Podcast: Are Science and Faith Really at Odds? (Hans Madueme)

June 30, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Science, Faith, and Our Longing for Meaning

In this episode, Hans Madueme challenges how we came to believe in a warfare narrative between science and faith. Hans discusses how Christianity has positively contributed to the rise of modern science, and talks about how we should think about religion, faith, and the scientistic worldview today.

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Does Science Make God Irrelevant?

Does Science Make God Irrelevant?

Hans Madueme

This concise booklet explains science from a biblical perspective, helping readers see how faith and science can coexist to glorify God and help us praise our Creator.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:34 - The Integration of Science and Faith

Matt Tully
Hans Madueme is professor of theological studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and serves on the editorial board for the journal Themelios. Before training in theology, Hans received his MD and completed his medical residency in internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic. His new book with Crossway is called Does Science Make God Irrelevant?, which is part of the TGC Hard Questions series. Hans, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Hans Madueme
My pleasure. I look forward to our conversation.

Matt Tully
Hans, this little book that you’ve written really does just what it promises in the title. It answers the question, Does science make God irrelevant? And you do it in such a concise and accessible and yet compelling way. I’m really excited to get into some of the arguments, some of the topics that you raise in the book. But before we get there, I wonder if you can just start by telling us a little bit about yourself. How did you first get interested in this topic, science and faith, and how they fit together? What was it that drew you to this area?

Hans Madueme
Yes, great question. If I could go back in time when I was a college student, I went to McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and I was basically a pre-med and doing my undergrad in anatomy. I finished there in three years and then went to medical school in DC at Howard University. It was a traditional medical school, so two years in the classroom and then two years doing rotations in hospitals. I think it was in my first year of medical school, when we’re doing lectures, and I think it was in psychiatry in particular, where I found myself—I was a fairly new Christian. I’d become a Christian after my first year in college. In medical school I found myself just struggling to make sense of the integration of faith and learning. I think that’s what I was wrestling with. But I didn’t go to a Christian college, and I was a new Christian, and so I just had questions about the things I was studying in the psychiatry lectures and then just my Christian faith. What it means to be a Christian. Why do we do the things we do? And implicitly, I had questions about the doctrine of sin. And so as a med student, I was grappling with questions about the interface of science and faith or science and theology. And so I went through medical school and then ended up doing my residency in internal medicine at Mayo in Rochester, Minnesota. And I think those questions stuck with me and perhaps sort of grew. They were always at the back of my mind, even as I was doing the work of a physician, and then when I finished my residency, which is a three-year program, I then ended up going to seminary at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and now I’m studying the Bible, I’m studying theology. I was always interested in thinking about wrestling with the theological questions raised by science, particularly as we think about various Christian doctrines, particularly the human person and the doctrine of sin. And I’ve ended up thinking about that and writing and doing research in that area over the years. But I think the germ of that, where the seed was planted, was when I was a medical student.

Matt Tully
And as you think about the way that you wrestled with that, especially as a younger student growing into your own maturity, did you find that there were other Christians around you who were asking the same questions and were open to kind of exploring those things? One of the themes of your book is just the way that so often both secular atheists on the one hand but also conservative evangelicals on the other hand can have this war mentality when it comes to science and faith. And for Christians, the tendency is to sort of want to stay away from some of these questions because they can feel threatening or they can feel like a slippery slope. Have you ever experienced that as you were working in your schooling?

Hans Madueme
To be honest, back in those days, it was a lonely sort of journey. There weren’t really any people around me that I could discourse with or bounce ideas off of. And what I had to do was I had to get online and find physicians in the US and sort of do a little Sherlock Holmes stuff to figure out if these were Christians. And so I ended up corresponding with doctors in other parts of the US and just throwing them my questions. And then they would recommend books and articles for me to read. And so for me that was actually how I started to make some progress and find some answers to the questions I was asking. So just really patient physicians who were getting these random emails from a medical student—that’s how it started off for me. But I think if a college student went to a Christian college here or a secular university with an InterVarsity group or RUF or something, I think the resources would be there for them to really be able to wrestle with these questions with mentors and people of faith that can really guide them along. Just in my case, I didn’t have that.

Matt Tully
And I wonder if the conversation, certainly on the Christian side, has progressed, and there is a little bit more of an awareness of the importance of really engaging with the scientific world in a more intellectually robust way. You argue in the book that this warfare model, this idea that science and faith are irreconcilable and that they are fundamentally opposed to one another, is a myth. You’ve got this medical background, so if you were to diagnose the cause or the factors that lead to this myth that is often prevalent still even today, what are some of those factors?

Hans Madueme
I would say that basically we’ve inherited this picture. This dialogue between science and faith has been going on for a long time. There are some pretty famous books from the nineteenth century by a couple of names, John Draper and Andrew White, and these two individuals weren’t Orthodox. They were Christians, but disillusioned with orthodoxy and tradition, and so they kind of wrote these books that portrayed science as essentially this victor that was in a war with theologians and clerics and dogma. The picture they painted was one of sciences progressing and winning battle after battle, and the theologians being slaughtered on the battlefield. And so historians would say that those two in particular, but there were others like Thomas Huxley and others, who sort of cemented this picture of conflict and sort of seeded the Western cultural imagination. And that’s what we’ve inherited. So Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens sort of breathe that narrative in their books. When they write these colorful arguments against God and against Christianity—“If you’re sane and rational, you are on the side of science; and if you are backward and religious, you are on that side”—they basically inherited that picture. And in pop culture, with Galileo and the Scopes trial, I think we often interpret those moments in history through the lens of this warfare view. And if we read a little bit of history and if we knew that, I think that might help us be a little more critical about some of that.

Matt Tully
And I want to get into those two stories, Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial, because those are so often trotted out as emblematic of this warfare. But one other thing that came to my mind that I’ve wondered about when it comes to just the way that our culture views science and faith as in conflict and even some sometimes views science as ultimately destined to be the victor, the way that science and technology are so intertwined. Science has led, in the last 100 years or so, to so much technological innovation that has radically changed our lives, oftentimes for the better. I think of the way that the world is and world poverty and hunger and so many of the advances that have come about not through religious reflection, where theologians are writing some tome that changes the world. It’s the guy who discovers how to genetically engineer food to produce far more of it than ever before. How has the advance of technology impacted the way that we think about these topics?

Hans Madueme
I think that’s a big part of it and. What you just described or summarized, I think that’s the reason that if CNN or MSNBC or Fox News are covering something significant that’s affecting the whole society (like Covid) and they want to interview an expert to sort of give some reflection and to help us understand what’s going on, when’s the last time you saw them interviewing a theologian from Wheaton College. No, it’s going to be a physician from Cleveland Clinic or it’s going to be a scientist. For the audience, for the rest of us, we really respect scientists. Well, we could talk about that, but we used to anyways.

Matt Tully
You open your book by talking about the rise in prevalence of Flat Earthers and how we do have this strand, even among non-Christians, of questioning science today.

Hans Madueme
That’s right. So, we’ll get back to that, but in the traditional picture, generally, if you have a PhD in science, that means something and that’s significant. And that's partly because if you want to go on vacation, you’re going to use an airplane. We have phones. Like you said, we have all this technology, and technology’s built on these scientific principles, and so it’s hard to deny all of that. And then when you look at theology and biblical studies, what we see—and this impression is not new for us—there’s all this disagreement, there’s all this confusion. With all the division and fraction and disagreement, it’s hard to know what’s the value of this?

Matt Tully
Why does it all matter?

Hans Madueme
Yeah. Why does it matter? But if you look at science and technology, it’s doing a lot for us from a medical perspective. If you’ve got gallbladder problems, if you’ve got cholecystitis, if your appendix is ruptured, you can go to the hospital and surgeons can treat that. And so we know the value. And by the way, I would say, concerning the value of technology in medicine, I think it’s also important to realize from a Christian perspective that that’s not a bad thing. And actually, from a Christian perspective, that’s a gift from the Lord that we are able to use medicine to bring healing, to bring relief from suffering, and for technology to enhance our lives in the way that it does. Now, obviously, those things can become idols, and there are ways in which untethered from devotion to the Lord, medicine and technology can wander off in dangerous ways. But I want to emphasize that in and of itself, those are good things that we should be thankful to the Lord for what he has done. But I do think, again, going back to your question, I think part of the problem is we don’t see the value in theology and tradition. The value of science and technology is so obvious and so dramatic and so astonishing, whereas maybe 300 or 400 years ago in society, your average person would have been very respectful of the theologians. You respect the pastors and the priests and so on. It seems like in our day, it’s inverted, and people need to be persuaded that theology is valuable.

13:29 - Was Galileo Really an Oppressed Scientist?

Matt Tully
Let’s go back to the couple case studies that you mentioned that often loom large when we think about this division between science and faith, or science and religion, or the religious establishment. The first one would have to be the story of Galileo. In popular culture, he’s this oppressed scientist who’s discovered something true about the universe from science, the scientific method, and then the Roman Catholic Church of the time just totally shuts him down and persecutes him, and it’s all in service of this blind, irrational religious faith. But you argue in this book that that’s actually not really an accurate picture of how things actually happened there. So just briefly, help us understand how that departs from the actual historical record.

Hans Madueme
I think the way we normally think about it, whether it’s from some movie we’ve watched or something we’ve read, is if you go back to that warfare mentality, where you’ve got science on one side and tradition and theology on the other, the way we think about it is Galileo represents the enlightened scientific view, and then the Roman Catholic church represents what’s oppressive about religion and about theology. And so that’s a lens through which we see the story. But when you actually look at what Galileo said and did and when you look at that those events, and it turns out, one, if we met Galileo today and talked to him, we would think, This guy sounds like a theologian. He was well-versed. He was well-read on the church fathers, well-read on Scripture, and discoursed about that. He wrote long letters—effectively, books—expositing and giving Biblical interpretation and reasoning theologically. That’s number one. Number two, he was a Catholic. He was Catholic by faith. It wasn’t like Galileo was this irreligious scientist discovering heliocentrism. He himself was connected to the church. And on the other side, when you look at the Pope and the Roman Catholic church, some of the religious leaders actually appreciated what Galileo was doing. He received commendation and letters from religious leaders who admired his work. So just that fact itself makes you realize this is a little different from what I thought. Yes, there was some tension, but the reason that this became really difficult was that geocentrism, the idea that the sun revolves around the earth, that view was tied to a whole way of understanding the world related to this guy Aristotle, the philosopher, and another guy called Ptolemy. The Catholic church had kind of wed itself to that whole way of seeing the world. So, to undermine that and to say geocentrism is just wrong and it’s heliocentrism that’s correct, that would be significant. And so I think that part of what was happening with Galileo and the Catholic church was some of the Catholic leaders were just saying, “Hey, you can do the research you’re doing. We’re right behind you. But when you are writing about it, don’t say that this is a fact. Because if you say that it’s a fact, then you are basically challenging this whole way the Catholic church has understood things in light of Aristotle. And that would just be really controversial.” And so, yes, there was tension, but the tension and the conflict that was relevant to the geocentrism and heliocentrism debate that we need to bear in mind is that Galileo himself was a man of the Catholic church. We also need to recognize that some Catholic leaders were supportive of what Galileo was doing. So, it wasn’t as black and white as we often tend to think.

Matt Tully
And that’s exactly what came to my mind. This is true for how we do history across all kinds of different issues or eras, but in search of a good narrative or a good story with clear villains and heroes, we can have simplistic views of how history actually happened. But the reality is often far more gray at times and nuanced and complicated than what we often give. And I think when it comes to this particular issue of science and faith, when we think of history, we are often looking at those examples where there is some tension, where the science is pushing in one direction and the religious people, we’ll say, are pushing in a different direction. But one of the things that you draw out in this book that others have also noted is the way that actually, when you look at the whole picture and keep all of the evidence in mind, there’s a lot of support for the idea that it was specifically religious convictions, theological convictions, that paved the way and that pushed science forward in many different ways. I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit.

Hans Madueme
I really enjoyed writing that part of the book because I’m a theologian, and often when I’m thinking about the doctrine of sin or the fall of Adam and Eve and related issues, I am often in a space where there’s tension and where there’s conflict between what mainstream science is saying and what orthodox Christians have thought the Bible says. I really enjoyed pointing out, guys, let’s step back and recognize, and I don’t want to overstate it, but in some really important ways, we wouldn’t even have science if not for the fact that in Europe in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, Christianity was the dominant religion. And because of Christianity there were these theological convictions that most people had. And because of those theological convictions, you had the rise of what we now call modern science. For example, if you live in a polytheistic culture, where you all believe that all these gods up there in the heavens are all warring against each other and you have to appease them and so on, in that kind of culture it’s unlikely that what we call science was going to emerge versus a culture in which we believe there’s a triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That God is a good God. And because he’s a good God, his creation is good. And that creation has an intelligibility about it. We can go and we can study the world. We can examine it and look at how it works. We can peek behind the curtain to see what’s the mechanism of this and that feature of the world? Actually, I meant to even say if we’re agnostics, like in ancient Greece, and we thought like the material world was evil and that matter is bad, if you have that view of the material world, why would you spend all this time studying it? Why would you spend all this time examining and investigating the creation? But for Christians, we don’t say that matter is evil. In fact, we would say the Son of God became incarnate. God took on flesh. And in taking on flesh, he shows that matter is good. Matter is from God. And so it’s theological convictions like that that it made sense for these men and women to to go out into the world and to study it and to ask these questions in a way that wouldn’t have made as much sense in other cultures with other religious convictions. So, it’s those kinds of things that I probe in the book. And particularly for someone who’s been steeped in the warfare mentality, I just hope it helps them to see here’s a side of the story where it kind of helps me to see that my theological convictions, my Christian view of the world, science actually fits quite comfortably within that.

Matt Tully
I could see one possible response to this idea that these theological convictions, this theological worldview, was ultimately what gave birth to science in many ways. I could see someone saying that’s just kind of a convenient way of looking at history and making sense of it. But really, the scientific revolution was going to happen regardless. It just happened to be that, as you said, all of the Western world at the time was broadly Christian, and so of course it’s going to start with “Christians” who had the time and the space and the resources to do this scientific work. But really, it could have happened anywhere, and there isn’t an intimate connection between the Christian worldview and scientific method. How would you respond to that kind of a response?

Hans Madueme
I think on one level I would want to agree with aspects of that in the sense that it turns out that Islam had played a role in the rise of science, and Islam is not Christianity. So, obviously, there’s another religion. And Greek philosophy as well had a role to play. So it wasn’t just Christianity, but Christianity played a big role. But I would still say it’s still speculation, right? The idea that, well, it doesn’t matter and it just turns out there were Christians around and that’s why silence arose, but it could have happened if there were any number of other cultures in play. It’s still speculation. I think it still matters that, actually, when you look historically and you see what did happen and who were the earliest scientists and why did they do the things they did, I think it’s significant that you had these individuals who really believed that Adam and Eve were historical people, that Adam and Eve sinned, and the fall affects us. It affects us body and soul, and it affects our minds. Francis Bacon believed this. Because Adam’s sin affects us today and our minds are affected, we can’t trust our minds. You can’t just sit in an armchair and be thinking, Oh, you know what? This is how the world works, and this is the meaning of life. Your intuitions and your rationality is, in some ways, suspect because of the fall. And so because of that, you had these seventeenth and eighteenth century natural philosophers (or you can call them early scientists) who then said we can’t trust our minds to understand the world, and so we need to go into the world and we need to look and see what is actually there. A historian called Peter Harrison in Australia wrote a great book showing how it’s going to amaze you, but actually the fall of Adam and Eve was a really important reason that empirical science developed, because they realized we can’t trust our minds, and so we need to go out into the world, look and see and measure, and actually see what’s going on. And that kind of gave birth to the empirical method. That’s what happened historically. Could it have happened a different way? Well, maybe, but we don’t really know, right? So, I appreciate the objection, but I do think it counts for something that historically we see that Christianity did play an important role.

Matt Tully
That’s one of the pitfalls of doing history is so often we can look at history, look at historical events, look at decisions that people made and actions that were taken, and we can almost neglect the explicit rationale that those historical figures gave for those actions. And we can want to attribute things to just broader historical movements, as if these things happened apart from individual choices and motivations and decisions.

Hans Madueme
Right. That’s really well said. And I think that’s what historians today, especially Christian historians, when we’re thinking about science and faith, often the big advice they’d give is, look, instead of sort of trying to come up with these grand stories, instead of trying to have these theories about what’s going on, the more respectful thing to do and the more reliable thing to do is actually look at what is that particular scientist doing? What is that scientist saying? Look at that theologian in the eighteenth century. What is he doing? What is he saying? Let’s look at individual cases rather than imposing our own picture or narrative on them.

26:46 - Why Are There So Few Conservative Christian Scientists?

Matt Tully
One natural follow-up question that I know I’ve wrestled with and I’ve wondered about before is if indeed science—the scientific method, the scientific project writ large—fits best within this Christian worldview that views a creator-God as ordering the universe in a certain way that’s understandable to us as humans as his creation and we have access to the real world through our senses, why is it that such a small percentage of professional scientists in the West today are conservative Christians? I don’t know the exact stats, but I’ve heard that it’s significantly a smaller percentage than that of the general population of the country.

Hans Madueme
Right. And that’s the big irony. And in some ways, it’s something worth lamenting because I think that wouldn’t have been the case 200–300 years ago. Most of those scientists would’ve been christians.

Matt Tully
Or Deists at least.

Hans Madueme
Or Deists. That’s right. In some way connected with the church. And now it is the great irony. And I don’t know that there’s one simple answer. But I think one reason is that particularly in a field like biology, say you’ve got a Christian high school student, and you’re studying science, and you’re trying to figure out what you want to do and what you want to grow up and be, you realize that in this particular scientific field, most scientists in that field and most of the textbooks are all saying and teaching these things that contradict and outright deny what is really central to the way my church sees the world, what is really central to the way that I understand the Bible. Then you could see how a young man or young woman like that would sort of say, “Okay, I still love science, but I’m going to maybe just go into physics. Or I might do something where I don’t see that tension. Whereas if I go into biology and I do a PhD in biology, I’m going to have to deal with this stuff, and it’s going to cause a kind of cognitive dissonance. Or I may end up being a biologist that has views that people consider ridiculous. Or I may end up having to just sort of revise my view of the Bible and my view of Christianity in order to reconcile those two.” So I think one reason is just that conservative Christians are sort of self-selecting in some ways. So, that’s one reason. Another reason is—I don’t want it to sound like a rebuke—I do think some conservative churches do very stridently teach and portray science and faith as being these enemies. And so you get young people growing up in those settings, and so they have drunk the Kool-Aid, and so they just think, Well, I’m never going to go into that field because I’ve learned in Sunday school and I’ve learned from my pastor that that’s dangerous. Or if I become a biologist or if I become a chemist or whatever, I might lose my faith. So you have those trends, and I think that plays a role as well. I think we need Christian biologists and physicists and chemists and so on, and I think it’s a shame if our young people grow up in the church and are led to believe that this is so dangerous that I can’t imagine this being a calling for me. I think that’s sad. Now, we don’t want to be naive about that, right? If you’re going to go into biology at a secular school or whatever, there’s going to be some challenges. But I don’t think those challenges are insurmountable. We’re supposed to be light in the world, and it’s a shame that most Christians from certain traditions are not in those fields. I don’t think it has to be that way.

30:54 - The Failure of the Secular Scientistic Mindset

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question, Hans, I think it’s fair to say, and people have observed this, that the New Atheists and movements like that—these strident, secular, atheistic movements of twenty years ago—are waning. And in place of that it seems like we’re seeing a broader openness to religious ideas and experiences. Maybe not formal religion and participation in formal religious services or denominations, and certainly, evangelical churches are not growing across the board in our culture today. How would you describe the religious landscape today and how we should be thinking about this topic of religion and faith moving forward as Christians?

Hans Madueme
It’s a great question. I think that recently there’ve been a lot of interesting books along those lines. Ross Douthat and others have written about how people in the Western world—there was one narrative that kind of said that with technology and with science, everyone’s going to become secular and religion is going to die. And it just sort of turned out that that’s not actually the case. In fact, you are getting the rise of all these spiritualities, neo-spiritualities, and religious views, even in popular media and in film and so on. So how do we explain that? I think in, one, I think that’s not how God created us. The way God has created us is we are meant to worship God. And if we’re not worshiping God, we’re going to be worshiping something else. But we are intrinsically worshiping creatures. That’s number one. Number two, I think there is a sense in which that worldview, which you could call scientism, where instead of seeing science for what it is—a gift from the Lord that we should receive with gratitude, but not turning it into an idol—scientism puts science on this pedestal and says if science can’t measure it, if science can’t detect it, then it’s not real. The only truth I accept is what can be proven scientifically. Well, if you live in that kinda world or if you live in a world where that’s the dominant assumption, I think what people are seeing is that that’s an arid kind of world. It’s not satisfying, it’s not fulfilling. And so in some ways, you could almost see the scenario that you’re describing as a kind of reaction to the failure of a secular scientistic mindset. And people are realizing we need more than that. Obviously, from a Christian perspective we would say there can be all kinds of dangerous things or unhelpful ways in which you can be religious. But I still think the proliferation of these perspectives is, in some ways, an indictment of a naturalistic, scientistic worldview.

Matt Tully
A materialistic worldview.

Hans Madueme
People are realizing they need more than that. And obviously, that provides an opportunity for us to preach Christ, to show people in compelling and attractive ways that, as Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee, O Lord.” And that desire that you have, what you are looking for, let me tell you about it. So I think there’s great opportunity there.

Matt Tully
And what I love about this book that you’ve written—this short, concise book—is that it really does help to explain how the Christian worldview, the biblical story, has room for so much of what we value in science, so much of the vision and the heart behind it of seeing the natural world for what it is and explaining it and using it to God’s glory. But Christianity also gives us the things that science alone cannot give us—value and meaning and transcendence. Things that I think we all long for naturally. It’s just part of the human condition is we know we need these deeper things as well. Hans, thank you so much for helping us to understand a little bit better how science and our faith as Christians can and should be brought together as we move forward in our world today.

Hans Madueme
Thanks. It’s been a great time. I enjoyed our conversation, Matt.

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