Originally written for The Gospel Coalition. Derek Rishmawy is the Reformed University Fellowship campus minister at University of California Irvine and a PhD candidate at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He cohosts the Mere Fidelity podcast. You can follow him on X or read more at his blog.
During a panel on the future of religion among Gen Z, a student asked me, “Are you scared of our coming generation? Because we’re so into reason and science, and that seems threatening to the future of religion and what you do.”
In voicing this sincere question, the student tapped into a long-standing trope in our culture about an alleged conflict between religion and science. This trope, known as the “conflict thesis,” was popularized by John William Draper’s 1874 book A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. He tells a familiar story: humanity, on its upward trajectory of progress, is continually opposed by a blind-faith peddling, power-hungry church. Scared of a heliocentric universe, it opposed Galileo. Terrified of evolution, it opposed Darwin.
In the conflict between science and faith, it’s not just religion in general that seems bad—Christianity and the Bible are particularly dangerous. Evolutionary science, we’re told, has made biblical accounts of human origins seem out of date, while contemporary accounts of geology and astronomy make the Bible’s chronology implausible. Moreover, it seems like the whole approach to knowing is basically opposed. On one side, you have reason, evidence, and observation; on the other side, you have faith and trust in ancient, unverifiable books with little connection to the real world.
We’ve become so familiar with the conflict thesis that it’s taken for granted today. We assume there’s a worldview generated by science (including the hard sciences) and worldviews generated by religion, and you must choose: one means thinking, the others feeling.