I have heard and read about the omniscient grip that science has been tightening around the neck of theology, strangling it till it can no longer grasp for air, causing it to slowly suffocate. Generally, this is how atheists have come to view theology. In their eyes, theism has slowly lost its credibility as science has advanced and made discoveries in the natural world. I’ll submit that this is one of the greatest mistakes that have been made over the last two centuries in the Western world.

The ungrounded assumption that God has been eliminated has fervently evolved into the dogmatic notion that God should no longer serve as a possible explanation for anything in this universe. As a result of this anti-theistic evolution in the scientific community, the God hypothesis is often laughed at and the subscribers to the God hypothesis are mocked as being no better than those who still believe in the tooth fairy, Santa Clause, or the Easter Bunny. In their own minds, they have become so intellectually superior that they fail to tolerate such nonsense due to having outgrown such superstitious fables of a man in the sky who tells people what to do.

Despite their atheistic approach on science and their outlook on the incompatibility of science and faith, it is important to acknowledge the biggest flaw in their thinking as well as the biggest hypocrisy. The quote below from Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin accurately describes the scientific community’s ideological commitment to materialism,

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment – a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

This is an excellent summation of how many scientists conduct their studies today. God is not considered as a possibility because the materialists are ideologically committed to coming up with materialistic conclusions despite what hypothesis the evidence may prefer. Really, it isn’t a shocker that they feel that way. They have convinced themselves that God is false so they do not consider God as a viable explanation for anything. Anti-theistic quotes such as the one above really depict how ideologically driven the scientific community has become, which now finds it scientifically acceptable to predetermine what types of conclusions are acceptable despite of the evidence. This scientific narrow-mindedness permeates with hypocrisy because it is contradictory to the very principles that science was founded upon.

To me, this sounds like a problem. Scientists who commit themselves to an atheistic ideology and only welcome conclusions that support that ideology are without integrity. Essentially, much of the scientific community has become a “No God Zone”. The secular worldview has continued to dilute the theological influence in the scientific sphere because theology is considered to be incompatible with science despite the fact that scientific evidence largely supports the Biblical account of creation. I’d encourage all scientists to have enough integrity to defy the status quo of the scientific community and perform science with an open mind and consider all hypotheses, not simply materialistic ones. This “commitment to materialism” as stated by biologist Richard Lewontin is the cause for the widened ideological gap between the scientists and the theologians. The evidence is essentially meaningless if the person examining the evidence isn’t truly committed to follow the evidence where it leads. Embrace God and the evidence shall give you greater insights into reality.