Doesn't Science Contradict the Bible?

A short answer to a longer question, and what to do with the longer question.

The short answer is: no, but it depends what you mean by both science and the Bible.

The longer answer is what most of the rest of this site is for. Let me try to put the shape of it on one page.

What “science contradicts the Bible” usually means

When people say this, they almost always mean one of three things:

The Bible says the earth is 6,000 years old, and science says it’s 4.5 billion.
The Bible says the universe was created in six days, and science says it took 13.8 billion years.
Evolution disproves Genesis.

These are all real conversations to have. None of them, in my view, amounts to science has refuted Christianity. Let me explain why.

On the age of the universe and the earth

I am a young-earth creationist. I take that position not because I came to the Bible first and then closed my eyes to the data, but because — after looking honestly at the data we can actually measure today — I think the young-earth reading fits it better than the alternative. The evidence for a young earth section makes the empirical case in detail, with citations to the relevant papers in mainstream journals. The short version:

The moon is receding from earth at a measured rate that, run backward, will not stretch to 4.5 billion years.
The oceans are accumulating sodium at a measured rate whose upper bound for the oceans’ age is tens of millions of years, not billions.
Dinosaur bones contain soft tissue and intact collagen protein that, according to standard biochemistry, cannot survive longer than a few million years under any condition. The fossils are said to be sixty-five million years old.
Coal and diamonds contain measurable carbon-14, which has a half-life of 5,730 years and should be undetectable in anything older than about a hundred thousand years.
Comets lose mass on every perihelion pass and have lifetimes on the order of \(10^5\) years; after 4.6 billion the inner solar system should be empty of them. The proposed reservoir supplying long-period comets (the Oort cloud) has been searched for and not observed.

Each of these is a measurement (or, in the last case, a conspicuous non-measurement) made today by mainstream science. The young-earth reading is the simpler explanation of all five. The deep-time reading requires either invoking unknown mechanisms (preservation in the case of collagen, generation in the case of C-14), changing the rates by orders of magnitude (in the case of the moon and the salt), or positing an unobserved reservoir (in the case of the comets) — or some combination.

I want to be clear that this is not the consensus position in contemporary academic science, and I take the consensus seriously. But the consensus, in this case, rests on assumptions about unobserved past rates and unobserved initial conditions, and when the assumptions are examined honestly, they look more like prior commitments than empirical conclusions. The empirical data points in the other direction.

The Christian tradition is also not monolithic on this — Augustine in the fifth century read Genesis 1 figuratively, and many contemporary Christians are old-earth creationists or theistic evolutionists in good faith. I think they are wrong on the empirical question, but I do not think they are bad Christians. The age of the earth is not the centre of the Christian message. The cross and the resurrection are.

On Genesis 1 specifically

I take Genesis 1 as straightforward historical narrative — six literal days, in the sequence given, with the genealogies that follow giving a chronology of thousands rather than billions of years. The Hebrew word for “day” (yôm) used with a number and “evening and morning” everywhere else in the Old Testament means a normal twenty-four-hour day; there is no internal-to-the-text reason to read Genesis 1 differently.

I am aware of the figurative readings — the framework hypothesis, the day-age view, John Walton’s “functional cosmology” — and I have read the careful versions of each. They have one feature in common: each was developed after deep time became orthodox in geology, as a way to reconcile Genesis with a chronology the text itself does not suggest. That is, in my reading, the wrong way round. The text is what it is. The data is what it is. The two fit comfortably together once you let both speak for themselves.

The literary structure of Genesis 1 is striking — three days of forming (light, sky/sea, land/plants) matched to three days of filling (sun and moon, fish and birds, animals and humans) — and I take that as a piece of artistry by the author, not as evidence that the chronology is non-literal. The same author wrote Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, which give a chronological genealogy from Adam to Abraham. The genealogies do not read as figurative.

There is a tradition of careful biblical scholarship that reads Genesis 1 as an ancient near-Eastern cosmology with a profoundly theological purpose: to declare that the one God, not the many gods of Israel’s neighbours, made and orders everything. That theology is real and important; I do not think it competes with the historical reading. Both/and, not either/or.

What I most want to say about Genesis 1 is this: it was given to ancient people in ancient language, but it was given as true, in every sense — theologically, historically, chronologically. The ancient author did not have to choose between teaching the theology of monotheism and getting the chronology right. He did both. One God, not many; made on purpose, not by accident; you and I made in his image, not as accidents — and he made it in six days, a few thousand years ago. All of those go together.

On evolution

Evolution is the third claim and the one that has done the most cultural damage to the church’s confidence in Genesis. I think the damage was unnecessary.

The fact of common descent — that all life on earth shares one ancestral history — is the claim of evolutionary biology, not the finding. The finding is that organisms share genetic sequences and physiological features. The standard interpretation of this finding is common ancestry from a single primitive cell. An alternative interpretation, equally consistent with the same genetic and morphological data, is common design — that a single Designer used overlapping toolkits across many created kinds, just as a single human engineer would reuse parts across a product line.

The mechanism of random mutation plus natural selection is well-documented to do real work on a small scale — antibiotic resistance in bacteria, variation within breeds — and the serious young-earth literature does not dispute this. What it does dispute is the extrapolation: that the small-scale mechanism, given enough time, can build up the large-scale diversity of body plans we see in the fossil record. Where I am less convinced, and where I think the honest scientific picture is also less convinced than the public picture suggests, is in the claim that random mutation and natural selection can account, by themselves, for the information in the cell (information in the cell) and for the major transitions in the history of life.

There is, in short, real scientific debate here. The popular picture of evolution explains everything is, in my reading, a confidence that goes beyond the actual state of the science.

A Christian can hold a range of positions on evolution — from young-earth creationism through old-earth creationism through intelligent design through theistic evolution — and remain a serious Christian. What no Christian should do is be intimidated into thinking the science has settled the question against God. It hasn’t. I hold the young-earth creationist position myself, for the empirical reasons laid out in the evidence for a young earth section.

What I would say briefly

If you came in with the worry that science has disproved Christianity, my short answer is:

Science is the careful study of the world God made. There is no reason in principle to expect it to contradict the truth about that world.
Many of the actual scientific results of the last hundred years — the fine-tuning of the constants, the information-rich structure of the cell, the soft tissue in dinosaur bones, the carbon-14 in diamonds, the persistence of comets in a solar system that should have lost them — fit the biblical picture better than they fit the alternatives, when read without the deep-time prior.
The places where there appears to be tension are usually places where a particular interpretation of the Bible is in tension with a particular interpretation of the science. Both interpretations deserve scrutiny.

For the longer cases: origins is the section, and evidence for a young earth within it is the empirical heart of the case.