Science works. This is not a small thing. The germ theory of disease, the structure of DNA, the age of the universe, the mechanism of evolution, the behaviour of subatomic particles — these are genuine achievements of human inquiry, established through a rigorous method of hypothesis, experimentation, and revision in response to evidence. Anyone who dismisses the authority of science on questions within its domain is making an error.
The question is not whether science works. It is whether science is all there is — whether every genuine question is, in principle, a scientific question, and whether questions that science cannot answer are therefore not genuine questions.
That position — scientism — is held explicitly by some and implicitly by many more. It is also, on examination, incoherent.
The self-refutation of scientism
Scientism is the claim that only empirically testable claims are meaningful or capable of being known. But this claim is not itself empirically testable. You cannot design an experiment to test whether “only empirically testable claims are meaningful.” The claim belongs to philosophy, not science. It is a metaphysical position about the nature and limits of knowledge — exactly the kind of position it declares to be meaningless.
This is not a trivial objection. It is a structural one. Scientism undermines itself before it gets started. It is not a position that can be defended using the methods it endorses.
Questions science does not answer
Even setting aside the self-refutation, there is an obvious practical problem: many of the most important questions human beings face are not scientific questions. Why does the universe exist? What makes an action genuinely right or wrong? Is the external world real or a representation in a mind? What is it for a mathematical proof to be valid? Is there meaning in conscious experience beyond what physical processes produce?
These are not questions science has failed to answer yet. They are questions of a different kind — philosophical, logical, metaphysical — that the empirical method was not designed to address. Science investigates the physical world by gathering data about it. Questions about the ground of the physical world, the basis of logic, the nature of consciousness, and the reality of moral facts are prior to the scientific enterprise, not within it.
What this means for the God question
The claim “science has disproved God” is therefore a category error. Science can provide evidence relevant to the God question — the Big Bang points toward a beginning, fine-tuning raises questions about design, the existence of consciousness raises questions about the reducibility of mind to matter. Science contributes to the inquiry. But it cannot resolve it, because the God question is at its core a metaphysical question: is there a transcendent ground of reality? That question is asked at a level prior to empirical investigation, and it must be answered — or left unanswered — through philosophical rather than experimental means.
The person who says “I only believe what science tells me” is not being scientific. They are making a philosophical commitment that goes beyond what science itself can establish. And if they are willing to make philosophical commitments, then the philosophical arguments for God’s existence deserve the same hearing as any other serious philosophical inquiry.
Faith and science: the actual relationship
The great theistic traditions have no stake in the failure of science. The tradition of serious rational inquiry — which across many centuries and civilisations has been inseparable from religious scholarship — is not a tradition threatened by honest empirical investigation. The conflict is not between faith and science. It is between faith and scientism — the philosophical position that science has replaced all other modes of knowing. That position is refuted by reason before religion gets a word in. Science is a method. What it cannot do is validate the philosophical claim that it is the only valid method — that claim exceeds what any experiment can establish.