No, you do not have to choose between trusting the Bible and trusting science. The supposed choice rests on two hidden assumptions: that science is a complete and certain account of everything real, and that faith is believing things without reasons. Take away either assumption and most of the conflict goes with it. What remains are real questions about how to read particular passages. Those are worth working through, and none of them forces you to pick a side.
Dr. Frederick Ware, a theologian at Howard University School of Divinity and an ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ, approaches the question by defining terms before taking sides. He describes himself as someone who is not a scientist but who works as something like a philosopher or theologian of science. He grew up reading his older siblings’ biology and physics homework while the country raced to the moon, and of science and faith in his own life he says, “Never felt any type of tension or conflict.” A personal report settles nothing, and Ware does not rest on it. He argues that the conflict appears mainly when people misdescribe what each side is doing.
What Would Have to Be True for the Conflict to Be Real?
Start with the strongest version of the claim:
- Science tells us what is actually true about the world.
- The Bible makes claims about the world that science contradicts.
- So anyone who trusts the Bible must distrust science at those points, and anyone who trusts science must set the Bible aside.
The argument is valid in form: if both premises hold, the conclusion follows. The work is in the premises. The first assumes that science speaks with a single, final voice about what is real. The second assumes that the Bible and science are answering the same questions in the same way, so that a clash between them is a clash between two reports of one event.
Ware presses on both. He does not claim the two never collide. He says plainly that “sometime there are conflicts.” His judgment is that for the most part faith and science are converging, each contributing its own part to understanding what it means to be human and to live in the world. Whether that judgment holds depends on whether the premises survive careful definition.
What Is Science, Exactly?
When Ware helps students who feel torn, his first move is description. He says some people “think of science only around the conflict type of model,” as if science existed mainly to argue with religion. But “we’re exposed to science all the time,” he points out, through the technology people use every day. A student who uses a phone, takes prescribed medicine or checks the weather forecast is already trusting scientific work without feeling any threat to their faith.
Then comes the definition that does most of the work: “science is a human enterprise like any other enterprise.” Ware means this literally. Science is something people do. It advances understanding, and “sometime it goes awry in directions that can be very detrimental to human beings.” His shorthand is even simpler: “It’s a tool.”
This definition changes what the conflict could even be. A tool cannot be a rival object of worship. The sensible questions to ask about a tool are how well it works for a given job and who is using it for what. If science is a disciplined human method for studying how the natural world behaves, then its findings deserve the trust that good method earns, and they carry the limits that any human method carries.
A skeptic might say this definition is too modest, because science is the only reliable way to know anything. That statement is itself a philosophical claim about knowledge. No experiment establishes that experiments are the only way to know, so the claim has to be argued on philosophical grounds. Ware’s description gives science its real job and leaves that larger claim to be defended by whoever makes it.
Is Science Certainty and Faith Guesswork?
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, names the assumption most people carry into this question: “when we think of science, we think of certainty, and we think of faith, and we think of a level of uncertainty, and you just have to believe.” If that picture is accurate, the contest is lopsided. Certainty beats guessing every time.
Ware complicates the picture from two directions.
The limits of evidence. Science has given people access to the past that earlier societies never had, including the ages of geological change. Yet he tells students that at some point “science cannot go back all the way to the beginning.” He calls that horizon deep time, and he says “deep time is fundamentally mystical and mysterious.” Past a certain point, the evidence runs out.
How science actually gets done. Because it is a human activity, it carries ordinary human habits. “We guess we speculate, we go on a hunch,” Ware says, and he notes that major breakthroughs have come from exactly those hunches, from someone casually stumbling onto something or pursuing a problem they cared about.
Be exact about what follows. Science is still a different thing from faith, and a hunch in a laboratory gets tested in ways that trust in God does not. Many hunches fail. The narrower conclusion is the useful one. Science involves trust, judgment and provisional conclusions. Faith, rightly understood, involves reasons. Once both descriptions are honest, they stop looking like opposite ends of a single scale.
What Does Faith Actually Claim?
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
The chapter commends people who trusted God’s word and acted on it, and it describes trust that reaches beyond what is currently visible. Genesis states the creation claim at the heart of that trust:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
The verse names who created, and it says creation had a beginning. A scientific instrument can study how the created order behaves. It has no reading to take on whether God stands behind that order.
This weakens the second premise. Much of what Scripture claims about creation answers questions of origin, purpose and dependence. Much of what science studies concerns mechanism, sequence and regularity. A conflict requires two answers to the same question.
Christian faith also makes historical claims, and those cannot be walled off from the real world. Ware is emphatic here. Echoing Paul, he says the resurrection is so basic that without it life is miserable, and “Christianity sits on that one great miracle of resurrection.” Paul puts the stakes plainly: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). The chapter goes on to describe a raised body, an event in history. A faith built on that event has to face the hardest objection directly.
Doesn’t a Natural Explanation Leave No Room for God?
Ware states the objection fairly. Science, he says, gives a very naturalistic description of the world, one in which you do not have to appeal to the supernatural to explain what happens. If that is true, a God who acts seems unnecessary, and miracles look like breaks in a system that otherwise runs fine without him.
Ware’s response targets the definition of a miracle. “Sometimes people think of miracles that somehow a natural law was broken,” he says. “That’s not the only way to define it.” His alternative starts with God’s nature: “God has absolute freedom.” On his account, God acts as the free Creator of the order he works within. When God acts, he shows that reality holds possibilities our settled expectations had not imagined. In that sense, Ware says, “no law has to be broken.”
Test the reasoning. A natural law, as science uses the term, describes how things regularly behave when nothing else is acting on them. Describing a regularity is one claim. Asserting that nothing beyond nature could ever act is a different claim, and it does not come from the regularity itself. Water reliably flows downhill, and a person can still carry a bucket up the slope without disproving anything about water. The comparison has limits, because God is not one more force inside the system. But it shows the logical gap. A science that describes what nature does on its own cannot, by that description, rule out what its Creator might do.
What remains unsettled? Ware’s way of describing miracles is one Christian account among others, and some believers prefer the language of God overriding natural processes. That disagreement is real but secondary. What Ware will not loosen is the event itself. Flexibility about how to describe a miracle leaves untouched the claim that Christ rose.
Where Does the Real Tension Remain?
For many readers the pressure point is Genesis and evolution. Ware defines evolution in plain terms as a way of making sense of how organisms change over time: “evolution is just simply how life changes over time,” with small changes adding up across very long stretches. He grants that some advances in science “might be a bit unsettling if faith has not matured” enough to wrestle with something new.
His most useful contribution here is historical. Ware points to Theophilus Gould Steward, an AME minister who later served as an Army chaplain, taught at Wilberforce University, and in 1885 published Genesis Re-Read, which tried to interpret Scripture in light of the geology and biology of the day. Ware says the book stirred lively debate among AME ministers, and that Bishop Daniel Payne judged it confusing for readers without theological training but essential reading for ministers on the path to being trained. Ware also reports that only two physical copies are known to remain, though digitized copies are available.
According to Ware, Steward wanted readers to see that the text “doesn’t always have to be literal, but yet it could be true.” Ware links this to older Christian interpreters who read Scripture in several senses: literal, allegorical, moral and spiritual. “If you take a literal meaning, of course, then you have this tension and this hard conflict between religion and science,” he says. With other senses in view, “you may not find yourself in that conflict.”
Here a careful reader should slow down. The multiple-senses approach is a real strand of Christian interpretation, but it is one strand among several, and it can be misused to dissolve any text one finds inconvenient. A sounder first step is to ask what the original author meant in the original context, which includes asking what kind of writing Genesis 1 is. Faithful Christians who do that work land in different places:
- Some hold a young earth and a recent creation.
- Some accept an old earth while rejecting common descent.
- Some see evolution as the means God used.
What they share is the conviction Genesis 1:1 states outright: God is the Creator. On the age of the earth and the mechanism of creation, believers who take Scripture seriously still disagree.
That disagreement is the tension that actually remains, and it is far smaller than the one people usually imagine. It is a set of questions about genre, meaning and evidence that believers have been working through for well over a century. Ware does not offer Steward’s generation as a template. “So we don’t have to imitate them, but they certainly provide us with inspiration that we can actually do that,” he says. They kept vibrant faith and vital churches while asking these questions openly.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
Ware’s clearest examples come from ministry. A pastor caring for someone with cancer can learn the pathology of the disease from those who study it, and the psychological weight of illness from behavioral scientists. “That helps me to do my job much better as a pastor,” he says. During the pandemic, his church invited medical doctors and researchers to explain what a virus is, how it spreads and how people could stay healthy. The congregation prayed and listened to the doctors in the same building.
That example gives a reader a method for the next conflict they meet. When a scientific claim and a biblical claim seem to collide, ask three things before choosing:
- Is the scientific statement a finding about how nature behaves, or a philosophical claim riding along with it?
- What question is the biblical passage answering, and what kind of writing is it?
- Is the dispute about whether God acts, or about how a particular text should be read?
Most collisions resolve at one of those three points. The ones that survive deserve patient study, the kind Steward’s readers gave them, by people who keep praying while they read.
