Can You Believe in Both Science and the Nicene Creed?

The assumed conflict between science and Christian faith is one of the most powerful cultural narratives of our time. The story goes like this: once, people believed in God because they did not understand how the world worked. Science has progressively explained what was once mysterious, making God unnecessary. The Nicene Creed, with its talk of a divine being creating everything and a man rising from the dead, belongs to the pre-scientific age.

What Science Does and Doesn't Address

Science is a rigorous method for investigating the natural world through observation, experiment, and theory-building. It is extraordinarily powerful within its domain. But it cannot answer questions outside that domain: Why is there something rather than nothing? What gives human life its value? Is there meaning in the universe? What happens after death? These are not scientific questions — not because they are unimportant, but because they lie outside what the scientific method is designed to investigate.

The Creed's Claims Are in a Different Category

The Nicene Creed claims that God created all things. This is a metaphysical claim about the ultimate source and ground of existence — not a claim about the mechanism of creation that science could test. The Big Bang, evolution, and all the processes science has discovered could be exactly how God made things. Science tells us how; the creed addresses why and by whom.

The resurrection claim is different: it is a historical claim, not a metaphysical one, and it is in principle the kind of thing that historical evidence can bear on. The earliest Christians were not arguing that Jesus rose as a spiritual symbol; they were claiming that on the third day his tomb was empty and he was seen alive by witnesses. That claim has been examined, debated, and found credible by many rigorous historians. The question "Can you believe in science and the creed?" is really two separate questions. The answer to both is yes.