Science Has Disproved Christianity

The argument does not start from something science has failed to explain; it starts from something science quietly assumes. Every physical explanation accounts for one dependent thing by appealing to another: this state of affairs by a prior state, this particle by a field, this organism by the chemistry that sustains it. That pattern is the lifeblood of science, and the argument leaves it completely intact. This is not a god-of-the-gaps move that waits for physics to stall.

What the argument notices is that the pattern is dependence all the way down. Each link in the chain holds its existence on loan from something else. The first premise claims only that contingent things, things that exist but could have failed to exist, are real. That is not a controversial religious assertion; it is the ordinary furniture of the world: galaxies, cells, you. None of them had to be.

Grant that contingent things exist. The real question is what explains the whole network of them. The tempting reply is that each thing is explained by an earlier one, so nothing is left unaccounted for. But explaining every member is not the same as explaining why there is any series at all. The cars of a train can each be pulled by the car ahead, yet that still never tells you why the train is moving rather than standing still.

The contingency argument presses this with the principle of sufficient reason: whatever exists has some reason for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in a cause beyond itself. As the Stanford Encyclopedia survey lays out the classic Leibnizian version, you begin with a contingent being and ask what could ground it. A purely contingent collection, however large, even infinite, is still the kind of thing that could have failed to be. So it cannot be the place where explanation finally comes to rest. Only something whose existence is not borrowed can play that role.

The conclusion of the bare argument is modest and precise: there is a necessary, self-existent reality that depends on nothing beyond itself. By itself that is not yet the Trinity, and honest apologetics says so out loud. But it is exactly the category Scripture reserves for God.

When Paul addresses the Athenians he does not argue for one more deity among the city’s many; he names the God who “made the world and everything in it,” who is not “served by human hands, as if He needed anything,” and in whom “we live and move and have our being.” Israel’s God reveals himself simply as “I AM,” being itself, not a being who happened to turn up. Paul’s doxology gathers the whole point into worship: from him and through him and to him are all things.

So the move from philosophy to faith is a genuine further step, carried by the rest of the case: the fine-tuning of the world, the resurrection, the character of Christ. But it is not a leap into a different subject. The necessary ground the argument reaches and the Creator Scripture proclaims are not rivals; they are the same answer described at two different depths.

The best objections do not attack a caricature, so neither should we.

• Why not let the universe itself be the necessary thing? This is a serious move, but it has to be argued, not asserted just to avoid God. The universe is a poor candidate: its contents are contingent, it changes, and mainstream cosmology points to a finite past. A whole made of parts that could each have been otherwise is not obviously something that exists by its own nature.
• Maybe the principle of sufficient reason fails, and some facts are simply brute. Perhaps. But “brute fact” is not an explanation; it is a decision to stop asking. We are free to weigh that choice, and a stopping point that explains (a necessary being) is more reasonable than one that merely halts inquiry (a contingent universe declared off-limits to the question).
• Doesn’t explaining each part already explain the whole? Not when the property in view belongs to the whole as well. If every sheep in a flock is contingent, the flock is contingent too; stacking up dependent things never manufactures independence. “Why is there a flock at all?” outlives the explanation of each sheep.
• Then who made God? This quietly re-imports contingency into the one reality the argument defined as non-contingent. The full reply is on who created God?: a necessary being is not the first item in the chain but the ground of the chain, so asking for its cause misuses the terms.

Popular fine-tuning talk often reaches for fragile examples, such as Earth sitting at exactly the right distance from the sun, as though a few million miles either way would have doomed everything. Leave those aside. They invite easy rebuttals (planets vary, life might adapt, there are billions of worlds) and they miss the more basic point.

The serious version concerns the basic settings of physics itself: the relative strengths of gravity and the nuclear forces, the masses of fundamental particles, the value of the cosmological constant, and the extraordinarily low-entropy initial conditions of the early universe. The Stanford Encyclopedia survey describes a model as fine-tuned when it reproduces the phenomena we observe only within an extremely narrow band of possible parameter values. Adjust several of these and you do not get a different kind of life; you get a universe with no stars, no stable atoms, no chemistry, nothing that could host complexity at all.

Fine-tuning is not self-interpreting. It is a fact in search of an explanation, and there are only a few serious candidates. The survey itself lays the main options side by side:

• Brute luck: the settings simply happen to be life-permitting, and that is a primitive fact we accept without further explanation.
• Physical necessity: a future theory will show the constants could not have been otherwise.
• Many universes: ours is one member of an enormous ensemble, and we naturally find ourselves in a rare hospitable one.
• Design: the settings are life-permitting because a purposeful mind established them so.

Listing design among these is not a logical fallacy. It is a hypothesis to be weighed by how well it predicts and explains, and purpose predicts a life-permitting universe far more naturally than blind chance does. “Necessity” so far remains a promissory note; no theory yet shows why the constants must take life-friendly values, and even one that fixed them would only raise the further question of why the laws are that fruitful.

The most serious objection runs through the anthropic principle: of course we observe a life-permitting universe, since otherwise we would not be here to observe anything. That is true, but it answers a different question. It explains why any observer who exists sees fine-tuning; it does not explain why a life-permitting universe exists in the first place. John Leslie’s image fits well: a prisoner survives fifty marksmen who all miss. “I’m alive, so naturally I observe that I survived” explains nothing; the fact that every shot missed still cries out for a reason.

A multiverse can blunt the force of the argument, and physicists explore it for independent reasons, so it should not be waved away. But two costs remain. First, the universe-generating mechanism must itself be finely structured to yield viable universes, which relocates the tuning rather than removing it. Second, an unobservable ensemble invoked precisely to dissolve a design inference is, methodologically, no more modest than a Designer, and arguably less so. Fine-tuning does not refute the multiverse; it keeps design on the table as a genuine rival.

Scripture does not do physics, but it describes exactly the kind of world fine-tuning hints at: ordered, intelligible, and dependent. The heavens “declare the glory of God”; what can be known of him is “clearly seen” in what has been made; in Christ “all things hold together.” Isaiah says God formed the earth “to be inhabited,” not as a cold accident but as a place meant for life.

Used well, fine-tuning is one strand in a cumulative case, joined with the contingency of the universe and the historical evidence for Christ. It does not by itself deliver the gospel, or even the God of Israel. It presses one question: is the order of the world mindless, or the work of wisdom? Christianity has been answering “wisdom” since its opening line.

The Gospel writers go out of their way to rule out a phantom. When the disciples think they are seeing a spirit, Luke records Jesus answering the fear head-on: “a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” He shows them his hands and feet, invites them to touch him, and eats a piece of broiled fish in front of them. The scene is not decorative; it is deliberately anti-ghost.

The point throughout is continuity. The body that is raised carries the marks of the body that was crucified: the same hands, the same feet, the same wounds. This is why the resurrection is the natural sequel to the crucifixion: not a different being who replaces Jesus, but the very Jesus who died, now alive.

John tells the story of Thomas, who refuses to believe on report and demands to see the wounds for himself. A week later Jesus offers him exactly that, and Thomas answers with the highest confession in the Gospel: “My Lord and my God!” A bodily encounter produces worship of the risen Christ as God.

These were not fleeting private impressions. The appearances are repeated, physical, and communal: meals shared, conversations held, wounds inspected, a commission given. Whatever else the first witnesses were doing, they were not describing a comforting inner feeling. They claimed to have met a person.

The earliest written testimony, Paul’s creed in 1 Corinthians 15, says Christ “was buried” and “was raised.” The body that went into the tomb is the body that came out, now the “firstfruits” of a coming harvest. Paul stakes the entire Christian hope on it: because Jesus was raised bodily, those who belong to him will be too.

The usual objection cites Paul’s own words: he speaks of a “spiritual body,” and says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” But this misreads the grammar. Paul contrasts a “natural body” with a “spiritual body,” and as many New Testament scholars note, those adjectives name the animating power, not the material. A “natural body” is not made of soul; just so, a “spiritual body” is not made of spirit; it is a body fully animated and empowered by the Holy Spirit, imperishable and glorious. As for “flesh and blood,” the phrase is a Jewish idiom for frail, mortal humanity. Paul’s very next lines call for “the perishable” to be “clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” That is transformation of the body, not escape from it.

Two careful versions of this objection deserve a careful answer.

Some groups teach that Jesus was raised as a spirit creature, his fleshly body disposed of, and that the appearances were materializations. This reads the texts against their grain: the wounds, the eating, the “flesh and bones,” and the empty tomb. The full response is at Jesus rose as a spirit creature.

Other readers, more sympathetic, propose that the first Christians had visionary experiences later dressed up in physical detail. But a vision does not empty a tomb, and Paul, who lists his own encounter alongside the rest, grounds the believer’s future bodily resurrection in the pattern of Jesus’ own. Strip the body out and the physical scenes, the empty grave, and the entire logic of 1 Corinthians 15 become inexplicable.

Concede what is true: Paul does not teach a mere resuscitation of a corpse that will die again, but a transformed, glorified body. Transformed, however, is not the same as immaterial. The risen Jesus is continuous with the crucified Jesus: changed, deathless, but unmistakably him. This is what makes the public apostolic witness a claim about history rather than private comfort.