Can science and faith coexist?

Short answer

Many people assume science and religion are at war. Historians of science largely reject that "conflict thesis." Modern science grew up mostly in a Christian setting. Its founders, including Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell, were believers. They expected nature to be orderly and intelligible because it was made by a rational God.

Science and faith answer different but overlapping questions. Science asks how the natural world works. Faith asks why there is a world at all, what it is for, and how we should live. A scientific explanation doesn't rule out God, any more than explaining how a car engine works rules out Henry Ford.

There are real points of tension, such as how to read Genesis or how to understand evolution, and Christians hold a range of views on them. But many scientific discoveries actually raise questions that point beyond science: the universe's beginning, the fine-tuning of physical constants, and the fact that mathematics describes nature so well. Today many leading scientists, such as Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project, are committed Christians who see no contradiction.