The relationship between Christianity and Science has been a rocky one, to say the least, as evidenced by historical resistance of the Church to scientific change, particularly the move to a non-geocentric view of the universe in the 16th century, then to an evolutionary view in the 19th – to the extent that particular groups of Christian scientists in the present day – ISCAST in Australia[1], for example – feel an urgent need to try to rehabilitate the relationship. But this essay is about the Gospel and Science, and my contention will be that, far from being in need of rehabilitation, the relationship is in excellent shape – that, in fact, modern science’s historical breaking free of the old human-centred, geocentric, creationist view of the world is actually driven by the Gospel, is an amazing fruit of it.
You can see, therefore, an essential distinction I wish to draw from the outset between the Gospel and Christianity – between, on one hand, the “good news of the Kingdom” proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth, and, on the other, the new social movement started up by Jesus’ early followers, which morphed over time into the mighty religious institution we know today as the Christian Church. That’s the first thing I’ll attempt to convince you of in what follows; then hot on its heels will be an account of the direct, generative relationship between the Gospel and Science.
So, to the Gospel versus Christianity – if I may put it that way. Firstly, when you read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, taking them on face value and setting aside any preconceptions you might have – not an easy thing to do, I would hazard! – you would be hard pressed to conclude that his intention was to found a new religion. The weight of evidence seems to be to the contrary, in fact, that Jesus’ intention was to put a sword to religion, all religion. On one hand, Jesus was unstinting in his criticism of the religious leaders of his day, the Scribes and Pharisees and their associates, in his rejection of their legalistic attitude, with all the burdens they placed on the people. On the other hand, Jesus’ teaching generally, mostly through parables but sometimes directly, seems to be focussed on disrupting the people’s traditional religious thinking, particularly traditional religious understandings of God.
The famous Parable of the Prodigal Son is a perfect case in point – although it would be more accurate to call it the “Parable of the Prodigal Father”, because the focus is very much on the prodigality of the father in the story, his joy and lavish generosity when the son whom he thought was lost returns – the father as a figure of the new understanding of God that Jesus is intent on presenting through the story. This is the surprise packet punch of the parable in fact: instead of judging his profligate son and punishing him for his waywardness, as the God of the Scribes and Pharisees would certainly have done, Jesus confounds his audience’s preconceptions and expectations by presenting a father/God who prodigally dispenses grace, not judgement. The contrast is provided by the elder son in the story – aka the Scribes and Pharisees and the old understanding of God they represent – who, however, despite his judgmental attitude, is treated to the same lavish grace: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours”, with a loving encouragement to join in the celebration of his younger brother’s return.
“Divine parent”, we should say, rather than “father/God”, because the God Jesus presents here sits in contrast also to your average human father, who would not have handed over the inheritance to his younger son in the first place without attaching all sorts of strings to it, and who would, as a matter of course, have made his son grovel when he returned, as he (the younger son in the story) actually anticipates and prepares to do. The judgmental God the people knew, that their religion had taught them about since time immemorial, was not a divine parent, however, but an omnipotent creator.
Omnipotent creator? When you google “the doctrine of creation”, the AI overview will tell you some variation of the following:
The doctrine of creation, a core tenet of many religions, particularly Christianity, asserts that God, the sole uncreated and eternal being, created the universe and everything within it, including humanity, from nothing (creatio ex nihilo). [7/4/25]
“Particularly Christianity”, which gleaned it directly from the Old Testament, rather than from anything Jesus had to say about God. For Jesus, God was always “my father”, never “omnipotent creator God”. That old God, common to many or most religions, as Google AI attests, did allegedly have some of the qualities of the God Jesus presents, most importantly love for the world they had created, but it was a love with conditions, and if humans ever dared put a foot out of line and disobey them, this love turned quickly to judgment, anger and punishment. Here’s a typical scenario, from Judges Chapter 4:1-2:
Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, now that Ehud was dead. So the Lord sold them into the hands of Jabin king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor.
“Sold them” to an enemy king?! – what a thing for a loving God to do! The Old Testament is replete with examples of such behaviour, and in fact judgement and punishment are constants in the biblical narrative, part of the creator God’s intrinsic nature, right from the beginning, in the Garden with our primordial human parents, Adam and Eve, the story we know so well.
The real problem is that the idea of God as creator radically understates and distorts the true relationship between God and the world. When you or I create something – a house, or an essay, or a beautiful meal – we might cherish it initially, but we’re just as likely to judge it and discard it if it doesn’t do what we want it to do for us. But with the children we give birth to it’s a different kettle of fish altogether. Our children frequently don’t do what we want them to do, in fact, but because we love them without conditions, we never just judge them and discard them – unless we’re the worst sort of parents, of course – rather we behave towards them in just the way Jesus describes the father/God doing in the Parable of the Prodigal Father.
“That’s not God; this is God” – Jesus is always saying to us – the unconditionally loving divine parent who dispenses grace, in spades, never judgement. It’s not that a sort of natural judgment doesn’t occur in the world – the younger son in the parable in question reaps the inevitable consequences of his prodigality when he blows all his money and winds up on skid row feeding pigs, for example – or that our natural human desire for judgment, for bad people not to get away with doing bad things, isn’t actually a good thing and something we should pursue ourselves by developing just systems of law and order. Rather, it’s just that the divine parent, as Jesus presents them, is not the ultimate judge of the world who directly intervenes in human affairs from time to time to impose judgment – as much as we’d often like them to!
Yes, it’s hard to let go of our natural human desire for a God who judges, and when the apostle Paul, some years after the time of Jesus, sets his mind to coming up with a detailed understanding of what the whole Jesus thing was about, and in doing so establish a common set of doctrines and practices to bring some order and organization to the new social movement that had sprung up in Jesus’ wake, this is the God he returns to. Drawing on the two traditions he had been schooled in, the Jewish and the Greek, Paul effectively turns the teachings and life story of Jesus into a new religion which over time becomes what we know now as Christianity. The God of Christianity, as elaborated, initially, almost entirely by Paul, is a syncretic hybrid of Jesus’ divine parent and the omnipotent creator of the Hebrew Old Testament, all set in a Hellenistic, dualistic universe of perfect heavens above and fallen earth below. It was a mighty effort by the great apostle – the Pauline “synthesis” – and had a significant influence over the writing of the four Gospels, which all post-dated Paul’s writings, so that even Jesus himself is recorded as saying things which seem to support the idea of the old judgmental creator God, particularly as he heads towards Jerusalem and the Cross – the long monologue recorded in Matthew 24-25 is a notable example – in apparent contradiction with his teachings about the Kingdom and many of his parables, especially the famous one we’ve been discussing in this essay.
Perhaps the clearest example of Paul’s syncretic idea of God appears in the book of Romans. Paul is known as the “Apostle of Grace”, but the starting point for his theology is judgement, and you couldn’t get a more dramatic and detailed account of the old judgmental God in action than in Romans 1:18-3:19. It is a withering denunciation of human sinfulness, closely followed by a ringing endorsement of God’s righteous judgment of it. Only after this, and on the basis of it, do we get the story of salvation, mercy and grace. No longer the amazing spirit-filled teacher and preacher who comes to inaugurate a kingdom of divine love on earth, Jesus is now the Christ, the Saviour, the divine incarnation of God who dies on the Cross as a sacrifice to appease God about humanity’s incorrigible sinfulness. The grace formula Paul constructs always starts with God’s judgement of us, but then God shows mercy to us by putting all the punishment we rightfully deserve on Jesus instead, letting us get off, so to speak, scot-free. This is a mercy we absolutely don’t deserve, unmerited favour we call “grace”.
So, God, according to Pauline theology, is the righteous divine creator who judges first, grace-dispensing divine parent second. It is just this confused idea of God that Science bumps into, however, when it begins to break free of the old human-centred, geocentric view of the world in the 16th century. The Copernican Revolution, so-called, the beginning of the Scientific Revolution (also so-called), is not so much about replacing an old theoretical model of the universe with a new one, as about finally, please, please, please, letting the observed evidence, in this case of the orbits of the planets, speak for itself. Essentially the same collision then recurs in the 19th century when Darwin unveils all the amazing evidence he has garnered for the gradual evolution of species, stacked up against the old idea of the fixity of species, each one a special creation by the old creator God.
Humans no longer centre of a divinely created universe; rather evidence – from observation, experiment, measurement – at the centre, speaking for itself, calling the shots: this is the real driver, the true genius, of the Scientific Revolution. Make your theory fit for the evidence a posteriori, don’t manipulate the evidence till it fits your a priori theory – but institutional Christianity, the Church, now more than a millennium and a half after the time of Jesus, opposed all this at key points, and, yes, it is wonderful that groups like ISCAST now are trying to make up for all that. Conversely, however, does not this breaking free from old religiously conceived and sanctioned ideas of the world not now start to sound suspiciously like the sort of move the Gospel, as opposed to the Christianity in which it became embedded, might inspire or even initiate?
We’ve now shifted our attention to the second part of my thesis in this essay, the intimate, generative relationship between the Gospel and Science. The first thing we’d better get clear on, then, is exactly what the Gospel is. This is straight out of the teachings of Jesus, and we’ve already seen the opposition between the God Jesus presents and the God of the religious leaders of the day in the familiar Parable of the Prodigal Father. The key quality of Jesus’ God, the divine parent, is, as we’ve seen, unconditional love of their offspring (us, the universe), in contrast to the conditional love and judgment of the old creator God of historical religion. Loving unconditionally, selflessness, selfless love – is this not the precise centre of Jesus’ teachings? All the sayings, parables, stories, even the withering attacks on the Scribes and Pharisees? A new way of living, letting go of the old, natural self-centred way of life, and embracing, through faith in Jesus, a new selfless way, living for and serving others. And is this not precisely what the Kingdom is – the very thing that Jesus came to inaugurate, that the Gospel is good news of – an objective state of human relationships in the world, growing now all around us, based on selfless love and cooperation?
Letting go of self-centredness, of our old, natural way of thinking about life and the world. Thinking that we are the centre of the universe, special creations of an omnipotent creator – a God who, in the end, is more fabricated by us in our image rather than we in theirs. A made-to-order God we hope is dependably at our beck and call to do what we want when we want them to, including, especially, judge those who harm us or harm those whom we love or identify with sympathetically in some way – and we’re quite prepared to play our cards right, follow the rules, make offerings and sacrifices to them, if that’s what it takes. This is the God that many or most people in the west, apart from a small number of professing Christians like ourselves and some other religious believers, have long since stopped hoping for and believing in, but it is definitely not the God Jesus presents.
Jesus puts us very much back in our rightful place in the universe, no longer at the centre with everything and everyone revolving around us, including our image-bearing divine creator; rather each one of us “a piece of the continent, part of the main”, as John Donne puts it. This is the wonderful insight of evolution, which Jesus prepares us for, but which the Church in the 19th century missed the opportunity to fully embrace, so intent was it in clinging onto its doctrine of creation with its omnipotent creator God. Far from being special creations, only contingently related to other species by the happenstance of occupying the same planetary surface, humans are one with all species from the outset, the very same thing coursing through all our cells – life! – which comes directly from the life of the divine parent. Through faith in Jesus, we let go of our self-proclaimed exceptionalism and throw our lot back in with all life, whence we came – this is the kenosis[2] that faith prepares us for, the transformative metanoia[3] it opens us up to.
Beyond the evolution revolution, in the 20th century now, Science delivers the final coup de grâce to the old religious view of the world through the medium of modern relativistic cosmology. But the opportunity goes begging again to fully dispense with the old creator God and embrace Jesus’ divine parent. It’s a giveaway: “birth of the universe” is the common description of the universe coming into being, born from literally nothing – no matter, no space, no time – in the so-called “Big Bang”. Yes, born from nothing – like a human child, or any organism, is born from (virtually) nothing, a single, fertilized egg cell, or equivalent – then the universe grows, evolves, ostensibly under its own steam – also like any organism.
“Birth”, “born”, “like any organism”: modern cosmology makes it crystal clear that the universe is not created complete and perfect in a once-off creative act, rather birthed, like a living organism. But instead of embracing this insight as clear evidence of the divine parent at work, birthing the universe, giving it the life, the freedom, to grow and evolve, Christianity persists with the old doctrine of creation and the old creator God, only partially informed by the Gospel. Yes, it’s true that mainstream Christianity has long since dispensed with hard creationism, the notion of a literal seven-day creation, affording it what seems to be a relatively peaceful coexistence with evolutionary science and cosmology. And even though a tacit soft creationism lives on – expressions like “God’s creation” continue to be used, for example, even among more progressive groups, and we still regularly refer to God as “Creator” – none of this seems to present any obvious challenge in most Christians’ minds to the scientific, evolutionary view of the world.
Does it really matter then, you might ask, that Christianity clings onto this mixture of the old and the new God – as long as it still has Jesus and the Gospel at its heart? Well, yes! The Scientific Revolution, culminating in the Big Bang cosmology of the 20th century, has unequivocally laid to rest, once for all, the idea of a created universe, and therefore of an omnipotent God who creates the world. But the demise of the creator God Christianity still clings to is the least of its woes. Far greater is the growing realization – and this is probably the key factor in the gradual loss of belief in God and decline in Christianity in the west, in the last century or so, that we’ve already mentioned – that, as much as we might want them to, God simply does not intervene in the world, directly, overtly, physically, to judge it, as people believed in the past, as testified to in ancient religious texts, myths and legends, including the Hebrew Old Testament.
There is a sense of this in some of the final recorded words of the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from Tegel prison in Berlin in April 1944:
“Our whole 1900-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the ‘religious a priori’ of humanity. ‘Christianity’ has always been a form – perhaps the true form – of ‘religion’. But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore people become radically religionless—and I think that is already more or less the case …. – what does that mean for Christianity?”[4]
“‘Religious a priori’ of humanity” – surely including, at its centre, the old creator God whose righteous judgement of humanity seems to have been radically refuted by the unrighteous judgement and destruction wrought upon the world by Nazism, Fascism and militarism. Yes, Dietrich would almost certainly have still clung onto the hope of an ultimate, future final divine judgment, beyond this present world and age, but is that not also part of the ‘religious a priori’ that now seems to have had its day?
Is there nothing left of God for us, then? Far from it. With the demise of the old God, the real God, the divine parent Jesus presents, now finally comes to the fore. Through Jesus a new type of divine intervention opens up, a spiritual rather than a physical one, which is completely real rather than just a figment of our hopeful imagination. In John 14:16 Jesus tells the disciples that, after he is gone, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever” – another advocate, helper, comforter – the Holy Spirit. Through faith in Jesus, through the Spirit, we are opened up, as we noted, to the amazing metanoia, the profound inner transformation which enables us to begin letting go of our natural self-centredness and start developing practical skills and know-how in the art of selfless love and cooperation with others. The Kingdom that Jesus inaugurates is, then, nothing more nor less than the gradual outworking of this metanoia in human society and the world. And among other fruits of this ongoing transformation of the world has been the Scientific Revolution of the past 500 years or so – as I have argued in this essay!
So, where to from here? It is evident from the analysis I’ve presented in this essay that the problem we face is primarily with Christianity rather than Science. Science as a cultural institution has become, by the 21st century, a largely secular, atheist affair, completely distinct and separate from religion, including Christianity. This is entirely appropriate and necessary, on one hand, an historical outcome, as I’ve described, of the impetus of the Gospel in human life and culture. On the other hand, however, the predominantly atheistic character of scientific culture is an intentional rejection of the God whom religion, especially Christianity, has presented to the world – a confusing admixture, as I’ve also described, of omnipotent judgmental creator and loving divine parent. The upshot is that Science continues to go from strength to strength while Christianity, at least in the West, has become increasingly marginalized – hence ISCAST’s urgent mission to reach out, to young Christians growing up especially, to try to counteract the influence of the atheism of scientific culture and culture generally.
I can’t help but think that this mission will never be enough to stem the tide, however, until we get our understanding of God right – until we take the opportunity to dispense with the old judgmental creator God and fully embrace the divine parent God whom Jesus presents. Only then will Christianity and the Church be able to fulfill its great mission to “make disciples of all nations”, to participate in the mighty work of building God’s Kingdom here on earth, of which the scientific enterprise is already an integral part.
[1] ISCAST: Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology, now referred to as Christianity and Science in Conversation – see https://iscast.org/
[2] Greek: self-emptying, letting go. See Philippians 2:6-7, Jesus’ self-emptying of his divine nature.
[3] Greek: changing one’s mind, a complete change of mindset. In the New Testament metanoia is typically translated as repentance – see, e.g. Luke 13:1-5, “… unless you repent you will all perish as they did.” In modern psychology the word metanoia is used to describe a “process of experiencing a psychotic ‘breakdown’ and subsequent, positive psychological re-building or ‘healing’”.
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter to Eberhard Bethge, April 30, 1944 – page 501 in A Testament to Freedom, 1990, edited by G B Kelly and E Burton Nelson, Harper San Francisco.
Opinion piece for ISCAST Journal – Christian Perspectives on Science and Technology – June 2025
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay