In addition to all the factors discussed above that may, for whatever reason, have fed a current of anti-Christianity, one cannot overestimate the sheer explanatory and life-transforming power of modern science. What might once have been ascribed to the direct finger of God, such as a lightning strike or a fortuitous recovery from the jaws of death, can now, in many cases, be explained by measured sequences of natural processes. And over the past 200 years in particular, these scientific explanations have grown too numerous to count.
On the other hand, while science’s advancing power, from Newtonian gravitation theory to antibiotics and DNA, has been truly stupendous, its province is what might be called the “how” questions. How, for example, do the planets move? How is disease altered by scientific medicine? How do the components in the DNA double helix make us the individuals that we are?
Yet in addition to how things work, human beings are driven to ask “why” questions, for humans are interested not just in processes – how things happen – but in why they happen. From “Why am I the person that I am?” to “Why am I curious about the universe, when knowledge of the universe plays no part whatsoever in what I eat, or how safe I may be when walking down the street?” In short, matters that have no biological survival value at all!
And science, while triumphant in answering the how questions, cannot even begin to answer the why questions, for they belong to a non-physical category best dealt with by philosophy or theology. So when an atheist tries to convince you that why questions are a delusion, an irrelevance, or a waste of intellectual energy, then simply ask him or her, “Then why are you trying to convince me that you are right?” The bottom line is that spiritual and religious questions, and why we still search for answers to them, remain untouched by science. But more of this in Chapter 10.