Before I taught this, before I wrote any of it, I was a PhD student in physics and a convinced atheist. I want to tell you why that changed — not to convert anyone, but because the question that changed me is one I think every honest person meets sooner or later.

Here’s where I started. I loved science. I still do. It felt like the cleanest, most honest way to know the world: you measure, you test, you let the data decide. And the more I learned, the more the circle seemed to close — as if everything real could, in principle, be reduced to physics. If a thing couldn’t be measured, I quietly assumed it wasn’t there. That assumption is exactly what made me an atheist. Science, I thought, held the whole map.

Last week I argued that the warfare map of science and religion is bad history. This week I have to confess a second bad map — the one I was carrying around inside me.

Because late one night, buried in problem sets, a question surfaced almost against my will. Why am I here? And where am I going?

Notice what those are not. They are not “how did matter arise” or “what is the mechanism” — science is brilliant at how. They are questions about meaning, and about destiny. I could describe every particle in my body and not come one inch closer to either one.

In the course I teach, Alister McGrath has a name for my mistake. He calls it scientism:

“‘scientism’—an inelegant contraction of ‘scientific imperialism’—which privileges the natural sciences, holding that scientific enquiry enables the resolution of conflicts and dilemmas in contexts where traditional sources of wisdom and practical knowledge are seen to have failed.” — Alister E. McGrath, The Territories of Human Reason, 57

That was me, exactly. I had granted science the right to define what was real, and quietly filed everything it couldn’t measure under not there. The philosopher J. P. Moreland sharpens the mistake into two settings. There is the hard version:

“Strong scientism implies that something is true, rationally justified, or known if and only if it is a scientific claim that has been successfully tested … There are no truths that can be known apart from appropriately certified scientific claims, especially those in the hard or natural sciences.” — J. P. Moreland, Scientism and Secularism, 29

And a softer one that lands in nearly the same place:

“Weak scientism is still scientism, but it allows for more ‘wiggle room.’ … Nevertheless, weak scientism still implies that science is by far the most authoritative sector of human knowing.” — Moreland, Scientism and Secularism, 29–30

I had been living in the strong version without ever deciding to. And it cannot ground its own claim: by its own rule, whatever can’t be measured can’t be confirmed — so meaning, purpose, even right and wrong slip straight through the net. I had mistaken a magnificent map of part of the territory for the whole of it.

Here’s something I rarely say out loud. I did not arrive at that wall empty-handed. I grew up in China, a short drive from Confucius’s hometown; as a young man I practiced Daoist cultivation through qigong; my entire education, up to college, ran on the current of official atheism. Before I ever opened a Bible, I had already been handed several of the world’s great answers to how a life should be lived. None of them had readied me for the night my own method failed.

Now back to the States. Some Christians, whom I had never known before, knocked on my door on a cold early evening. That night, they didn’t try to convince me to become a Christian. Rather, they made me a strange offer. They didn’t hand me an argument. They handed me an experiment — and that got my attention, because running experiments was exactly how I had been trained to think. They pointed me to one line in Paul’s letter to the Romans: “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom 10:13; NRSV). Just try it, they said. Call on him. See what happens.

I want to be honest about how reluctant I was. Every instinct said this was soft, unscientific, beneath me. But I had already admitted that my own instrument couldn’t reach the question that mattered most. So one night I simply called on the name of the Lord Jesus.

And something happened that I had no category for. A warmth — a current — filled my whole being. Not a conclusion I reasoned my way toward. Something that arrived. For the first time, why am I here and where am I going stopped feeling like a locked door.

I won’t claim that experience proves anything the way a measurement proves a value. I am telling you it pointed — past the edge of the map, toward a territory I had assumed wasn’t there.

Two rivers met that night. The scientist in me did not die; he learned the true size of his map. The atheist in me did not simply flip a switch to belief; he followed a question across a border he had sworn didn’t exist. And the crossing did something I never expected: it made me unable to hear the rest of the world’s answers as mere noise.

(The road from that night was long. Physics gave way to engineering, then to a decade on Wall Street, and only years later to theology — but that is another post.)

Because if my equations couldn’t reach the question of why, then neither could the tidy Western quarrel of “science versus faith.” A Confucian ordering a life around ritual and relation; a Daoist listening for the grain of the Way; a Muslim philosopher reading the cosmos as a book of signs; the Indian traditions thinking hard about consciousness, rebirth, and release — these are not failed physics. They are serious, centuries-deep answers to the questions physics never asked. Having once lived inside three of those answers myself, I cannot pretend the conversation is only ours.

And it is not only the other religions that are larger than the Western story. So is my own faith. I came to Christ in the West. But the years of long and short missionary trips have brought me all over the world — mainland China and Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, Cambodia and Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, then the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Ethiopia — and in each place I met Christians whose faith did not sound like mine. The gospel had learned the local language, the local music, the local ache. Christianity is not a Western religion the rest of the world borrowed; it is now, overwhelmingly, a global and non-Western faith, and it meets science in as many accents as it has homes.

That is what this series is really for: to put the world’s big questions on the table — mine, yours, and those of the traditions and the Christians the Western debate keeps leaving out — and to let science and faith actually talk to each other, no longer in vacuum, but in real sites with atheism(s), secularism(s), religious pluralism, ever-advancing sciences and technologies, and in particular, artificial intelligence.

So let me hand you the experiment that was once handed to me, turned into an invitation. What is your life’s big question — the one your usual tools can’t quite reach? Bring it. We are going to need it.

Next week: we cross the first border — how the Chinese traditions I grew up inside read a cosmos that Western science thought it had fully mapped. Or perhaps something totally different: “The wind blows where it chooses…” (John 3:8).

Grateful you are reading — Jacob

Further Reading

McGrath, Alister E. Science & Religion: A New Introduction. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.

The standard one-volume textbook on the field — and one of the key course texts behind my course on Science & Religion. McGrath maps the relationship through Ian Barbour’s four models, a history from the medieval synthesis to Darwin, and the methodological questions of proof, models, and natural theology. He also names scientism — science as “the whole map” — as a philosophical overreach that cannot ground its own claim.

McGrath, Alister E. The Territories of Human Reason: Science and Theology in an Age of Multiple Rationalities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

McGrath’s more advanced treatment of how the sciences and theology reason. It is here that he defines scientism in his own words — “an inelegant contraction of ‘scientific imperialism’” that lets one form of knowing claim the whole field — the definition quoted above.

Moreland, J. P. Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018.

A brisk, accessible case against scientism from an analytic philosopher. Moreland distinguishes strong scientism (only science yields real knowledge) from weak scientism (science is merely the most authoritative knowledge) and argues the weaker form is no safer than the stronger — the book behind the two definitions quoted above.

You already carry the picture in your head. Galileo, on his knees before the Inquisition, rising to mutter ”and yet it moves.” The brave scientist; the frightened church; reason marching forward while faith retreats, step by grudging step. It is one of the most successful stories the modern West has ever told about itself.

It is also, as history, largely false.

The story even has authors. In 1874 a chemist named John William Draper published History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science; two decades later Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, followed with A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Between them they gave us the “warfare thesis” — the idea that science and religion are two armies locked in a war as old as faith itself. The books were bestsellers. The cartoon in your head is their child.

Historians no longer believe it. Not conservative historians — historians, across the board.

Consider what the warfare map leaves out. The medieval church was the chief patron of natural philosophy; the university is a Christian invention. The men who founded modern science — Kepler, Boyle, Newton — were, to a person, devout, and understood their work as reading the mind of God. Even the Galileo affair, the one case everyone cites, dissolves under a close look into a tangle of patronage, papal politics, personal arrogance, and academic turf — a quarrel far messier, and far more human, than “science versus faith.”

Three scholars will help you see it, if you want to go deeper. John Hedley Brooke (Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, 1991) gave the alternative its name — the ”complexity thesis”: the real record is too varied to fit any single slogan, whether of war or of harmony. Ronald Numbers gathered two dozen historians to dismantle the popular fables one by one in a book with a wonderful title, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009). And Peter Harrison (The Territories of Science and Religion, 2015) showed something stranger still: the very words “science” and “religion,” as we now use them — two separate domains that could go to war — are barely two centuries old. You cannot have a war between two things that had not yet been carved apart.

So what does a truer map look like?

Not a battlefield, but a borderland — where the traffic runs both ways. Sometimes there is real tension. Far more often there is borrowing, funding, mutual influence, shared wonder. The physicist Ian Barbour offered a useful set of directions decades ago: science and religion can stand in conflict, in independence (each minding its own questions), in dialogue, or in integration. Four possible roads — and “war” is only ever one of them, and rarely the busiest.

Here is where I want to push further than the usual correction, though. The warfare map is bad history. It has a second flaw, and it runs deeper: it is provincial. Draper and White were arguing about a Western, largely Protestant experience, and then quietly mistook it for the human story. Most of the world’s believers were never conscripts in this war. When a Confucian scholar, a Muslim philosopher, or a Chinese Christian looks at the heavens, the questions do not arrive pre-sorted into “science” and “religion” at all. The map we inherited is not only wrong about the past. It is too small for the planet.

That is the map I want to redraw with you in the weeks ahead — wider than the West, and honest about the borderland.

Next week: the world’s other answers — how traditions outside the West have framed nature, mind, and the divine, and why their voices change the whole conversation, told from the perspective of my personal spiritual (atheist vs. Christian) and academic (science vs. theology) journey.

If a truer map interests you, subscribe — and bring a curious friend.

Grateful you are reading —

Jacob

Further Reading

The warfare thesis — the story this post corrects

Draper, John William. History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. New York: D. Appleton, 1874.

The founding statement of the “conflict thesis.” Writing just after the First Vatican Council, Draper cast the history of science as a war between the “expansive force of the human intellect” and “traditionary faith,” aiming his fire chiefly at Roman Catholicism. It is the urtext everything below corrects. Free at the Internet Archive.

White, Andrew Dickson. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1896.

The other, more influential classic of the “warfare” narrative. White — Cornell’s first president — catalogues case after case of “dogmatic theology” obstructing science, while carefully distinguishing that dogmatism from religion itself, which he expected to flourish once the fighting stopped. Free at the Internet Archive.

The historians’ correction

Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

The book that named the alternative — the “complexity thesis.” Brooke shows the real record is far too varied to fit any single slogan, whether “conflict” or “harmony,” and it remains the standard scholarly correction to Draper and White. Available at Cambridge University Press.

Numbers, Ronald L., ed. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Twenty-five historians each dismantle one popular myth — that Galileo was tortured, that medieval Christians taught a flat earth, and more — collectively retiring the Draper–White conflict thesis in favor of the evidence. The most accessible entry point on this list. Available at Harvard University Press.

Harrison, Peter. The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Harrison’s Gifford Lectures push deeper still: “science” and “religion” as we now use the words are barely three centuries old. Tracing the Latin scientia and religio from inner virtues to bodies of doctrine, he shows the very categories that could “go to war” are recent Western inventions. Available at University of Chicago Press.

The map itself

Barbour, Ian G. When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000.

The source of the fourfold map used in this post — Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, Integration. The physicist-theologian lays out the four postures and applies them across astronomy, quantum physics, evolution, and neuroscience. The clearest one-volume orientation to the field.