Faith and Science Playing Nice | The Branch

Can faith and science coexist? For Pastor Chris Reed, Pastor Anthony Lombardi, and Pastor Matthew Johnson, that question is not just worth asking. It is worth sitting down and working through together.

In this episode of The Branch Podcast, the three pastors pick up where guest speaker Pastor Tim left off after his message on the perceived tension between faith and science. What follows is a wide-ranging, grounded conversation that takes both intellectual honesty and biblical conviction seriously.

Pastor Matthew opens the conversation with a question that cuts to the heart of the whole discussion. What actually requires more faith, he asks, believing everything came from nothing, or believing there is a creator?

His answer is direct. When you look at the fine-tuning of the universe, the precision required for life to exist at all, and the reality that something inanimate somehow became living, the idea that it all happened without a designer starts to feel like the harder thing to accept. Pastor Matthew points out that even some people he knows personally who do not hold a Christian faith have told him they find it more intellectually honest to believe some kind of intelligence initiated life on earth.

Pastor Anthony builds on that. He notes that science as a discipline has real limits. It can observe and measure, but it cannot get behind the question of what caused the universe to exist in the first place. At some point, honest inquiry has to acknowledge that the boundary has been reached. To move beyond that boundary and claim there is definitely no creator, he argues, is not scientific. It is a faith system of its own, one that Pastor Tim called scientism in his message the week prior.

Pastor Chris brings up a question that lands closer to home for many believers. When is it appropriate for Christians to push back on what the scientific community broadly accepts?

Pastor Matthew's answer is measured. He says that when science genuinely proves something, his response is curiosity, not defensiveness. He wants to understand how new information fits within his faith, not because his convictions are fragile, but because he does not believe truth ultimately contradicts itself. He does, however, draw a clear line between scientific laws and scientific theories. A theory presented as settled fact, he says, deserves critical reading regardless of how confidently it is offered.

Pastor Chris adds that his freshman college biology professor shaped how he approaches this. The professor's whole point was to teach students to read scientific articles carefully and not accept claims as gospel truth just because they are confidently presented. That same critical thinking, Pastor Chris says, applies in both directions. Christians should apply it to science, and they should apply it to their own assumptions about what scripture is saying.

One of the richest threads in the conversation is the question of whether the creation account in Genesis was ever meant to answer scientific questions at all.

Pastor Anthony's response is clear. Genesis is primarily about theology, not science. It is answering the why, not the how. The ancient world had competing creation narratives, most of them involving warring gods and bloodshed. Genesis sets itself apart by presenting a God who creates out of love, with purpose and intention, and who makes human beings in his image not as slaves but as partners in caring for what he made.

Pastor Matthew picks up the thread and talks about the danger of reading Genesis through a modern Western lens. A 21st century reader expects a news article to be factually accurate, chronologically ordered, and complete. But that is not how ancient Israelite writers thought or wrote. Ancient literature used poetry, parallelism, and layered storytelling. The audience understood what kind of text they were reading. Pastor Matthew points to the literary structure of Genesis 1, where the days mirror each other in a way that reads more like a work of art than a timeline, as evidence that the author was doing something theological rather than scientific.

"Why can't we read it as poetry," he says, "or as these very layered stories that are historically rooted, but that are teaching ideas about who God is and what it means to be human?"

The conversation turns to evolution, and all three pastors engage it carefully.

Pastor Chris is honest about where his tension lies. Evolution requires enormous amounts of death through natural selection. He is not sure that death was part of the original created order before the fall, and he also struggles with the idea of made in the image of God being something that emerged gradually rather than something God gave immediately and directly. He reads the account of God forming Adam from dust and breathing life into him as carrying real weight.

Pastor Anthony agrees. He says the special designation given to human beings in Genesis, the repeated refrain that God looked at them and called them very good, the charge to have dominion over creation, and the unique covenantal relationship God offers to people but not to animals, all of it points to a distinction that an evolutionary framework makes very hard to maintain. One of his theology professors put it this way: human beings are the only creatures on earth capable of destroying the world. That kind of capacity, he argues, did not come from natural selection.

Pastor Matthew holds the tension openly. He acknowledges question marks he has not fully resolved, including the reality that the scientific record points to large populations of humans existing on earth at the same time. He does not pretend to have tidy answers. What he does say is that even if it turned out God used some form of guided process in creation, that would not shake his faith. God would still be the initiator and the designer behind all of it.

Pastor Chris names himself an old earth creationist and explains why he holds that view without apology.

His reasoning rests on two points. First, the Hebrew word translated as day in Genesis carries a range of meaning far wider than a single 24-hour period. Second, biblical genealogies were never designed to function as timelines. They highlight specific individuals for specific purposes. Treating them as a complete generational record and then doing the math to arrive at a 6,000 year old earth, he says, is standing on faulty ground.

Pastor Anthony frames the whole question in a way that takes the pressure off entirely. Whether God created everything in an instant or set a 13.6 billion year process in motion, he is still the one who spoke it into being. Neither view threatens the core of what Christianity actually teaches. What changes between them is not the identity or the power of God but only the timeline.

"If God did it in a moment, how awesome is our God," he says. "If he did it over 13.6 billion years, how awesome is our God."

One of the sharper sections of the conversation arrives when the pastors examine what happens when science tries to answer philosophical and moral questions it was never designed to address.

Pastor Matthew makes the point that science, taken to its logical end without a moral framework rooted in something beyond natural selection, cannot actually account for why human beings care for the weak, protect the elderly, or sacrifice for strangers. If survival of the fittest is the operating principle, then strength should dominate and weakness should be discarded. But no one actually lives that way, and no society that wants to survive actually advocates for it.

Pastor Chris takes that a step further by pointing to what happens when meaning gets stripped from human experience. Love reduced to a brain chemical. Compassion explained as a survival mechanism. When science is used to reduce everything to its most basic parts and those parts are assumed to be the whole story, the meaning that God designed human life to carry gets lost entirely. People are left with an existence instead of a life.

"God has obviously designed us to not just have an existence," Pastor Chris says. "We're designed to flourish."

The final question of the conversation asks how Christians should think about scientific and technological advancement when it consistently outpaces moral reflection.

Pastor Matthew's answer is that the concept of progress is only meaningful if you know what you are progressing toward. Technology aimed at human flourishing, at aligning life more closely with the way God designed people to relate to him and to one another, is worth celebrating. Technology developed for profit or convenience with no moral framework guiding its use is a different thing entirely.

Pastor Anthony references the story of Babel as a biblical example of human ingenuity untethered from the purposes of God. The ability to build something, he says, does not automatically mean it should be built. Not all ends justify every means, and Christians have a responsibility to say so clearly.

The episode wraps with a moment of humor. Pastor Anthony walks back some comments made in an earlier episode about intermittent fasting after receiving a spirited correction from Dr. Todd Hansen, a member of The Tree Church. The retraction is made in good fun, and the conversation ends with the announcement that this is the last Branch Podcast episode before a summer break.

Pastor Chris thanks Pastor Anthony and Pastor Matthew for a conversation that clearly mattered to all three of them. The listener can hear it.

If this conversation sparked something in you and you are looking for a church community in central Ohio that takes both faith and honest questions seriously, we would love to meet you at The Tree Church.

We have two campuses in the area:
Our Lancaster campus is located at 721 N. Memorial Drive, Lancaster, OH 43130. Our Logan campus is located at 36 Hocking Mall, Logan, OH 43138. Both campuses hold services on Sunday mornings at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM.

Whether you have been following Jesus for years or you are just starting to ask the hard questions, there is a place for you here. We would love to see you on a Sunday.