Have you ever encountered someone who tried to use science to prove that God doesn’t exist?  A friend of mine has, and she wants to know how to respond to those who doubt God’s existence and rely on science as evidence against Him.  To answer her question, we’re going to examine the Bible and science to see if we can find evidence of God’s existence.

Does the Bible support science?

We’ll start by looking at what the Bible says about science.  Obviously, the Bible is not a science textbook.  It’s interesting, though, that what the Bible does say about science is one hundred percent accurate. Here are a few examples:

• The Bible says that God “stretches out the heavens” (Job 9:8; Isaiah 40:22; Jeremiah 10:12).  In Bible days, they didn’t have the scientific equipment that we have today.  To the naked eye, they could not have known that the universe is stretching out, or expanding, yet more than one biblical author mentioned it.  The expansion of the universe was only proven around 100 years ago.
• The Bible describes the earth as being round, stating that God sits above the “circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22).  In ancient times, people believed the earth was flat.  Isaiah wrote this a couple hundred years before the Greeks first proposed a round earth.
• The Bible states that God hung the earth on nothing (Job 26:7).  Many ancient myths suggest theories that something is holding up the earth.  Perhaps the most famous is the Greek myth of Atlas, who was forced to hold up the world as a punishment.  That story may go back to the 400s BC, but the book of Job was written well before that. 
• The Bible mentions sea currents when it talks about the “paths of the seas” (Psalm 8:8).  Yet ocean currents weren’t discovered until the 1800s.

It’s amazing how many accurate scientific facts are mentioned in the Bible, centuries before science ever discovered them!  How could the biblical authors have known these things unless there was a Creator who told them?

Does science support the Bible?

We’ve seen that the Bible is true where it mentions science, which points to a Creator revealing these facts, but does science provide evidence of God’s existence?  Yes, actually, it does!  Atheists rely on evolution to disprove a creator by arguing that the universe is billions of years old.  The biblical account of creation points to a much younger universe, one that’s only a few thousand years old.  So, to argue with an atheist, we must show that the universe cannot be billions of years old.  Fortunately, much of the scientific data actually points to a young universe.

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” 

Psalm 19:1

The Bible says all we have to do is study the heavens, which is the scientific field of astronomy, if we want proof of a Creator God.  Here are just a few facts from astronomy that give us evidence of God’s existence:

• Spiral galaxies are extremely common, yet they can’t be billions of years old.  The inside of these galaxies is spinning faster than the outside, so they would have lost their spiral shape over millions of years.  They can only be thousands of years old. 
• Blue stars are also very common, yet they burn off their fuel very quickly.  They can only last a few thousand years, not millions of years.  There’s no evidence of new stars being created, so the ones that exist must have been there from the beginning.
• Planets such as Jupiter and Neptune are giving off more energy than they absorb from the sun.  If they were millions of years old, they would have already burned off all their energy, so they can only be thousands of years old.
• The moon is slowly moving away from the earth at a steady rate.  Scientists are able to calculate where the moon would have been going back in time.  If you go back millions of years, the moon would have been inside the earth!  However, the moon would only have been a few hundred feet closer to earth a few thousand years ago.
• Comets are made up of ice.  Every time one goes near the sun, some of it melts.  They cannot possibly have lasted millions of years.  As with stars, there’s no evidence of new comets forming, so the ones that exist must be from the beginning. 

These are just a few facts from astronomy that prove that the universe cannot possible be millions, much less billions, of years old.  I could easily provide facts from other branches of science, such as geology and biology, to also prove a young earth.  For evolution to work, it would take billions of years for things to evolve to the state they are in today. If the earth is only a few thousand years old, then the biblical account of creation must be true.  Therefore, a Creator must exist, and who else could have created everything except an all-powerful God?  So, science does, in fact, provide evidence of God’s existence!

How can we use the evidence to respond to an atheist?

To get back to my friend’s question, how can we use this evidence to respond to an atheist?  Well, first, we must remember that the things of God are foolishness to an unbeliever, and the only way for him to accept the truth is for the Spirit to reveal it to him (1 Corinthians 2:14).  We can argue with someone all day long, but, no matter how good our evidence, we can’t change anyone’s mind.  Only the Spirit can do that.

We can use the evidence to silence some of his arguments, though.  I would present these facts to him, and then have him try to explain them based on his understanding of evolution.  The truth is, he can’t.  There is no real evidence to prove evolution, but as we’ve seen, there’s much evidence to support the biblical account of creation.  At the very least, maybe this evidence of God’s existence will make him stop and think.  It will show him that the Bible and science are not contrary to one another—they actually support one another. 

Much of the information for this article was taken from the DVD Astronomy Reveals Creation, by Dr. Jason Lisle.

If you liked this article, you may enjoy these related posts:

• Our Creator God–Implications of Creation

• No Other God–Worship God as He Deserves

For more information about science and the Bible, you can check out these resources:

• Answers in Genesis

• The Institute for Creation Research