Two Pictures of a Human Being
Imagine two drawings of a human being. One is a portrait — a man sitting in a chair, reading a book, his expression captured by the artist. The other is an anatomical diagram from a medical textbook, a detailed map of arteries, organs, and glands. Both depict the same subject, yet comparing them feels almost absurd. They serve entirely different purposes. You would never criticise the portrait for failing to show the respiratory system, nor the anatomical drawing for lacking the colour of the man’s hair.
This simple illustration opens up one of the most important conversations any thoughtful person can have: how does the book of Genesis relate to modern science? It is a question that touches nearly all of us, especially in a culture that often treats science as the ultimate — even the only — source of truth.
When Science Becomes an Idol
We live in an age that doesn’t just respect science — it idolises it. People place their faith in it, trust it implicitly, and give it a reverence that really belongs only to God. Many believe that if science advances far enough, it will eventually solve every human problem: feeding the world, curing every disease, perhaps even conquering death itself. People are already having their bodies cryogenically frozen in hopes of being revived by future medical breakthroughs.
When a vague, unspecified group called “scientists” claims to have proved something, it becomes an article of faith demanding unquestioning acceptance. And one of the most common articles of that faith is the claim that science has disproved the Bible. The average person on the street would be genuinely surprised to hear Christians strongly disagree. As Paul writes in Romans 1:18–32, humanity has an ancient tendency to exchange the truth of God for a lie, worshipping created things rather than the Creator.
Different Questions, Different Purposes
The first thing to understand is that Genesis and science are concerned with fundamentally different issues. Like those two drawings, they serve different purposes.
Genesis answers questions like: Who created the universe? Why does anything exist rather than nothing? How does the Creator want His creatures to live? Where does life come from? What went wrong with the world?
Science answers questions like: What is the universe like? How does it work? What laws govern natural processes?
The subject of the Bible is God — a transcendent Creator who cannot be placed under a microscope or repeated in a laboratory experiment. There were no human observers at the moment of creation. Any conclusions scientists draw about the ultimate origin of the universe are, by definition, beyond what empirical science can prove. Genesis addresses the questions that no amount of scientific theorising or experimentation can ever answer.
This means we shouldn’t pit Genesis and science against each other. They are complementary, not competing. If you want to know why human beings exist, only Scripture can tell you. If you want to know the mechanics of why things fall when you drop them, you need physics. Going back to our illustration: the portrait tells you what a person looks like; the anatomy diagram tells you how the respiratory system works. Both are valid — and both accomplish their purpose perfectly well.
Written for Everyone
There’s another dimension to this difference. Genesis is addressed to every human being — every culture, every age, educated and uneducated, literate and illiterate. As someone once said, the Bible is a pool in which a child may wade and an elephant may swim. There are unfathomable depths, but on the whole, it is a book accessible to everyone.
What practical use would a scientific textbook have been if that was what God had given us in Genesis? A book written in technical, abstract language describing the physics, chemistry, and engineering behind creating a universe from nothing — how many people in the last three thousand years could have understood such a thing? Even today, with all our advances, the vast majority of the universe remains a mystery. Scientists are only now beginning to explore phenomena like dark matter, which may explain enormous swathes of reality that remain sealed to us.
God gave us a book that everyone can read and understand. Anybody who dismisses Genesis because it isn’t a scientific textbook has simply misunderstood who it’s for and what it’s for.
No Final Conflict
Having established that Genesis and science are different, the next question is whether they contradict. The answer is clear: there is no final conflict between the Bible and science — at any point.
The word “final” is important. It means that when all the facts are in — when we properly understand both Scripture and science — we will see there is no contradiction. However, on this side of heaven, our understanding is imperfect in both directions. Our reading of the Bible can be flawed, and our interpretation of scientific data can be equally mistaken. That is why, at times, it may seem as though they disagree. Faith calls us to trust that God cannot contradict Himself. He is both the author of the Bible and the Creator of the physical universe.
So when an apparent contradiction appears, it is either because we have misread the Bible or we have misread the science.
When We Misread the Bible
Before Copernicus and Galileo, many people believed the sun revolved around the earth — partly because the Bible speaks of the sun “rising” and “setting.” When the heliocentric model emerged, it seemed like science was contradicting Scripture. But there was no real conflict: people had misinterpreted poetic, observational language as a cosmological statement. A physicist is not denying his own field when he calls his wife to admire a beautiful sunset.
Another example: in the seventeenth century, Archbishop James Ussher carefully added up the genealogies in Scripture and calculated that creation occurred in 4004 BC — even pinpointing the night before 23 October. His date was widely accepted until the nineteenth century, when carbon dating and other methods suggested a much older earth. Was this a conflict? No — Ussher had made assumptions about the genealogies that the text doesn’t actually support. He assumed there were no gaps in the genealogical record and that “father of” always meant immediate biological parent, whereas in Hebrew the term can mean simply “ancestor of.”
Many apparent conflicts between science and Scripture dissolve once we read the Bible more carefully. The earlier sermons in the Can We Trust the Bible? series explore this principle in greater depth.
When We Misread the Science
But misreadings go both ways. Consider starlight. The most distant star currently located — Earendel, discovered by the Hubble telescope — is roughly 28 billion light-years from Earth. Scientists argue that because its light has taken that long to reach us, the universe must be at least that old. But this reasoning makes assumptions that are far from proven. It assumes that when God created the stars, their light had not yet begun its journey — that the light stream didn’t already stretch from star to Earth at the moment of creation.
There is no difficulty with a God who creates a universe bearing the appearance of age. Adam, two minutes after creation, didn’t look like a newborn baby — he was a fully grown man. The trees in Eden weren’t seedlings; they were mature, fruit-bearing oaks. And when Jesus performed miracles, the water He turned into wine was indistinguishable from a fine vintage — the master of the banquet even complimented it — yet it was only minutes old.
Then there is the geological doctrine of uniformitarianism, promoted by the nineteenth-century geologist Charles Lyell. This is the assumption that geological processes have always occurred at the same slow rate we observe today — “the present is the key to the past.” Under this model, features like the Grand Canyon must have been carved by a tiny stream over millions of years. But this is not the only explanation. What about a lot of water and a little bit of time? A catastrophic global flood, as described in Genesis, could reshape the world’s topography dramatically in a short period. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens demonstrated exactly this: canyons were cut into solid rock within hours. Uniformitarianism is not a proven law — it is an assumption, and one that has been observationally challenged.
Science as God’s Gift
Christians do not need to be afraid of science. We need both Scripture and science. Scientists are really doing no more than thinking God’s thoughts after Him — investigating and exploring God’s creation. No genuine scientific discovery will ever undermine the true interpretation of the Bible. True science is the ally of the Christian, not the enemy.
In fact, science is one of God’s great gifts to humanity. In Genesis 1:28, God blessed Adam and Eve and said: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” That command to “subdue” the earth is, in essence, a mandate to explore it, understand it, and steward it — the very heart of scientific enquiry. Some of the greatest scientists in history have been Christians: Isaac Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Faraday, and many others.
The tragedy is that, as with so many of God’s good gifts, humanity has twisted science into something it was never meant to be — an idol. When used according to God’s Word, science is a means of bringing great blessing. But when people exchange the truth of God for a lie and worship the creation rather than the Creator, even the best tools become instruments of confusion.
The portrait and the anatomy diagram each tell us something essential about what it means to be human. Neither replaces the other. In the same way, Genesis and science each illuminate reality from a different angle — and when we hold them together with humble, faithful eyes, we see more clearly than ever the wisdom and power of the God who made all things.
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