Science vs. the Bible?

How many times have you seen a headline or an advertisement for a television show declaring a battle between “science” and the Bible?

It’s an extremely popular narrative within our culture with just one major problem — it’s dead wrong.
First of all, “science” does not speak, declare, or attack anything. It doesn’t make conclusions. Science is a process, a methodology of accumulating certain types of knowledge through experiments that are observable,
testable, repeatable, and falsifiable.

Scientists, Christian or secular, on the other hand, do make interpretations, statements, and declarations of what they believe to be true. In reality, there is no conflict between real, observable/repeatable science and the Bible. Most people don’t realize that Bible-believing Christians — most of whom believed in a young earth! — started most branches of modern-day science.

Johannes Kepler, one of the founders of astronomy, said science was “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” And this makes good sense because without the Bible being true, science would be impossible. It is the Bible that reveals the true Creator God who made the laws of nature and maintains their consistency by the power of His Word (Colossians 1:15–17). If the laws of nature randomly changed (and there is no reason to believe they shouldn’t in an evolutionary worldview), then experiments, consistent results, and accumulation of knowledge would be impossible. Thus, science would be impossible (it is actually science because of the Bible)!

Now comes the crux of the matter. When attempting to figure out what happened in the unseen past, like origins, for example, this can be called “historical science.” And it’s a different ball game all together from what might be called “observational science.” Why? The past is gone. It is not observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Without an eyewitness account, the best a person can do is look at the present-day evidence and make a guess about the past.
That guess will flow directly from a person’s assumptions about the past. Those assumptions are rooted in a belief system called a worldview.
The question is not the evidence; the question is which worldview do you use to interpret the evidence to understand the past. Do you trust the eyewitness account of the Creator God as revealed in the Bible? Or do you trust the opinions of fallible men who weren’t there and don’t know even a fraction of all knowledge? Bottom line, the issue is not science vs. the Bible; the battle is man’s word being the absolute authority vs. God’s Word from a God who is absolute.