Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 21:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Are Christianity And Science At War With One Another?
Author: David H. Calhoun

Are Christianity And Science At War With One Another?

David H. Calhoun

David H. Calhoun is professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University; director of the Gonzaga Faith & Reason Institute and the Gonzaga Socratic Club; and Life Group pastor at Valleypoint Church in Spokane, WA.

I am deeply grateful to the former Director of the Defend conference, Dr. Bob Stewart, for years of friendship and encouragement and for helping me develop expertise in apologetics by inviting me to speak at Defend conferences beginning in 2009.1

Rumors Of War?

Is there tension, conflict, and perhaps even outright war between Christianity and modern natural science? One might think so. Critics have alleged numerous instances in which Christian authorities or institutions suppressed, opposed, or persecuted scientists or scientific inquiry. For example, only a few centuries after the birth of Christianity, a mob of Christians attacked, murdered, dismembered, and burned philosopher, scientist, and mathematical astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria.2 Later scientists like Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei were prosecuted by the Roman Catholic Church, and while Galileo’s advocacy for heliocentrism was punished only by years of house arrest, Bruno was burned at the stake for his speculations about worlds beyond the

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one recognized by the late medieval worldview.3 Centuries later, in the United States, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925 was the result of Tennessee state legislation prohibiting instruction in evolutionary biology primarily to protect religious beliefs.4 Immortalized in the play and movie Inherit the Wind, the prosecution of biology teacher John Scopes pitted a literalistic Bible-thumping creationist against a theologically skeptical evolutionist, and thereby became emblematic of a broad conflict between religion and science.5

More recently, the New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others—made the notion of a religion-science conflict central to their crusade by sharply contrasting the worldviews of modern natural science and Christianity.6 If the scientific account is grounded in rational theorizing

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and empirical evidence while the religious view is based on faith and religious authority (the argument goes), then we have clear reason for preferring the scientific ...