Every scientist on earth exercises faith before breakfast. I do not mean that as an insult, and I do not mean it as a riddle. I mean it as a plain description of what happens before any experiment is run.
The Assumption Under Every Experiment
Before a scientist measures anything, he assumes that the universe runs on laws. He assumes those laws will still hold tomorrow, so that a result found today will mean something next week. He assumes nature is uniform, rational, and honest, that it is not playing tricks, and that the same cause will produce the same effect in his laboratory as on the far side of the galaxy.
Can science prove any of that? It cannot. To run the proof you would have to assume the very thing you set out to prove, because every experiment relies on the uniformity of nature in order to mean anything at all. This is the starting faith of all science. Nobody earns it in a laboratory. Everybody brings it in through the door.
Which Worldview Expects an Orderly Universe?
Here is the question that interests me. Given that science must assume a law-governed cosmos, which worldview actually expects one?
If the universe is a random accident, it owes you nothing. It owes you no laws, no regularity, and no tomorrow. There is no reason an accident should be rational, and no reason it should stay the same from one day to the next. The atheist assumes that it will, but his worldview gives him no grounds for the assumption.
Now consider a rational God who created all things and upholds them moment by moment. That worldview predicts exactly the ordered, intelligible cosmos we find. Laws are what you would expect from a Lawgiver. Consistency is what you would expect from a faithful God. It is no accident that modern science was born in Christian Europe, among men who wanted to think God’s thoughts after Him.
Borrowed Theology
So science does not run on atheism. It never has. It runs on borrowed theology: a universe that is lawful because Someone made it so, and knowable because He made us able to know it.
The atheist in the laboratory trusts the laws of nature with his whole career while denying that nature has a Lawgiver. He is right to trust the laws. He is simply standing on a foundation that his own worldview cannot supply, and he has borrowed it from the very faith he says he has outgrown.
The next time someone tells you that faith and science are enemies, remember where science got its first assumption. It did not get it from a microscope. It got it from a worldview in which the heavens were made by a reasonable God, and it has been living on that inheritance ever since.
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