt and distrust of the
Bible is actually caused by a positive faith in something else. Materialists say science has proven that there is no
such thing as miracles. But this is a “leap of faith” without any real evidence. “It’s one thing to say that science
is only equipped to test for natural causes and cannot speak to any others. It is quite another to insist that science
proves that no other causes could possibly exist.” (pg. 85).
A big part of the conflict between science and faith is this anti-supernatural bias. Many who are hostile to
Christianity don’t recognize that they actually have a contrary faith. They can’t accept a God of miracles
because they start with the assumption that nothing supernatural is even possible. They believe in scientific
naturalism, the concept that only things which can be empirically proved are real. But even many scientists
realize this is going too far and is a declaration that requires faith, because it cannot be scientifically proved.
How can you empirically prove that thought is real, value is real, fear or love are real? You can’t weigh these
things, measure them, see or feel or hear them! So even the statement that only what is empirically provable is
real is not empirically provable!
I liked Keller’s quote from Alvin Plantinga (pg. 86), about the drunk who has lost his car keys and decides to
search for them under the street light because the light is better there. He says it goes the drunk one better and
says that, since the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the streetlight!
As Keller points out, if you don’t have this biased mindset, and can accept the concept of a Creator God in the
first place, it’s not hard at all to believe He is capable of rearranging the universe any way He chooses, so that
miracles happen. I believe it actually takes less faith to believe in God than to be an atheist, and there’s a book
you can get with the same thesis – “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist” by Norm Geisler and Frank
Turek. Keller says, “To be sure miracles cannot occur you would have to be sure beyond a doubt that God
didn’t exist, and that is an article of faith. The existence of God can be neither demonstrably proven or
disproven.” (pg. 86)
I found the following quotes at CRI’s website, equip.org:
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Next Keller deals with the idea that science is in conflict with Christianity. He says this is partly something the
media has encouraged, because they like to have conflicts – it catches peoples’ interest. People want to see a big
fight! So the media like to paint the situation in black and white, with believers on one side and educated people
on the other. A majority in the media have the mindset represented by the quotes in the beginning of this
chapter as well, so they can hardly help from presenting things from that perspective.
As a result of all this propaganda, many have a hard time accepting the claims of Christ because they think to do
so would be unscientific. Keller tells of conversations he’s had at his church with people who think this way,
then focuses on one particular med student who talked with him about this.
Keller’s approach was to basically say that not all Christians are as black and white about this. He says many
believe that faith in God and evolution are not necessarily in opposition to each other, and refers to Roman
Catholic “pronouncements supporting evolution as compatible with Christian faith.” He cites Francis Collins,
the director of the Human Genome Project, who believes in evolution, yet is a man of faith. Keller goes on to
cite a man named Ian Barbour, who “lays out four different ways that science and religion may be related to
each other: conflict, dialogue, integration, and independence.” (pg. 88) This is a continuum that goes all the way
from the warfare model of creationists vs. scientific materialists, all the way to people who think faith is merely
a subjective, private thing that doesn’t really speak to the empirical realm at all. Keller says the conflict model
gets the most publicity, but really, it’s not how things are. A study was done in 1916 that showed roughly 40%
of scientists believed in a God who actively communicates with humanity, at least through prayer, but another
study was done in 1997 that showed the numbers hadn’t significantly changed at all.
An important quote is found on page 89: “The history of the secularization of American institutions is treated in
an important and influential book edited by Christian Smith. In it, Smith argues that the conflict model of the
relationship of science to religion was a deliberate exaggeration used by both scientists and educational leaders
at the end of the nineteenth century to undermine the church’s control of their institutions and increase their
own cultural power. The absolute warfare model of science and reason was the product, not so much of
intellectual necessity, but rather of a particular cultural strategy.”
As previously mentioned, Richard Dawkins cites this same study, but goes on to say that if you survey only
those scientists who are in the National Academy of Sciences, only 7% of them are believers. However Keller
quotes Alistair McGrath, a theologian with a Ph.D. in biophysics, who says there are other reasons behind such
statistics. For example, who do scientists tend to hang out with? Other scientists! They want to be accepted by
others, the same as anyone else. Sometimes it isn’t good for their careers if they’re seen as religious, and as a
result, many bring that sort of background to the issue of faith. Instead of their faith or lack thereof being the
result of a completely unbiased study of the issues, it is also significantly influenced by peer pressure and the
desire for funding and such. Keller quotes Stephen Jay Gould, a noted evolutionist, who also doesn’t agree with
Dawkins and says half his colleagues don’t either; they believe in God. Thomas Nagel, an atheistic philosopher,
also stands in opposition to Dawkin’s idea that if you’re a person of science, you must believe in scientific
materialism. He says, “Can physical science do full justice to reality as human beings experience it? I believe
the project is doomed – that conscious experience, thought, value and so forth are not illusions, even though
they cannot be identified with physical facts.” (pg. 92) Keller’s point in all this is that we need to “disabuse
ourselves” of the notion that science and faith are necessarily incompatible.
I would go further than Keller. I believe that science would never have even developed at all in the first place
without the Christian or at least theistic worldview. Sociologist Rodney Stark and others have written books on
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this, and prove, to my satisfaction, that science only developed under Christianity, and history proves that many
or most of the greatest scientists of all time have been believers. Theism posits a God of order who made the
universe and put us in it with a desire to search out truth. Because He is orderly and reasonable, and we are
made in His image, we can search out truth with a confidence that it will be discoverable and reasonable.
Keller then spends some time covering the different perspectives of Christian thinkers regarding evolution and
how it could’ve been something God used to develop life as we know it today. I do not accept this at all, and
believe that so-called “theistic evolution” is the worst of all compromises, because it says a God of order and
design created all life by a completely undirected process. Evolutionists stress that natural selection must be
seen as an undirected process. Any appearance of design or purpose is only that, an appearance. To say God
directed an undirected process is stupid to me. Besides, I believe all of nature shows intricate design and
brilliant engineering, yet evolution denies that. I think it is a stupid notion that was accepted in the 19th century
because we didn’t know as much as we know today about biochemistry and cellular structures, and because it
“set people free” from the concept of a Creator God to whom they had to give account. I believe it was a
grievous error on the part of Pope John Paul II to say anything positive about evolution.
One worthwhile point Keller makes on page 93 is that we must interpret scripture based on its genre (poetry,
history, apocalyptic, etc.), and not always literally (Jesus is the True Vine, but that doesn’t mean He’s a plant!),
but there are a few sections of scripture where we’re not sure of the genre (like Genesis 1.) He says he believes
Genesis 1 & 2 are a couplet, like Judges 4 & 5 and Exodus 14 & 15. I am not completely convinced of this, but
I tend to think there is some truth to it. For example, the six days of creation have some strange inconsistencies,
like light being created the first day, yet the sun, moon, and stars not being created until Day Four. It does seem
like Day 1 & 4 go together, 2 & 5, and 3 & 6. They cover similar things. So the six days may be something like
the 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the captivity, and then 14 more from the Captivity
to Christ. It’s possible this is not meant to be taken literally or as an exact and full description of what went on,
but rather, a sort of schematic overview meant to teach the main points without bogging down with all the
details. Adam and Eve were real people, but did Satan really enter into a serpent’s body in some way, or is that
meant to show us more about his character than his appearance? (He’s like a serpent, like a dragon.)
I liked Keller’s last section called “Healing the World.” He refers to Matthew 28 where, even after the
resurrection, when the disciples were face to face with Jesus Himself, “some doubted.” He says that passage
shows some really important things. 1) “It’s a warning not to think that only we modern, scientific people have
to struggle with the idea of the miraculous, while ancient, more primitive people did not. The apostles
responded like any group of modern people – some believed their eyes and some didn’t. 2) This passage is also
an encouragement to patience. All the apostles ended up as great leaders in the church, but some had a lot more
trouble believing than others.” (pg. 95)
I really have come to agree with what Keller says in the last two paragraphs especially:
“The most instructive thing about this text is, however, what it says about the purpose of Biblical miracles.
They lead not simply to cognitive belief, but to worship, to awe and wonder. Jesus’ miracles in particular were
never magic tricks, designed only to impress and coerce. You never see him say something like: “See that tree
over there? Watch me make it burst into flames!” Instead, he used miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the
hungry, and raise the dead. Why? We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order,
but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally
make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal
the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of
what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’ miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to
our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.” (pg. 95, 96)
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