Why Were Science and God Separated?

No. 98

In last week’s article, “Science Confirms Belief In God,” I wrote on how science fosters a belief in God, not a disbelief in God as I previously thought. I wrote on how the science rabbit holes I go down these days, some of which I included in the article, lead me to God, not away from the Almighty. As I wrote the article, however, I began to question why this was the case now when for most of my life, science was presented to be in direct opposition to God. How did it get this way? How did the lies of confrontation rather than support first surface and become embraced, and then entrenched in much of society around the world?

As I started to think more about this, I remembered an earlier article I wrote about “Methodological Naturalism.” I was surprised I’d never heard of this philosophical doctrine prior to reading Stephen C. Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt. This codified principle began its insurgence after the publishing of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in the late nineteenth century. The idea of the doctrine held that for a study of the world to qualify as “scientific,” it could not refer to God’s creative activity or any sort of divine activity including metaphysical or supernatural. To use Meyer’s words, the natural world had to “be explained by material causes without recourse to purposive intelligence, mind, or conscious agency” (Darwin’s Doubt, Page 19). In short, if you couldn’t see it, you were restricted from proving it with science.