Why Science Needs Religion More Than Ever

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Talking with a legend

I remember sitting in the basement of a U.C. Berkeley law professor who went to my church watching videos of a Christian debater with an intern from the same church. The professor was upstairs writing a book while we were downstairs learning about the intellectual credibility of the Christian faith.

The intern later became the chair of the philosophy department at Biola University, where that debater, William Lane Craig, was a professor. And the Berkeley professor in whose house we were sitting was Phil Johnson, whose book “Darwin on Trial” started a firestorm in the relationship between religion and science.

Dr. Johnson said something I’ve never forgotten.

He told me they were trying to get Christian professors to sign on to open statements about their beliefs, but these religious professors were hesitant to do so for fear of reprisals. The academic community had a vendetta against anyone who would admit to being Christian. But Johnson was undeterred.

“Bunch of chickens,” Dr. Johnson said.

I’ve gone on to earn a Master’s in the Philosophy of Science from the University of Edinburgh (same school Darwin went to, except I got a degree and he was a dropout), and it’s worse than I realized. Years later, the truth is coming into the light. Bigoted academics are perfectly willing to silence evidence when it doesn’t jibe with their preferred paradigms.

Science keeps getting it wrong

What’s a bit stunning is that the sophomoric vision of a scientific community that are simply objective truth-seekers who are persecuted by religious intolerance still persists, despite the fact that the roles are plainly reversed.

Scientists have used the tools at their disposal to hide evidence, silence disagreement, and persecute challengers. A few case studies make this painfully clear:

• Eugenics. The history of eugenics is a sordid, racist one, in which the most educated, wealthy, and empowered scientists sought to diminish the reproductive capabilities of non-whites in America and then elsewhere. Sir Francis Galton, father of modern eugenics and cousin of Charles Darwin, was educated at the premier English universities of his day. He studied medicine and rejected traditional Christianity for masonic practices and the masons’ Scientific Lodge. He did extensive research into the inheritance of traits, and ultimately argued that Africa should be populated by the Chinese to replace the inferior races. Anglo Saxons, he asserted, were the superior race worldwide. Eugenics would go on to be used to justify the unconsented sterilization of non-white women who had come to hospitals to deliver babies.

  
  

• The Tuskegee Syphilis Study. For decades, US government scientists allowed hundreds of black men to suffer from syphilis without treatment even after penicillin had been discovered. The stated reason was to observe the progression of the disease. The US Public Health Service oversaw the study, and the CDC was complicit. Men died, suffered permanent disabilities, and passed the disease on to their wives and children.

  
  

• Piltdown Man. The discovery of the missing link that tied human development to the apes was allegedly found in 1912. For 40 years the scientific community ran with it. The problem was that it was an intentional hoax, with bones chemically stained to appear ancient and teeth filed down by hand. It appeared a dozen years before the Scopes Monkey Trial, just in time to tilt and bias popular thought as debates were being hammered into policy.

  
  

• Tobacco. By the mid-1950s, internal research had already shown that smoking caused cancer and that nicotine is addictive. But well-educated, wealthy members of the scientific community asserted publicly that the science was inconclusive and then created misleading studies to muddy the data. Read Richard Lewontin’s Biology as Ideology to see how this works — he’s a Harvard scientist who has lifted the lid off the illusion of objective science.

  
  

How to cheat at science and get away with it

Those who think that science is a library filled with objective, established facts that stand as a fortress against superstition and religion are really living in a fantasy world. Science is an ever-evolving investigation that resists final claims of certitude, and its halls are filled with materials that are biased and manipulated. Here are a few filters to keep in mind anytime we read what “the science” says.

• Research has to be funded. The people paying the money usually want results favorable to their cause.

  
  

• Boring papers don’t get published. If 10 studies are done, and 9 turn up nothing, but the last one hints at some possible correlations (especially if they might be controversial), the 10th one is the only one that gets published. And remember, to keep their jobs and salaries, scientific researchers need to publish. They are inclined towards what will keep them employed, not merely what is true.

  
  

• Peer reviews are essential to gatekeeping and validating studies. However, the people doing the reviews are often senior researchers who also want to keep their jobs and salaries. That means that someone with a fossilized bias is going to be predisposed to reject alternate findings from their peers. Max Planck famously said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” This is often paraphrased, “Science advances one funeral at a time.” Thomas Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions essentially says the same thing. Peer review doesn’t eliminate bias; it institutionalizes it.

  
  

Religious scientists are better at their jobs

Christian ethics proposes a remedy to this: the classic virtue of humility. Intellectual humility requires one to admit when one is wrong, to be open to alternative views, and to be willing to change one’s mind when truth demands it. A Christian scientist is, at the end of the day, just going to be a better scientist than another.

This is because empirical science presumes morality; it cannot establish morality. Morality comes before good science, not vice versa.

Science has always relied on moral scientists, even while pretending it does not need morality at all. Honesty in reporting data, courage in publishing unwelcome results, and humility in the face of contradictory evidence are not scientific discoveries; they are moral virtues science quietly borrows and then forgets to credit.

And right now, the scientific community is struggling with the reality that the evidence points towards an intelligent designer.

Christianity, in particular, has historically produced scientists who understood their work as an act of faithfulness rather than self-assertion. Galileo pursued the intelligibility of the cosmos because he believed it reflected a rational Creator. Isaac Newton saw his laws not as replacements for God but as descriptions of divine order. Gregor Mendel’s genetics emerged from the patient discipline of a monastery, not the hunger for prestige.

Michael Faraday’s experimental rigor flowed from a theology that prized truth over status. And in our own time, Francis Collins has spoken openly about how his Christian faith compelled intellectual honesty rather than obstructed it. These figures were not good scientists despite their beliefs; they were good scientists because their beliefs trained them in virtues science itself cannot generate.

Science presumes morality at every step, requiring truthfulness, restraint, and responsibility, while lacking the resources to justify why any of those virtues should matter at all. Christianity doesn’t compete with science; it supplies the moral soil in which good science actually grows.

The most dangerous scientist is not the religious one. It’s the one who believes his work is morally self-justifying.

Conclusion: The moral blind spot

Science is extraordinary at describing the world, but it is silent about why truth should matter more than power, why people should matter more than progress, or why some lines should never be crossed even if they can be. Those judgments cannot be cooked up in the laboratory. The real conflict, then, is not between science and religion, but between science that acknowledges moral limits and science that imagines itself morally self-authorizing. History has already shown us which of those two becomes dangerous. If science is going to guide the future, it will need more than better instruments. It will need better, and specifically religious, people.

© James W. Miller

First published in Faith Seeking Wonder