The history of science and Christianity is not a story of constant warfare, and many founders of modern science were themselves believers.

A common objection says science has explained away the need for God and that religion has always fought science. The historical record does not support the warfare picture. The idea of perpetual conflict traces to two late nineteenth century writers, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, and historians of science now widely reject their thesis as one-sided. Many builders of modern science, including Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, were Christians who saw their work as studying God’s creation. Honest limit: this does not by itself prove God, and there were real disputes, with the Galileo affair the usual example, though its details are more tangled than the popular story. The point here is narrow. The claim that science and Christian faith are natural enemies is a cultural story, not a finding of history. The deeper reply to “science explains everything” is that science describes how the physical world works, while the questions of why there is a world at all, and why it is orderly and understandable, sit outside the reach of experiment.