“Why do we need a God when we have science?” he asked.

My mind immediately responded with, “Because in God we find solid answers to a host of questions that science cannot even ask, much less answer.” That is not what I would say to him, though, because I expect that his question was a bit off the cuff, a little too hastily phrased. I expect that his question really was, “How is God relevant anymore, now that we have science?”

The answer, of course, begins with the fact that ‘science’ is not a worldview. And that is an important point, because a worldview is a constellation of beliefs and ideas by which we make sense of the world around us. Generally, if a worldview is self-consistent and coherent with broad explanatory scope and predictive value, it is considered valid and reliable by critical thinkers. And so if science were a worldview, then it would collapse into an unintelligible heap—because the very criteria for determining those conditions are not a matter of science. So science is not a worldview, but rather a toolbox available to one’s worldview. Science is a valuable collection of tools for exploring the natural or physical world; it can service a worldview but is not itself a worldview.

Returning our attention to his question, I would say that if science is a flashlight, then God would be the batteries that allow it to function. Most scientists are content to use the flashlight without bothering to question how it works. They are simply pleased that it does. But there are others who are more curious, people who like to crack open that flashlight to discover how that beam of light is produced (i.e., to question and explore the foundations upon which science rests). That falls under what we call the philosophy of science, which is not a scientific enterprise itself; and yet science is an unintelligible coincidence of incomprehensible accidents without that foundation. So those batteries are a vitally important issue.

That science is not a worldview is something we discovered early in the 20th century with the failure of ‘logical positivism’, where some people tried to reduce epistemology to the empirical domain and to toss out metaphysics altogether, especially ontology. And it didn’t work. Because it couldn’t work (for it was self-defeating). Epistemology is a discipline that explores the nature of knowledge, what can be known, how we know, and so forth. Whether one describes epistemology under a justified-true-belief model or a warranted-true-belief model, science has very strict self-imposed limits on the degree to which it can service either the justification or the warrant elements. It turns out that epistemology draws more heavily on metaphysics than the logical positivists realized, with science proving to be of rather limited value.

You see, epistemology is invested heavily in truth (whether justified-true-belief on the one hand, or warranted-true-belief on the other). But science does not do business with truth. Period. That is, science deals in probability, which gestures proximately at truth without presuming to reach it. (Real science is self-consciously modest.) With regard to epistemology, at the very least we ‘know’ something when what we believe to be true is in fact true, such that epistemology depends heavily on metaphysics, the philosophical discipline concerned with the nature of reality. This is because a thing is ‘true’ when it reflects the way things really are (reality). And because countless things are true and known but aren’t empirical, science has no relationship to epistemology other than as a modest tool of limited value (i.e., limited to stuff that is empirically apprehended).

So epistemology is grounded foundationally in metaphysics (what constitutes reality or the way things really are). However, science is not a metaphysical model, but rather a methodological toolbox. This is why we recognize the sharp and important distinction between “methodological naturalism” (our scientific toolbox) on the one hand, and “metaphysical naturalism” (an atheistic worldview) on the other. The former is the means by which we explore the empirical world and how it works, while the latter is an assertion about the nature of reality. A statement which makes assertions about the nature or scope of reality is not a scientific statement but a metaphysical one. Since science is for exploring objects, causes, and forces in the natural world only, it is the wrong tool for finding out the scope or nature of reality. Nature is part of reality, but it is not necessarily the sum of reality.

So then we have our chain of function and relevance. One starts with a metaphysical worldview and, from that, one grounds an epistemological model. Without the former, the latter is utterly meaningless. And one of the tools of epistemology is the scientific method, which is limited strictly to stuff that is empirically apprehended. Some of the things involved in epistemology are truth, logic, reason, etc., and none of that comes under the purview of science because they are not empirical matters (e.g., logic has no molecular structure). But insofar as our flashlight is a brilliant tool for exploring the physical world, what is it that explains how the flashlight itself works?

Science relies upon a number of vital assumptions that cannot themselves be proven scientifically. For example, science operates under the assumption that the physical laws of nature observed in this region of space are the same in that unobserved region of space, that inductive inference works, that the world we observe is how the world actually is—but cannot itself prove any of that. The assumptions are numerous and none of them can be established scientifically. Given that the flashlight works, what explains how it does so? This is where one’s metaphysical worldview and epistemology comes into play, articulating and defending those assumptions (i.e., trying to describe the batteries which power the clearly functioning flashlight).

While I would rely on our staff writer Duane for the scoop on the historical evidences and references, the answer is that the biblical Christian worldview constitutes those batteries. The scientific method as we have it today was birthed from the biblical worldview (Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, etc.) and flourished under it (particularly English Puritanism and German Pietism; q.v. the Merton Thesis), as scientists operated from biblical revelation about the nature of reality in their development of scientific enterprise, discovery, and invention—for several hundred years, up until the 19th century when Darwinism began to remove science from its foundations (i.e., ignoring the batteries). The biblical Christian worldview provides the most comprehensive and reliable metaphysical foundation upon which science can rest and engage confidently in its enterprises. No other worldview successfully constitutes those batteries, much less do any provide juice to power the flashlight, failing for various reasons unique to the worldview under critical analysis. That is how God is relevant, especially now that we have science.

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