Sounds a bit strained, doesn’t it? As it turns out, the teaser itself doesn’t reflect the tone and tenor of the participants for the conference itself. The roster includes a wide variety of scientists from outright skeptical scoffers (like physicist Victor Stenger), to extremely fair-minded theist-friendly non-theists (like physicist Paul Davies), to outright and upfront Christians (like astronomer Hugh Ross). While the writer of the conference brochure might believe that science is making God obsolete, a good number of the actual heavy-weights of the conference are shifting the scientific scales toward theism rather than skepticism.

Witness the following summary of conference participant Stuart Kauffman’s newest book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. 

“Consider the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere? As the eminent complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman explains in this ambitious and groundbreaking new book, people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality. For those who believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief. In Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues that the science of complexity provides a way to move beyond reductionist science to something new: a unified culture where we see God in the creativity of the universe, biosphere, and humanity. Kauffman explains that the ceaseless natural creativity of the world can be a profound source of meaning, wonder, and further grounding of our place in the universe. His theory carries with it a new ethic for an emerging civilization and a reinterpretation of the divine. He asserts that we are impelled by the imperative of life itself to live with faith and courage-and the fact that we do so is indeed sublime. Reinventing the Sacred will change the way we all think about the evolution of humanity, the universe, faith, and reason.”

Stuart Kauffman is a man everyone has to respect. He’s the founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics and a professor of biological sciences, physics, and astronomy at the University of Calgary, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His previous books have plumbed the depths of complexity in the universe, and Kauffman has been a stalwart in the fight against the Richard Dawkins-type reductionism. Granted, Kauffman is not an orthodox Christian. He’s not even close enough to be a heretic, and is probably some kind of a pantheist. But he’s certainly dead-set against the simple-minded, self-congratulatory atheism of the so-called Four Horsemen, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Maybe astronomer and Christian apologist Hugh Ross can bring Kauffman a bit further along the road to truth during the conference coffee breaks. Who knows?

Of course, no one knows how the conference will turn out, so we’d like to offer our own thoughts on the great question: Does science make belief in God obsolete?

Yes, bad science does it all the time. For at least the last two centuries, science has been defined by materialistic and reductionist assumptions that, if accepted as true, would indeed make belief in God obsolete. Happily, the materialistic and reductionist assumptions themselves are themselves being made obsolete by the advance of science. Perhaps that explains much of the hot-under-the-collar, in-your-face atheism of folks like Richard Dawkins.

So we put the question again: Does science make belief in God obsolete?

And we answer: No, the best science, the latest science is pointing the way to God. The days of atheist-friendly science have entered their twilight; the days of theist-friendly science are now dawning.

This statement may seem rather jarring to some Christians. For a very long time—too long—many Christians have chosen a kind of default position in regard to science. Science deals with the “how” but not the “why,” they say. Science neither proves nor disproves God’s existence. It merely works with the mechanics of the universe so religion as nothing to fear from science.

On this view, science and theology never conflict because they deal with entirely different realms. The problem with this approach is that it concedes everything to science—and not just any view of science, but the reductionist, materialistic view that so well serves atheists. While it is often put forth with good intentions, it ends up creating a kind of schizophrenia where the view of nature given to us by science would naturally lead us to believe that God doesn’t exist, and the view of the supernatural clung to by theists shrinks to affirmations of spirituality that tend to be entirely unconnected with the universe we live in.

That would seem to be an odd position for Christians, who hold that the God who created the world also left the imprint of his masterful wisdom in nature. No less an authority than St. Paul said of the God of Abraham and the Father of the Divine Son through Whom the world was created, “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Roman 1:20).

St. Paul’s words would seem to lead to the position that science, properly done, would naturally tend to support theology, rather than destroy it (as Dawkins would have it) or be entirely unconnected to theology (as the “default position” of many Christians would have it). That doesn’t mean that theologians should hijack science and force it to conform to pre-conceived theological positions. Rather, it means that because the same God created the universe Who redeemed it, we can then expect that nature, patiently investigated, will point to the magnificent wisdom of its Maker. We have proof of this in the history of science itself. Nature, patiently investigated, is revealing even now that the artificial shackles of the atheist-inspired reductionist, materialist approach to science is woefully inadequate to the real wonders of the world.