Does science disprove the Bible?

No — and the popular claim that it does is based on a misunderstanding of both science and the Bible.

Science is an enormously powerful tool for investigating the natural world — how things work, what the physical universe is made of, what processes drive biological change. What science cannot do is make pronouncements about questions outside its domain: whether God exists, whether miracles occur, what the ultimate meaning and purpose of the universe is, or whether a first-century man rose from the dead. These are historical and philosophical questions, not scientific ones.

The supposed conflict between science and the Bible has been greatly exaggerated, and much of it is historically manufactured. The idea that Christianity and science have been at war is largely a nineteenth-century invention — before that, the most significant pioneers of modern science (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Mendel, Maxwell) were Christians who saw their scientific work as "thinking God's thoughts after Him." The university and the scientific method both grew out of a Christian intellectual culture that believed a rational God had made a rational, ordered universe worth investigating.

Where genuine tensions exist — the age of the earth, the origins of life, the mechanism of human origins — these are areas where the interpretation of Scripture and the interpretation of scientific data both involve human judgment, and where sincere, thoughtful people land differently. They are not areas where "science has proven the Bible wrong."

The Bible does not claim to be a science textbook. It claims to be the true account of God's creation of the universe, His relationship with human beings, and His redemptive work through Jesus Christ. These are claims science is simply not equipped to evaluate one way or the other.

What science has never done — and cannot do — is disprove the resurrection. That is the claim Christianity stakes everything on. And it is a historical question, not a scientific one.