Science and Proving the Existence of God

Hi, my name is Matt Slick, and welcome to the KarmAnswer Desk. You know, here at Karm, we get a lot of inquiries, a lot of questions, a lot of comments, a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails. And we get a lot from the atheists as well.

And Christians will often ask us questions that atheists will pose to us, and we try and answer them. Let me tackle for a minute this bit about atheists requiring science to prove that God exists. Well, there's some problems with that.

The Limits of the Scientific Method

You see, when an atheist says, use science and prove to me God exists, well, what's he really asking? In order to kind of get to the bottom of this, we need to look at what the scientific method is first.

You see, science, basically, the scientific method is basically looking at the physical universe and trying to understand it through observation, testing, theorizing, changing our ideas when we see tests go a certain way or not a certain way we expect.

And we learn more and more and more about physical phenomena and the physical attributes of the universe. If an atheist is saying, look, I want you to use a scientific method to prove that God exists, how do you do that when you're doing measurements of weight and light and heat and things like this?

See, these pertain to the physical properties of the universe and how the universe behaves. The scientific method, basically, automatically is restricted to that area of learning and that area of thinking.

And science is just simply not sufficient to be able to tackle all kinds of learning issues. For example, how do you use science to quantify honor or love or integrity or faithfulness or appreciation?

The scientific method can't do that. But it doesn't stop the atheist from saying, look, use science to prove to me a person of God exists, the same person we Christians believe in who has honor and integrity, who has certain personal characteristics that aren't going to be detectable through the scientific method.

To require God to behave in a manner sufficient for mere humans to be able to detect him by looking under rocks or in a telescope or doing measurements of radar or x-rays or whatever it might be, really is to ask something that is not logical, that is certainly not fair.

It's not consistent with how things would normally work when you're trying to find God. You see, God, according to the scriptures, is alive and he's a being, and he's not going to simply allow himself to be tested in a Petri dish or under a microscope or on a scale and say, okay, atheist, see, I've proven myself existing to you.

It doesn't work like that any more than you could prove by weighing anything that I'm a man of honor or character or not or whatever. So the scientific method just isn't sufficient that way. And when an atheist asks a Christian to do that, well, really, he's not asking a good question.

He's not asking a fair question. He's not making a fair requirement. Instead, what we need to do is we need to assess the facts in a manner consistent with the way those facts are and ask questions in relationship to that.

The Resurrection of Jesus as a Different Kind of Evidence

Let me give you an example. The resurrection of Jesus. How do you test, using the scientific method, the resurrection of Jesus? You can't. You can't go back in time and observe it and kill him five times and see if he rises from the dead each time.

It just doesn't work like that. What you need to do is look at the evidence the way it's presented in its literary form and see if it makes sense and if it's the best explanation, say the resurrection, given the evidence, given the changed lives of the apostles, given the eyewitness accounts, given the empty tomb, given the idea that the Romans and the Jews did not want Jesus to have been said to have risen from the dead, things like this.

You see, it's a different set of criteria that you would use to demonstrate, for example, the resurrection of Jesus than you would a scientific method for determining how fast an object falls. They're different categories, and so they require different sets of testing and different approaches to get to.

Why Demanding Scientific Proof of God Is Not Logically Consistent

So when an atheist were to say, prove to me, use the scientific method, that God exists, he's not asking you to do something that's logically possible. He's not being intellectually consistent with the facts in which how things are to be done.