Are Christians "Anti-Science?"
Not at all. Science has many Christian roots. Most of the early scientists were Christians (Copernicus, Galileo, Pascal, Isaac Newton, Carl Linnaeus, Johannes Keppler, Robert Boyle, Louis Pasteur, Jean Henri Fabre, Michael Faraday, John Ambrose Fleming, etc.). These great scientists operated within a Christian framework.
An interesting fact is that the vast majority of all scientific development has come out of western civilization, which has Christianity as its basis. Christianity views God as rational and trustworthy, which implies that His creation is rational and orderly and thus can be examined. Nature in the Christian view (as compared to non-Christian worldviews) was no longer an object of fear and worship.
The idea of laws of nature came from Christianity. And the concepts of subduing nature and being stewards of nature are right from the first book of the Bible—Genesis.
As D. James Kennedy suggests (see resource list), science could not have begun in the Buddhist or Hindu worlds. The essence of those religions is that the physical world has no reality, that it is an illusion. Scientific inquiry requires the assumption that the world is real. Nor could science have begun in the Muslim world because that worldview is dominated by fatalism, and fatalism is antithetical to the concept of progress.
Misconceptions about the Bible have been around for a long time. For example, one misconception is that the Bible teaches that the earth is flat, or that it is the center of the universe. A closer examination of Scripture shows otherwise. The idea of a flat earth from the Bible is rooted in the biblical language of "four corners" in Isaiah 11:12 and Revelation 7:1, and "four winds" in Jeremiah 49:36 and Matthew 24:31. The Hebrew and Greek words translated "corner" are also translated as "quarter" and are best understood as "directions" or "headings." The Bible's usage obviously refers to the four directions as measured from the particular focal point of interest and is the standard convention used in surveying and mapping to this day. Moreover, in Isaiah 40:22 the Bible uses the term the "circle of the earth," also translated "sphere of the earth" as is evident from the context.
It can be said that Christianity has produced more literate and educated people than any other movement in the history of mankind. For example, in America all but 3 of the first 126 colleges established in the United States were built in order to propagate the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Bible was not written as a science textbook. But, when the Bible does reveal truths related to science, the Bible can be trusted. Indeed, the Bible demonstrates scientific knowledge and concepts far before mankind had developed the technological base for such knowledge.
Biologist William J. Cairney (in the book edited by John Warwick Montgomery, see resource list) discusses many such biblical pre-science evidences in the fields of human health, disease control, agriculture, etc. He states, "These rules of sanitation and diet stand on a foundation requiring considerable knowledge of epidemiology, microbiology, physiology, plant pathology, and animal pathology, all of which require a technological base not available until the last hundred years or so of human history."
Henry Morris (in Appendix 8 of his Defender's Study Bible, see resource list) lists numerous other pre-science evidences in the Bible.
So-called conflicts of science and the Bible are often conflicts between interpretations of the facts. While there are questions for which there are as yet no explanation, there is no fundamental conflict between science and Scripture. (See also the Evolution or Creation section of our web site.)
More importantly, while we live in a time of change and of great scientific discovery, what we discover about the human heart is that it has not changed at all. Matters of human nature, emotions, relationships, and ultimate meaning remain the same. It is in Scripture that we find enduring truths as appropriate for modern man as for ancient man.