Q: Does Belief in God the Creator Require Rejecting Science?

Theology ought not attempt to fit itself within the story of reality told by science

11. Does Belief in God the Creator Require Rejecting Science?

Only if you mistake what Christians mean by the word “Creator.”

Theology and Science name different answers to two different questions:

• Science aims to answer the question, “Why is the universe the way that it is?”

• Theology, on the other hand, seeks to answer the question, “Why is there creation  at all? That is, why is there something instead of nothing?”

This last question is not a question that can be answered from within the bounds of the material universe and so it is a question necessarily beyond science’s explanatory power. Thus, science, rightly understood, can never shed itself of theology.

God is theology’s answer to the question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”

Theology and science are thus two different discourses, and the latter is beneficial to the former because it “complicates us open.” For example, a Copernican understanding of the universe complicates our construal of Christ’s ascension and even the nature of heaven.

While belief in God as Creator does not require the rejection of science, theology and science are two distinct discourses that will narrate created reality in different, sometimes conflictual, ways.

The doctrine of creation, for instance, rules out two false images of created reality: mechanism and cosmos.