Science and the Bible: God’s Truth in Creation and Scripture

Science and the Bible: Understanding Truth Through the Ages

The Bible is the divine Word of God, but I think we are justified in believing that God expected every generation to interpret the Word according to the age in which they live. Those who dispute this put a major limitation on the workings of God, as well as on us, the pinnacle of his creation, by implying that God assumed there would be no human progress with time, and that what rang true for us thousands of years ago would still ring true today. This is especially true for the nature of what we think of as “scientific truth.” I see no contradictions between the holy, divine-inspired words of the Bible and what we have learned from scientific investigations into the nature of the universe and life on earth. One reason for this is the ever-changing nature of scientific knowledge.

Understanding Science and the Bible

There is not a great deal of actual science in the Bible, and what there is seems to most modern people to be just plain wrong. Of course, it would be miraculous if the Bible writers had accurately portrayed the geology and geography of the earth or had understood the genetic and cellular basis of life. But isn’t it reasonable to assume that such a miracle could have (should have) been accomplished by an all-powerful God?

Why Jesus Didn’t Teach Scientific Facts

I have often been asked why God didn’t correct the scientific “errors” in Scripture as time went on. After all, God came to earth to live, teach, and work among us, and Jesus could have explained the truth of cosmology and biology to his disciples. And yet in all the New Testament, there is hardly a single word from Jesus, any of his disciples, or Paul in his many letters containing any scientific content. It is worth thinking about why that is—why Jesus quoted Scripture often in the Gospels but didn’t seem interested in scientific truth.

What are we to think about this? Did God mean for us to remain scientifically ignorant and for people in the twenty-first century to follow the four-thousand-year-old “science” of ancient days, no matter how out of date it is? Clearly not. Even (most) biblical literalists know that the earth is not flat (as some poetic passages could be read to suggest) and there is no solid “firmament” in the sky.

Why Jesus Didn’t Teach Science Directly

The answer lies not with God but with us. When we talk about scientific truth, we need to ask ourselves which scientific truth we mean. If Jesus had decided to teach science to his followers, what science would he have taught them? The science of his day? That wouldn’t have been such a great improvement over the Old Testament version. Should he have said, “Let me explain the way the natural world works” and then described quantum theory, the Big Bang and galactic expansion, the periodic table, the genetic code, and so on? In other words, modern science—the science of 2025?

But why should he have chosen 2025 rather than, say, 1875? People living in 1875 also thought their knowledge about the natural world was the ultimate scientific truth, but at that time there was no quantum theory, no genetic code, and the chemistry and astronomy they knew would not be quite right either, from our point of view. Of course, had he chosen the science of 1500, it would have been even less developed.

The Limits of Scientific Knowledge Through Time

In other words, consider that it just might be possible—in fact, it is rather likely—that 2025 science is not as correct as the science of 2050 or 2500 will be. I think we can be sure that the “correct” science will change because it always has before. The science of today will very likely be seen as containing many errors by our descendants in the coming centuries.

Why God Didn’t Give Us Future Science

The question of which science God “should have” instructed his scribes to put to paper is not one we can answer. It’s something God knows because he is God, and he alone knows the final truth of how the universe and everything in it works. He created it all. If back in Jesus’ day, or even today, he had made it known somehow that in fact the trunoligous wave particle controls all photonic collindations from dark matter into Bulisinski energetics, or that mega-crypto-nucleotide repeats regulate transmembrane activation of bridging peptides for epigenetic reversal of Stettmeyer fibrules, which of us would even understand his use of this common scientific parlance from the twenty-second century? (All of which I just invented, so please don’t bother looking it up!) My point is that whatever future science will say, we wouldn’t understand it if we read it in Scripture any more than Jesus’ first-century audience would have.

Understanding the Limits of Divine Scientific Revelation

It isn’t God’s will to tell us the science of how the world works. It’s up to us to figure that out. We have his Word that tells us how we should live, how to love our neighbors, whom to worship, and how to be the best humans we can be. And we have his creation—his book of works—to learn about the natural world.

How Science and the Bible Reveal God’s Creation

During the period that I was wavering between agnosticism and faith, I came across this famous verse: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). It struck me that Paul was telling us that nature (“what has been made”) reveals the reality of God’s existence and qualities. My first thought was of the creation of the universe (“the world”), but I was a full-fledged biologist, and I realized that the world of life is also “what has been made” and that perhaps I was indeed without excuse.

As a scientist, I am drawn to the notion of digging as deeply as possible into how everything happened, but I also know that using our science of today, we can only go so far, and at some point, the only way forward is to stop and pray our thanks for this wonderful world we were given and for the gift of love that surpasses all understanding.

Adapted from Beyond Evolution: How New Discoveries in the Science of Life Point to God by Sy Garte, PhD, releasing in August 2025.

About the Author

Seymour “Sy” Garte, PhD (in biochemistry), is the author of the award-winning book The Works of His Hands: A Scientist’s Journey from Atheism to Faith (Kregel, 2019) and Science and Faith in Harmony: Contemplations on a Distilled Doxology (Kregel, 2024).

He has been a tenured professor at New York University, Rutgers University, and the University of Pittsburgh; division director at the Center for Scientific Review of the National Institutes of Health; and interim vice president for research at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

He has published more than two hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers and monographs and four books, as well as articles on science and Christian faith in periodicals such as Christianity Today, Premier Christianity, and Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith. He has also appeared on numerous podcasts and YouTube channels, with more than four million views. His most recent book, Beyond Evolution, will release in August 2025 from Tyndale House Publishers.

Currently, Dr. Garte serves as editor-in-chief of the American Scientific Affiliation’s (ASA) online quarterly magazine, God and Nature, and also as vice president for the Washington, DC, metro chapter of the ASA. He also served as a member of the board of advisors of the John Templeton Foundation. Dr. Garte converted to Christianity from an atheist family background, and he is now a certified lay servant in the United Methodist Church in Rockville, Maryland.