Does science disprove God?
"Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings." —Victor Stenger
"God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance." —Neil deGrasse Tyson
"Every scientific domain—from cosmology to psychology to economics—has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture." —Sam Harris
You’ve heard these claims. You’ve seen the memes. Maybe you've even wrestled with them yourself. But is it true? Does science, with all its progress, all its explanatory power, really disprove God?
Let’s break it down—the myths, the limits, the goals.
First, The Myths
There’s this popular idea—what historians call the “Conflict Thesis”—that science and faith have been locked in some great battle for centuries. You’ve probably heard the infamous stories:
The Catholic Church persecuting Galileo
The religious outrage over Darwin’s theory of evolution
The infamous Scopes Trial
But here’s what you probably haven’t heard: The narrative of a war between science and faith is historically misleading. Sure, there have been moments of tension, brief skirmishes, but the overarching relationship between science and religious belief is far more nuanced; one of interaction and, often, mutual reinforcement.
And that’s not coming from Christians with an ideological axe to grind. That’s coming from modern historians of science. The Conflict Thesis was largely popularized by two 19th-century writers, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White—neither of whom were scientists, and both of whom had strong anti-religious biases. Today, as far as I know, virtually no serious historian of science upholds their view. Why? Because history tells a different story.
Far from being an obstacle to science, Christianity actually helped lay its modern foundation. The scientific revolution was overwhelmingly pioneered by men of faith—Newton, Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Faraday—not in spite of their belief in God, but precisely because of it. It’s no small accident of history that modern empirical science was birthed in Christianised Europe. It’s not like other parts of the world, with other dominant religions, weren’t advanced:
China had invented gunpowder
The Babylonians pioneered mathematics
The Egyptians developed sophisticated engineering and medicine
The Islamic world made remarkable advances in astronomy, optics, and algebra
But none of these societies and cultures experienced a scientific revolution comparable to Christian Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Why?
Because the intellectual framework of Christian theology uniquely fostered the conditions for modern science to emerge. The contents of the Bible provided not just impetus but expectation—that the universe was rational, orderly, and intelligible, and that human beings are capable of reason and discovery, though nevertheless prone to error and bias and therefore in need of objective measures to test, verify, and repeat our findings.
In the summary words of CS Lewis: “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”
Yet, despite this rich history, I personally find myself surprised that many people today simply assume that science has not only progressed beyond religion but has rendered belief in God obsolete. So even if we aren’t prepared to dismiss God as a delusion, perhaps we can set Him aside for a different reason—that modern science has advanced to the point where we have, in a sense, outgrown God.
That brings us to the second point:
Second, the Limits of Science
Does science disprove God? Well, that depends. It depends on what we mean by the “science,” and it depends on what we mean by “God.”
The meaning of science has changed over time. In the Middle Ages, the Latin scientia simply meant knowledge—not just what we know, but why we know it and how we come to know it. It encompassed all domains of inquiry, from the natural world, to music, ethics, even theology, the study of God. Science wasn’t at odds with faith; it was part of the larger quest for truth.
But over time, science became increasingly restricted to empirical methods—not necessarily because belief in God declined, but because the scientific method itself demanded testable, measurable, controllable, predictable, quantifiable, repeatable processes. As a result, modern science became increasingly mechanistic; less concerned with questions of ultimate meaning and purpose and morality, and more laser-focused on observing reality in objective and impersonal ways, according to material forces and mathematical descriptions.
Now, that’s not a critique—who can deny the staggering success of modern science, from life-saving medicine to the very technology making this conversation possible? But what it does mean is that modern science doesn’t have the first or the final word on all that can be known about reality.
Science has its limits. And saying that isn’t a critique—it’s a clarification. Science is a method for studying the material world, but it cannot tell us why there is a material world to study in the first place. When that point is missed, all sorts of ‘grand designs’ emerge—attempts to explain a universe from ‘nothing’ that smuggle in philosophy under the guise of science. Even the question we’re addressing—'Does science disprove God?'—is, in many ways, a category mistake. It assumes science is the only game in town, that it alone holds the key to meaning, morality, purpose, and God.
Let me put it another way: Saying science disproves God is like saying a metal detector disproves plastic—if your tool isn’t designed to find something, its failure to detect it proves nothing. Assuming the wrong tool for the task isn’t a failure in reality, but a failure in method.
And yet, when that failed assumption takes hold, our definitions of morality, meaning, purpose, what it means to be human, and ultimately, God, begin to shift. And so, if by ‘God’ we mean nothing more than a placeholder for ignorance—like Thor’s hammer for a thunderclap or Poseidon’s wrath for a storm at sea—then yes, those kinds of ‘gods of the gaps’ shrink with every scientific discovery. But the God of Christianity was never that kind of god. He is not found in the fading margins of our ignorance but in the very foundation of our understanding. Science may explain the gears of the clock, but it cannot explain why there is a clock in the first place.
Christianity doesn’t claim that God is just another force within the universe. It claims He is the foundation of all reality. He does not merely exist—He is self-existent. So, the real question isn’t whether God explains a thunderclap or a storm at sea, but whether science can explain why there are skies and seas to begin with!
And that leads us to the heart of the real issue here: science and faith do not compete—they complement each other.
Third, Science and Faith have distinct goals
Some people suggest that science and religious faith of one kind or another have completely different methods and goals, and never shall the two overlap. I’m not entirely convinced. Because while science and theology ask different kinds of questions, they are not unrelated.
Think of it this way.
Imagine a Tesla. Science can explain the mechanics—how the battery works, how the software operates. But it can’t tell you why the car was made, or who designed it. Those are different kinds of questions. In fact, if you were to get your hands on a Tesla and reverse engineer it, the ingenuity of HOW it works would likely prompt you to ask questions as to WHY it works; the intelligent engineering would serve as a sign pointing to the intelligent Engineer, so to speak.
In the same way, science explains natural processes of the created order, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for a Creator of that order—if anything, I think it points to it.
And here’s where I would want to point out that some of the most significant discoveries of modern science serve as bright neon signposts to what the Bible has said about our universe from the very beginning.
If you were an atheist 100 years ago, you could believe that the universe was eternal, self-existent—no need for a Creator. But today, that’s a much harder position to hold, because modern science has revealed:
That the Universe Had a Beginning. The discovery of redshift in distant galaxies showed that the universe is expanding, leading to the confirmation of the Big Bang, a moment when time, space, and matter came into existence from nothing.
That the Universe is Finely Tuned for Life. The physical constants of the universe—like gravity, the speed of light, and nuclear forces—are set at values so precise that even the smallest change would make life impossible with odds so small that mere chance is an increasingly unreasonable explanation.
That DNA is a Coded Language and Languages come from Minds. At the heart of every living thing is DNA, a system of encoded instructions that tells cells how to build life. And wherever we find a structured code carrying information, we recognise intelligence behind it.
Of course, none of these discoveries prove Christianity out right. But I think their cumulative force do challenge the pervasive assumption today that a purely materialistic explanation of life as we know it, is sufficient. The more we discover, the more the universe at both the macro and micro levels looks like it was designed by an Intelligent Creator. And that raises a whole host of questions that science not only struggles to answer, but by its very nature, never will.
So, does science disprove God?
No. Religion and science are not enemies. They are two hands reaching toward the same reality with different goals. And if the Christian claim is true—that God is the author of both nature and reason—then those two hands belong to Him. The same God who spoke the universe into existence is the same God who gave us minds to understand it.