Is Science the Enemy of Faith? The Conflict Myth

A pastor stood in front of a room that included teenagers who had school the next morning and told them, in so many words, not to trust what their science teachers say about where human beings came from. To make the point he reached for a piece of ancient history. The Egyptians, he said, taught that humans evolved from worms, and look how far that got them, and look what your textbooks are doing now.

The claim is false. Not shaded, not oversimplified. False in a way that a curious ninth-grader can verify on a phone during lunch.

I want to be careful about how I frame this, because the man was not being malicious and he was not being lazy in the way people usually mean. He was doing what he understood the job to require. He believes the culture is coming for these kids, he has said from that same platform that his fear is watching them go off to college and come home unsure whether God is real, and he was trying to hand them armor. What he handed them was a claim that falls apart the first time anybody checks it, attached to the authority of the pulpit, the Bible, and Jesus, all bundled together.

I have run one of these to ground before. The story about a narrow gate in Jerusalem called the eye of the needle has the same shape: a real pastoral point resting on a fact nobody can produce. That bundling is the problem, and it is the reason this essay exists.

Did the Egyptians Believe Humans Evolved from Worms?

No. Egyptian anthropogony is not obscure, and Egyptian religion turns up in Scripture often enough to be worth knowing firsthand, as anyone who has worked through the plague narrative already knows. There are two main strands here, and neither one has a worm in it.

In the first, the god Khnum forms human beings on a potter’s wheel. He is depicted doing it, most famously in the relief at Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari where he shapes the queen and her ka on the wheel, and the tradition runs back into the Coffin Texts.^[1] Humans are crafted, deliberately, by a divine artisan.

In the second, humanity arises from the tears of the creator god. The Egyptian text works a play on words between remyt, tears, and remetj, people. It is a pun doing theological work, which is a very Egyptian thing for a text to do. John Currid and John Walton both treat this material in their work on Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern backgrounds, and neither of them has anything resembling worms.^[2]

So where does the worm come from? The trail runs through Herodotus. In Histories 2.123 he reports that the Egyptians believe the soul, at death, enters into whatever creature is being born at that moment, cycles through land animals and sea creatures and birds over three thousand years, and then re-enters a human body. He adds, pointedly, that certain Greeks had adopted the doctrine as their own.^[3] Most Egyptologists read the passage as Herodotus pressing Pythagorean categories onto Egyptian afterlife belief he did not fully understand. Later popular retellings compressed the cycle into an upward ladder from lower creatures to man, which is close enough to sound like evolution if you are not paying attention, and by the time it reaches a nineteenth-century church history like Döllinger’s it has the shape of a proto-evolutionary doctrine. From there to a sermon illustration is a short hop.

So the sermon’s claim is a conflation of two unrelated things, transmitted secondhand, and then deployed as a foil for the image of God. There is a real point buried in it about human dignity. The support underneath it does not exist.

Here is the practical cost. A kid repeats that in a classroom. His teacher corrects it in thirty seconds. Now the whole package is suspect: the pastor, the church, the text, the Lord. Bad apologetics does not fail neutrally. It inoculates. The pipeline the man is afraid of is the one he is building.

Does Explaining How Something Works Disprove God?

Everything downstream of that sermon depends on a framing that was never true, and John Lennox is the best I have read at taking it apart. Lennox is an Oxford mathematician, not a theologian, which is exactly what makes him useful here. He is not a pastor defending territory. He is a working academic in the general neighborhood of the discipline the pulpit is nervous about.

His central move is a distinction between mechanism and agency. Suppose a man who has never seen a car assumes there is a little god inside the engine making it run. Then he studies engineering, takes the thing apart, learns about combustion and timing and compression, and finds no god in there. Fair enough. But if he concludes from this that Henry Ford therefore never existed, he has made an error that has nothing to do with engineering. Understanding how the engine works and knowing who designed it are two different questions, and answering one does not touch the other.^[4]

Lennox has a second version that works better for people who do not care about cars. His Aunt Matilda bakes a cake. Bring in the best scientists in the world and they will tell you everything: the caloric content, the protein structures, the chemistry of the bonds, the physics of the particles, the equations describing their behavior. Complete description. Now ask why she baked it. Not one of them can answer, and their inability is no insult to their disciplines. The only way anyone finds out is if Aunt Matilda tells them.

That does not mean reason shuts off at that point. This is the part people miss. If she says she baked it for her nephew Jimmy’s birthday, and you know for a fact she has no nephew named Jimmy, you are entitled to doubt her. Reason is exactly what you use to evaluate the answer. Revelation supplies what unaided investigation cannot reach; it does not replace the mind that receives it.

So “science or God” is a category mistake. Christians who accept the framing have surrendered ground they were never obligated to give, and then spend the rest of the argument trying to win it back on terms that guarantee they cannot.

What Is the God of the Gaps Argument?

It is the objection that bringing God into any of this is intellectually lazy. You cannot explain something, so you say God did it, and every time science fills a gap your God gets smaller.

The objection is a good one. It should be taken seriously, and by Christians before anybody else, because it identifies a genuinely defective idea about God.

Richard Swinburne puts the correction in one line. He is not offering God to explain what science has not gotten to yet. He says he postulates a God to explain why science explains.^[5] That is a different claim entirely. The order and intelligibility of the world are the thing being accounted for, not the leftovers.

Think about where the gaps version actually leads. If God is what remains after explanation, then every discovery is a defeat, every advance is a loss of territory, and the believer has a permanent stake in ignorance. That is not the God of Scripture. That God upholds the whole system, the parts we have figured out and the parts we have not, and Lennox’s point is that Henry Ford is not hiding in the gaps in our understanding of combustion. He is responsible for the engine, including all the bits we understand perfectly well.

Which means the pastor and the atheist he is arguing with have quietly agreed on something. Both of them are treating God and mechanism as rivals for the same job. One says the mechanism won, the other says the mechanism has holes and God lives in them. Neither one has questioned the premise.

Have Science and Religion Always Been at War?

Ask most people, believers included, and they will tell you science and religion have been fighting for centuries and that the church has been losing on points since Galileo. Two stories carry almost all the weight of that impression, and historians of science took both of them apart a long time ago.

Galileo first. He was not an unbeliever squaring off against a church that hated inquiry. He believed in God and in Scripture his whole life, he held that the laws of nature were written in the language of mathematics by God’s own hand, and the Jesuit astronomers of the Collegio Romano initially praised his work and celebrated him for it. His fiercest early opposition came from the secular philosophers of the universities, who were committed Aristotelians and were furious that a man with a telescope had put holes in their master’s cosmology. Galileo’s own account, in the 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, is that the academics were the ones lobbying the church to move against him. He says outright that his opponents, mistrusting their case in the field of philosophy, went looking for a shield in the authority of the Bible.^[6]

None of which excuses what the Inquisition did, or the centuries the Roman church spent rehabilitating him. But two details usually left out of the sermon version: he was never tortured, and after the 1633 sentence his confinement was commuted quickly, first to the home of a friendly archbishop in Siena and then to his own villa at Arcetri. He also did himself no favors. Told to include the pope’s argument in his Dialogue, he put it in the mouth of a character he named Simplicio, which means roughly what it looks like it means. There is a lesson in there about being right and being insufferable at the same time.

The second story is the 1860 Oxford exchange between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, which everyone remembers as the moment a scientist demolished an ignorant churchman. Wilberforce was not ignorant. He held a first-class degree in mathematics, he was vice-president of the British Association, and a month after the meeting he published a long and substantive review of Origin of Species in the Quarterly Review. Darwin, who had every reason to dislike it, called it uncommonly clever and said it picked out all the most conjectural parts and brought forward the difficulties.^[7] Wilberforce insisted in print that the theory should be judged on scientific grounds alone and that objecting to a fact because it seemed to contradict revelation was a mark of weak faith. Nor was the opposition to Darwin coming only from clergy: Richard Owen, the leading anatomist in England, and Lord Kelvin both had problems with it.

As for who won, no major London paper treated it as a decisive public humiliation. There is no official record. Most of the colorful accounts came from the Darwinian circle, and the legend was codified more than twenty years later, largely by Francis Darwin and Leonard Huxley writing their fathers’ Life and Letters.^[8] Hooker, who was on Huxley’s side and in the room, wrote to Darwin two days afterward that Huxley had not carried the audience and that he had stepped in himself.^[9] The Athenaeum scored it roughly even. Wilberforce wrote to a friend that he thought he had the better of it.

Colin Russell, surveying what the research actually shows, says the popular picture of enduring hostility is not merely inaccurate but a caricature strange enough that the real historical question is how it ever became respectable.^[10] And there is a straightforward answer. Huxley was running a campaign. He wanted the emerging professional scientific class to hold the cultural authority that clerics had held, and a story about a bishop being publicly humiliated by a scientist served that campaign perfectly. Michael Poole notes that Huxley started capitalizing Nature and handing her attributes that used to belong to God, which is a curious move for a man who claimed to be draining the world of gods.

I want to keep this honest. The church has genuinely obstructed inquiry at points, and T. F. Torrance, who argued strongly that Christian theology mothered modern science, said plainly that the church also hindered it, that Augustinian eschatology turned attention away from the physical world for a thousand years, and that a hardened idea of authority discouraged the scientific mind. John Brooke adds the other necessary caution: the fact that a religion helped science along does not prove the religion true. Both things go in the ledger.

What Is the Difference Between Evolution and Evolutionism?

C. S. Lewis is doing something adjacent to Lennox and it pairs well, because Lewis is never actually attacking science. His target is scientism, the slide from a method into a metaphysics, and the difference matters more than almost anything else in this argument.

In “The Funeral of a Great Myth” he separates two things that get fused in ordinary conversation. There is evolution, a biological theory, held provisionally by biologists because it accounts for more of the data than the alternatives on the table, subject to revision like any other theory. And there is Evolutionism, a popular cosmic story in which everything everywhere is climbing steadily upward from worse to better, from simple to complex, from primitive to advanced, all by itself, forever. The second one is a myth in the technical sense. It is a story people live inside, and it carries emotional freight the biology never asked for.^[11]

Lewis makes an argument from chronology that I had not thought about until I read it. If the popular myth were simply the theory filtering out into the public, it should have shown up after the theory became widely known. It did not. The imaginative picture of upward cosmic progress was already in circulation before Darwin published, running through the Romantics and through nineteenth-century ideas of progress generally. The story came first and the science got recruited into it afterward.

That distinction is the one the pulpit collapses, and the collapse is why the fight feels existential. When a pastor hears “evolution,” he is hearing Evolutionism, the whole cosmic story with no God in it and no purpose anywhere. He is right that the story is a rival to Christianity, because it is. It is a competing account of what everything is for. But he is fighting it by attacking a biological theory, which is like trying to refute Marxism by disputing a statistic about steel output. You can be right about the statistic and lose the argument that matters.

Lennox, incidentally, is not a Darwinist. Large sections of God’s Undertaker argue that the mutation-and-selection mechanism cannot carry the whole load put on it, and he is careful, methodical, and citing working biologists when he does it. But he refuses to let the argument be framed as science versus God, and that refusal is the thing worth learning from him whether or not you land where he lands on the biology.

Do Most Scientists Believe in God?

If science and faith were really at war you would expect scientists to be atheists and non-scientists to be believers, and that is not the distribution. James Leuba surveyed a thousand American scientists in 1916 and found roughly four in ten affirming belief in a God who answers prayer. Edward Larson and Larry Witham repeated the survey in 1997, after eighty years of extraordinary scientific advance, and got essentially the same figure.^[12] The number barely moved.

There is a number that cuts the other way and I would rather put it in front of you than have you find it later. Larson and Witham ran a second study the following year, this time on members of the National Academy of Sciences, and belief there came in near seven percent. Almost total disbelief at the top of the profession.^[13] That figure is real and it gets quoted constantly, usually with no mention of the first one.

It is also not the comparison Leuba set up. He surveyed a broad sample of working American scientists, and the only way to measure change across eighty years is to go back to the same population, which is what the 1997 study did. The elite sample tells you something worth knowing, and what it tells you is that disbelief concentrates sharply at the top. What it does not tell you is that scientists in general have been abandoning God as they learn more, because across eighty years and a broad sample, they have not.

The real division is not between the lab and the pew anyway. It is between two accounts of reality, and one of the clearest statements of it came from Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist and no friend of theism. Reviewing a book by Carl Sagan, he acknowledged that scientists sometimes accept claims that violate common sense, and said the commitment to materialism comes first, before the evidence, not out of it. Then the line that gets quoted everywhere, because it is unusually candid: “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”^[14]

That is not a finding. It is a decision about what will be permitted to count as an answer, made in advance. Lewontin was honest enough to say so out loud, which is more than most manage.

And the same fault line runs the other direction, into territory the church should find encouraging. The conviction that the universe is orderly, that it runs on laws, that those laws can be found out by looking rather than deduced from first principles, is not itself a scientific result. It is a presupposition the whole enterprise rests on. Melvin Calvin, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, traced that conviction back to ancient Hebrew monotheism, the idea that one God governs everything rather than a committee of gods each running his own province by his own rules. Whitehead argued that the medieval insistence on the rationality of God is what made the scientific revolution possible. Lewis compressed it: people looked for law in nature because they believed there was a lawgiver.

Francis Bacon, whom a lot of people call the father of the scientific method, taught that God gave us two books, nature and Scripture, and that an educated person studies both.

The pastor is teaching kids to close one of them. He thinks he is protecting the other.

How Should Christians Teach Kids About Science?

Not with a list of facts to deploy. Facts get corrected. What actually holds is a shape.

Someone can explain how a thing works and still tell you nothing about why it exists or who is behind it. Those are separate questions and finding out the first never settles the second.

God is not the explanation for what we have not figured out yet. He is the reason there is anything orderly enough to figure out. If your faith gets smaller every time a scientist publishes, the problem is upstream of the scientist.

The war story is a nineteenth-century invention with a specific author and a specific purpose, and the historians took it apart decades ago. Nobody sent the memo to either pulpit or lab.

And a story about the universe climbing forever upward toward nothing in particular is not a scientific finding. It is a myth people are living inside, and it is worth arguing with. Just argue with the right thing.

None of that requires a kid to distrust his teacher. Most of it gives him something to do in that classroom besides brace.

Claim Tiering

Strong / Confirmed

Egyptian anthropogony includes Khnum forming humans on a potter’s wheel (Coffin Texts onward, iconography at Deir el-Bahari and Esna) and humanity arising from the creator’s tears via the remyt / remetj wordplay.
Herodotus, Histories 2.123, reports Egyptian belief in a three-thousand-year transmigration cycle through land animals, sea creatures, and birds, and notes Greek adoption of the doctrine.
Wilberforce published a substantial review of Origin of Species in the Quarterly Review, July 1860, and Darwin praised its acuity in a letter to Hooker.
No major London paper treated the 1860 exchange as a decisive defeat for Wilberforce; no official record exists; the legend was codified in the 1880s and 1890s by the Darwinian circle.
Galileo was never tortured, and his confinement after 1633 was commuted to the archbishop’s residence at Siena and then his own villa at Arcetri.
Leuba (1916) and Larson and Witham (1997) produced substantially unchanged belief figures among American scientists across eighty years.
Larson and Witham (1998) found belief among National Academy of Sciences members near seven percent.
Lewontin’s “Divine Foot” statement is verbatim from his January 1997 New York Review of Books piece.

Contested / Suggestive

That Herodotus is imposing Pythagorean categories onto Egyptian afterlife belief. This is the majority Egyptological read, not a unanimous one.
The transmission path from Herodotus through later popular retellings and nineteenth-century church history to modern sermon illustration. The endpoints are documented; the middle links are reconstruction.
The suggestion that Wilberforce’s local unpopularity, rather than the substance of the exchange, drove the legend of Huxley’s victory.
The Calvin and Whitehead thesis that monotheism is the historical precondition of modern science. Widely argued and influential, and disputed by historians who read the causation as looser and multi-causal.
Early Jesuit support for Galileo was real but neither uniform nor durable, and this essay should not be read as claiming otherwise.

My reading, not a sourced claim

That the pastor and the atheist he opposes share the premise that God and mechanism compete for the same explanatory job. That is my inference from the shape of the argument, not a statement about anyone’s stated position.
That Evolutionism rather than evolutionary biology is what most pulpit anti-evolution energy is actually aimed at.
That the National Academy figure and the broad-sample figure are measuring different populations and should not be swapped for each other. The numbers are sourced; the framing is mine.

Unresolved / not yet verified

I have not traced the sermon illustration back through American revivalist or creationist literature to find where it entered that stream. The nineteenth-century European shape is documented; the American route is not. Do not repeat a transmission story more specific than what is above.

Footnotes14

On Khnum, the potter's wheel, the Deir el-Bahari relief, and the Coffin Texts material, see the Glencairn Museum overview listed in Sources and the bibliography attached to it.
Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament; Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament.
Herodotus, Histories 2.123, Perseus Digital Library.
Lennox, God's Undertaker, ch. 2, "God, an unnecessary hypothesis?"
Swinburne, Is There a God?, p. 68, quoted in Lennox, God's Undertaker, ch. 3.
Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615.
Darwin to J. D. Hooker, 20 July 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project, quoted in Jonathan Smith, BRANCH.
Smith, "The Huxley-Wilberforce 'Debate' on Evolution, 30 June 1860", BRANCH.
Hooker to Darwin, 2 July 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project. Hooker himself later called this letter far too much of a braggart epistle.
Russell, "The Conflict Metaphor and its Social Origins", Science and Christian Belief 1 (1989).
Lewis, "The Funeral of a Great Myth", in Christian Reflections.
Leuba, The Belief in God and Immortality (1916); Larson and Witham, Nature 386 (1997): 435-436.
Larson and Witham, "Leading scientists still reject God", Nature 394 (1998): 313.
Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons", New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997.

Sources17

Primary texts

Herodotus, Histories 2.123, Godley translation. Supports the transmigration report and the Greek adoption note. Free in full at the Perseus Digital Library.
Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (1615). Supports Galileo's own account of academic opponents reaching for Scripture. Free in full, Internet Modern History Sourcebook text hosted by Hanover College.
J. D. Hooker to Charles Darwin, 2 July 1860. Supports Hooker's contemporary account of the Oxford meeting. Free in full at the Darwin Correspondence Project.

Journal articles and scholarship

Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, "Scientists are still keeping the faith", Nature 386 (1997): 435-436. Supports the broad-sample figure. Paywalled; free through most university libraries.
Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, "Leading scientists still reject God", Nature 394 (1998): 313. Supports the National Academy figure. Paywalled; free through most university libraries.
Richard C. Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons", New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997. Source of the a priori materialism passage. Free to read, may prompt for registration.
Jonathan Smith, "The Huxley-Wilberforce 'Debate' on Evolution, 30 June 1860", BRANCH. Supports the Darwin quotation, the press silence, and the 1880s codification of the legend. Free in full, peer-reviewed.
Colin A. Russell, "The Conflict Metaphor and its Social Origins", Science and Christian Belief 1 (1989): 3-26. Russell's later treatment of the same material appears as "The Conflict of Science and Religion" in Gary Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction. The journal original sits behind the society's archive; the linked PDF is a course-hosted scan of the Ferngren chapter.

Egyptian background

Jennifer Houser Wegner, "Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths: From Watery Chaos to Cosmic Egg", Glencairn Museum News. Supports Khnum, the potter's wheel, and the Deir el-Bahari relief, with full bibliography. Free in full.
John D. Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997). In print. No verified free full text, so no link rather than a guess.
John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006). In print, and in Logos.
UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, entries on cosmogony. Peer-reviewed and open access at eScholarship, searchable by author and topic rather than by a per-entry link I could verify.

Books

John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2009). Source for the Ford and cake analogies, the Swinburne citation, and the Galileo, Huxley-Wilberforce, Lewontin, Calvin, Whitehead, Torrance, Brooke, Russell, and Poole material as cited here. In print, and on Audible.
Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 68. In print.
C. S. Lewis, "The Funeral of a Great Myth", in Christian Reflections. In print.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. In print, and on Kindle.
Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter (London: Fourth Estate, 1999). In print.

Where a book has no verified open link I have given the publication data and an access note instead of pointing at a bookseller or a scan of uncertain provenance. The Egyptian material and the Herodotus transmission trail come out of prior research in my own Logos library rather than from Lennox, and the Döllinger link is the weakest step in that chain. Where the reconstruction outruns the documentation I have said so in the tiering rather than smoothing it over.

Science Is Not the Enemy of Your Faith