Science and the Bible: A Relationship Revisited

Bruse Atkinson, PhD

January 20, 2024

This essay is an extended and updated version of an article
I wrote for VirtueOnline in 2012, entitled “On the Bible and Science:
Preliminary Principles Associated with God’s Revelatory Purposes.”

It is a horrendously false idea that the Christian faith and
empirical science are enemies, that these fields can never come to agreement.
While God has directly inspired and authorized the scriptures according to His
divine purposes (Isaiah 55:8-11, 2 Timothy 3:14-17), we have to admit that He
is also on the side of science. He supports (and has actually established) the
real purpose of science among humans, that is, the search for truth. However,
we can be sure that God is not for that ‘science’ which is done without
integrity. He is not for research done for political purposes and which bends
both the methods of fact-finding and the interpretation of the results so that
that they support whatever the researcher wants to publicly promote. As an
individual who had my dissertation research published in a scientific journal,
I know how easy it is to falsify data. I could have easily done so and no one
would have known the difference.

Fortunately, both deliberate manipulation of data and
ignorant errors must eventually fall to the wayside, for all misinformation is
short term. The truth will show itself again and again, and ultimately it
cannot be covered up. This is why I believe that the evidence revealed from our
scientific study of nature and scriptural truth (special revelation more
directly from God) will eventually come together and be of one piece, a
wonderful tapestry without contradiction or interpretive conflict. But yes, we
still have a long way to go.