A number of years ago, a high school acquaintance of one of my kids was discussing the Christian faith that we as a family have embraced.

He looked down, shook his head, and said, “Wow. They don’t know anything about science.”

And that’s a common belief in our culture today: Science has made belief unnecessary and illogical. Faith is only for the uneducated, superstitious, or irrational. Sticking your head in the sand is one thing, but holding your head high and believing an illusion is worse. Science and faith cannot coexist.

Ian Hutchinson would disagree. He has said, “The impression that many people have got that science is somehow incompatible with Christianity, with a spiritual view of the world, is simply a mistake; it isn’t the case factually. That idea is a myth.”

Who is Huitchinson? He received a bachelor’s degree (natural sciences: physics) from Cambridge University and a doctorate (engineering physics) at the Australian National University. He is currently professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From his bio: “He and his MIT team designed, built and operate the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, an international experimental facility whose magnetically confined plasmas, with temperatures reaching beyond 50 million degrees Celsius, are prototypical of a future fusion reactor. In addition to 200 journal articles, Dr. Hutchinson is widely known for his standard textbook on measuring plasmas: Principles of Plasma Diagnostics and A Student’s Guide to Numerical Methods, both published by Cambridge University Press.” Hutchinson is also the author of the computer program TtH a TeX to HTML translator, widely used for Web-publishing of mathematics. Is the guy a scientist? I think so. He has written and spoken widely on the relationship between science and the Christian faith, and is the author of the 2011 book “Monopolizing Knowledge: A Scientist Refutes Religion-Denying Reason-Destroying Scientism.”

“Scientism,” Hutchinson says, “leads some people to believe that religion is a waste of time because it can’t possibly be knowledge because it’s not science.”

Because science produced important practical advances like the engineering that gave us the Mackinac Bridge or the polio vaccine, we have given some scientists credibility when they make claims about life’s meaning or purpose. Scientism states that all real knowledge comes from science and only science. And then the media give them a megaphone to promote their atheist philosophical stances.

However, many disciplines such as history don’t use the methods of science. One cannot reproduce history to test its truth claims. No one does observations and experiments to prove the efficacy of Alexander the Great’s battle strategies that won the Battle of Gaugamela.

The scientific method cannot reveal all truth. A jury is tasked with making a decision on guilt or innocence. Can we use science for that? No. We weigh what evidence is presented, what counter claims are made, and sift through our thoughts to come to a conclusion. We can’t simply use reproducible scientific experiments.

Hutchinson says, “There are many different routes to knowledge, and science is just one of them.” History, philosophy, literature, the law, the arts, etc. enrich our lives and give meaning.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not a scientific claim. It is a historic one, says Hutchinson.

Christians aren’t called to blind faith, or what can be called “believism,” believing something with no evidence just because you want it.

The early Christians were surrounded by evidence and even demanded it. The early writings we have are from eyewitnesses. The Bible doesn’t teach that faith is the opposite of evidence or rationality. In fact, it is that very faith that led to the creation of universities and the pursuit of knowledge to understand creation and make a better world. Hutchinson says, “The fundamental question is this, has science displaced or has it ruled out” faith in God? “I would give the definite answer that that can’t be the case.” He points out that “the early scientists, those responsible for the scientific revolution, were predominantly Christian people. Certainly for them adopting an understanding of the natural world based on explaining nature did not replace their faith. It supplemented it. It helped it in many respects.”

And that is still happening today. “Actually,” he says, “if you ask, who are the Christians in universities, you find that scientists are not underrepresented … if anything, they’re overrepresented. It’s the scientists that tend to be Christian, and it’s the sociologists, the politicians, and people in the humanities” that tend to be antagonistic to Christianity.

So don’t be intimidated by scientism. There is no war between Christianity and natural science. There are many of the top scientists in the world, along with the very founders of modern science, who are firm believers in God — the loving, beneficent, merciful, kind, yet holy creator who wants a relationship with you.