The Fall 2025 semester has commenced at universities throughout the U.S. Many new and returning students will pursue a course of study in various STEM-related fields.
I teach chemistry to two separate STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math) cohorts. One is made up of students preparing for careers in medicine, forensics, marine biology, and graduate research. The second and much larger cohort is enrolled in our university’s school of nursing.
But teaching chemistry is only half of what I do. Since I teach at a Christian university, I am afforded the unique privilege of integrating a Christian worldview into my lectures and laboratory classes.
If the concept of mixing the Bible and science together in a college classroom seems alien, that is due to the widespread ignorance of Christianity’s role in the history of the development of science.
We’ve been sold a bill of goods. Scientists have told us that theology and science don’t belong together, and that only science has the authority to make truth claims about reality. This is not science; it is scientism, a worldview based on the arrogance of philosophical materialism.
Before the advent of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, dubbed the “four bearded god-killers” by the late Martin E. Marty, Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School, many of the greatest scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were devout Christians, whose faith motivated them to pursue the study of science. They saw a world that was ordered, and concluded, as Stephen C. Meyer explains in The Return of the God Hypothesis, that “nature had been designed by the same rational mind who had designed the human mind.”
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Writing in Science and Religion: A Critical Survey, Holmes Rolston explains that it was “monotheism that launched the coming of physical sciences, for it premised an intelligible world, sacred but disenchanted, a world with a blueprint, which was therefore open to the searches of the scientists. The great pioneers in physics — Newton, Galileo … Copernicus — devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world” (Rolston 2006, 39).
The seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler said that God “wanted us to recognize natural laws and that God made this possible by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”
The father of classical physics, Sir Isaac Newton, and the father of quantum physics, Max Planck, were both able to integrate their Christian faith with science seamlessly. Belief in God did not present a contradiction to their understanding of the design and the mechanics governing the respective worlds they studied. They believed that God had created a universe that was ordered, predictable, and contingent, that it had been designed like a precise clock, and that laws governed it. These characteristics led them to conclude that mathematics and science demonstrated God’s precise handiwork.
C.S. Lewis was the master of integrating a biblical worldview into science. He lived during the exciting era of scientific advances in atomic theory. He compared the inadequacy of pictures to explain the complex mathematical expressions governing the nature of the atom to Christ’s death on the cross for the atonement of sin, arguing that a man’s inability to fathom completely the doctrine of salvation by faith could not be a valid argument for rejecting the Gospel.
Writing in Mere Christianity, Lewis says;
What [scientists] do when they want to explain the atom or something of that sort is to give you a description out of which you can make a mental picture. But then they warn you that this picture is not what the scientists actually believe. The pictures are there only to help you understand the formula… The thing itself cannot be pictured; it can only be expressed mathematically. We are in the same boat here. We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to picture this (Lewis 2007, 55).
We live by faith more than we might care to admit. We accept many things without fully understanding the why or the how. Lewis offers the example of enjoying a meal without fully understanding how that food nourishes us and adds, “A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works” (Lewis 2007, 55).
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Science doesn’t have all the answers. After over seventy years of research, since the elucidation of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953, biochemists are no closer to solving the fundamental question of how life began. In fact, the more that is learned about the cell and its unfathomable complexity, the farther in the rearview mirror any answer fades.
Venki Ramakrishnan was one of three collaborators awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2009 for studies in the function and structure of the ribosome. Writing in Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome, he explains how his own research led him to ponder the deeper question of life’s origins.
How life began is one of the great remaining mysteries of biology… the problem [is] that in nearly all forms of life, DNA [carries] genetic information but DNA itself [is] inert and made by a large number of protein enzymes, which [require] not only RNA but also the ribosome to make these enzymes. Moreover, the sugar in DNA, deoxyribose, [is] made from ribose by a large, complicated protein. Nobody [can] understand how the whole system could have started (Ramakrishnan 2018).
Both sides of the faith-science argument should be presented to students. They should be allowed to consider that they might not be the result of some blind, unguided process that began millions of years ago in a warm little pond—the so-called “primordial soup.”
In my classroom, they will hear me say that God created man in his own image so that we can share in his own thoughts and see the world as his precise handiwork. I want my students to consider that the first verse recorded in the Bible—“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”—is a truth claim, and a valid starting point for the study of science, as it was for some of the greatest scientists the world has ever known.
Visit our Minding the Science column for in-depth analysis on topics ranging from wokeism in STEM, scientific ethics, and research funding to climate science, scientific organizations, and much more.
Image: “Chemistry-lab” by ТимофейЛееСуда on Wikimedia Commons
Brilliant. Congratulations.