Has Science Replaced God?

"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Psalm 19:1

Psalm 19:1
A common modern conviction holds that science and religion are at war, and that science has won — that as knowledge advances, God retreats into the shrinking gaps of what we cannot yet explain. Is that the true story? Or is the supposed war a myth, and the very enterprise of science more at home in a universe created by a rational God than in one produced by blind chance?
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Skeptic View

The skeptic argues that religion and science are fundamentally opposed. Religion, he says, explains the world by appeal to the supernatural; science explains it by natural law and evidence, and has steadily replaced religious explanation — of the origin of species, of disease, of the cosmos itself. The Galileo affair shows the Church as the enemy of inquiry, and “God” has become a placeholder for ignorance, invoked to plug the gaps that science has not yet closed.

Christian View

The “war” is largely a nineteenth-century invention, and the history tells against it. Modern science was born in the Christian West, nurtured by the conviction that a rational Creator had made an ordered world the human mind could understand. Its pioneers — Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Mendel, and the Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, who first proposed the Big Bang — were believers who saw no contradiction. Science answers how the world works; it is silent on why there is a world at all, or why it is intelligible to us. God is not a gap in the explanation but the reason there is anything to explain.

Summary

Rightly understood, faith and science are not rivals but partners, each answering questions the other cannot. Science describes the mechanism; it cannot tell us why there is a cosmos, why it is ordered, or why we can comprehend it. Far from being threatened by discovery, the believer expects the world to be intelligible — because a Mind stands behind it.