Apologetics · Creation & Science — naturalism, materialism, and the argument that is always owed
You have had this conversation. Maybe at a job site, maybe with a nephew home from his second year at a state school.
You raise something a purely material account of the world has not explained. Pick any of them: how the first living cell assembled itself, where the coded information in DNA came from, why there is a universe at all rather than nothing, how a three-pound organ produces a person who knows he exists. And the reply comes back, calm and confident, in one sentence.
“Science hasn’t figured that out yet.”
Then the conversation moves on, and you are left with the odd sense that something was settled without anything being shown. You are right. Something was. The word yet did all the work, and it should not have been allowed to.
The Position Has a Name
Philosophers of science call it promissory materialism — a label Karl Popper used pointedly, and he was no friend of Christian apologetics. The idea is simple: every unexplained feature of reality is treated as a bill that materialism has already promised to pay, and the promise is accepted as though it were payment.
It is important to say clearly that this is not stupid, and that the people who say it are usually not being dishonest. There is a real track record behind the confidence, and a Christian who sneers at it is a poor witness. Disease was once demons and bad air; now we have germ theory and antibiotics, and millions of people are alive because somebody kept looking for a mechanism instead of settling for a mystery. Planetary motion yielded to mathematics. Inheritance yielded to genetics. The patient, methodical search for natural mechanism is one of the great goods of human history, and much of it was built by men who believed God made an orderly world worth investigating.
So grant all of that generously. Then ask what the promise is actually doing in the argument.
Problem One: It Cannot Lose
A claim that no possible outcome could count against is not a strong claim. It is an untestable one.
Consider how the promise handles evidence. When a material mechanism is found, that is a win for materialism. When one is not found, that is a research opportunity — a yet. There is no finding, in principle, that the position will accept as a loss. Fifty more years of failure on the origin of life will be read exactly as the last fifty were: not as data, but as a to-do list.
Now notice who usually raises the unfalsifiability objection. It is the standard charge against Christian belief: your claim is constructed so that nothing could ever count against it. That charge has teeth, and believers should be able to answer it — we can, because the faith stakes itself on a public event in a datable year that Paul says would collapse the whole structure if it did not happen. But the man making the charge needs to hold still long enough to notice that the blade cuts both ways, and that his yet is the least falsifiable sentence in the room.
He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. (KJV)
Proverbs 18:17
Every case sounds airtight until somebody cross-examines it. That is not hostility. That is how truth gets established, and Scripture recommends it.
Problem Two: Past Success Does Not Transfer Across Kinds of Question
The promise runs on an inference: science has explained a great many things naturally, therefore science will explain the rest naturally. As an argument, that is only as good as the assumption that the remaining items are the same kind of item as the solved ones.
They are not, and the difference is not a matter of difficulty. Germ theory, orbital mechanics and heredity are all questions about how the machinery works. Science is magnificent at those, and will keep being magnificent. But several of the open questions are not about machinery at all.
- Why is there any machinery? Not “what happened at the first moment” — a physics question — but why there is a physical order at all rather than nothing. No description of the machinery can produce the machinery.
- Why is the machinery regular? Science does not discover that nature is lawful; it begins by assuming it, and could not run a single experiment otherwise.
- Why does describing it work? Mathematics done on a chalkboard predicts what a particle will do. That is strange, and no amount of further particle data explains it.
These are not gaps in the map. They are questions about why there is a map, why the territory holds still long enough to be mapped, and why a creature made of territory can read maps. A better microscope is not an answer to any of them, because the microscope is inside the thing being asked about.
Problem Three: The Argument From Ignorance, in a Lab Coat
“We do not know yet” is an honest sentence. Every scientist alive says it, and so should every Christian.
“We do not know yet, therefore the answer will be purely material” is a different sentence entirely. The conclusion is not drawn from evidence; it is drawn from the absence of evidence, plus a prior commitment about what kinds of answers are permitted to exist.
And that move has a famous name, because believers have been rightly criticized for making it. The “god of the gaps” objection says: you cannot take the current edge of human knowledge and plant a deity on it, because the edge keeps moving. That objection is correct, and Christians should accept the correction rather than resent it. If your case for God rests on some mechanism not yet discovered, your case will erode, and it will deserve to. Plenty of sincere believers have attached God to a gap that later closed, and the church absorbed an avoidable embarrassment every time.
But the same logic, applied evenly, is fatal to the yet. Naturalism of the gaps is the identical fallacy with the sign reversed: an unknown is assigned to the preferred category in advance, before anybody has looked.
What the Christian Claim Actually Is
This is the point where the conversation usually gets confused, so be precise about it. The biblical claim is not that God is the explanation for the leftover percentage science has not reached. God is not a competitor to mechanism. He is the reason there is mechanism.
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. (KJV)
Colossians 1:17
“Consist” in the King James is doing heavy lifting; the Greek means to hold together, to cohere. The claim is not that Christ fills the cracks. It is that He is why there are not cracks everywhere — why the universe has the kind of steady, intelligible, repeatable character that makes a laboratory possible in the first place.
That is why a new scientific explanation costs Christianity nothing. Lightning has a complete electrical account, and Psalm 29 is not retired. A mechanism explains how; it never rules out who. If I describe the chemistry of a loaf of bread down to the last reaction, I have not shown that no one baked it. Materialism’s great sleight of hand is to present a full account of the how and present it as a verdict on the who, when the two questions were never in competition.
A Word Paul Used, and What He Meant By It
O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called. (KJV)
1 Timothy 6:20
That verse has been badly abused, so handle it carefully. “Science” in 1611 English simply meant knowledge; the translators were not reaching for laboratories, microscopes or peer review, none of which existed in the sense we mean. Paul is not warning Timothy away from studying the world. The phrase names something narrower and far more recognizable: knowledge that is falsely so called — confident claims that have outrun what anyone actually knows.
Read that way, the verse is not an attack on science. It is a caution that applies to anyone, in any century, in a lab or a pulpit, who dresses a conviction in the clothing of knowledge. The sentence “science will eventually explain it” is a conviction. It may turn out to be right about some particular item. It is not, today, knowledge about any of them.
How to Answer Without Winning Cheaply
Do not try to score. Ask three questions, slowly, and let them do the work.
- “What would it take to change your mind?” If no answer comes, the two of you have just discovered together that this is a commitment rather than a conclusion. Say that kindly. It is not an insult; it is a clarification, and it is the most useful sentence in the conversation.
- “Is this a question about how the machinery runs, or about why there is machinery?” Most of the heat in these arguments comes from running the two together.
- “Can an explanation of how something works tell you whether anyone intended it?” Take it to bread, or a cathedral, or a sentence on a page. The answer is no, every time, and he already knows it everywhere except here.
Why It Rarely Ends on the Evidence
Be realistic. You will not usually argue a man out of materialism, because materialism is seldom held on evidential grounds alone. There is something in all of us that would rather inhabit a universe with no owner, because an owner has claims.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. (KJV)
Romans 1:20
Which means your job in that conversation is smaller and more hopeful than you thought. You are not required to close every gap or win every exchange. You are required to be honest, to be kind, to refuse to let an IOU pass as a payment — and then to point past the argument to the one place where Christianity did not ask for a promissory note. It named a tomb, a city, a Roman governor and a date, and invited everyone to go check.
Naturalism says: wait, and eventually we will explain everything. The gospel says: come and see, because it already happened.
One of those is a bill. The other is a receipt.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist