Is Science the Only Way to Know Something Is True?

Can you believe in something that hasn’t been proven scientifically? Our current culture has an infatuation with science, incessantly proclaiming that it is the solitary test of what is true. This current stance is often the primary argument to discredit Christianity. If science is the only way to know things, then you can’t really know that Christianity is true. And further, without scientific confirmation that the Bible is true, Christians cannot judge anyone by the religious standards set in it.

But is it true that science is the only way to know things? I believe there is a strong argument against that claim and that we gain certainty and confidence in all kinds of truths in the world outside of scientific proof. So, let’s look at six different ways that we can know something is true.

The first way humans know truth is through hardwired knowledge. There are certain things that every person knows. We can’t not know them. Examples are logical truths, mathematical truths, and moral truths.

The second form of knowledge is established through sensory perception. When our five senses interact with the material world around us, we gain knowledge by seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting.

Another way we can know something is true is through intuition. Intuition is making deduction and drawing conclusions from what is happening around us. Often, these intuitions are difficult to make explicitly. There are certain things that you know even though you can’t fully explain how you know them to be true. We often do this when we are trying to determine if someone is telling the truth.

Fourth, we know certain things about reality by our experiences. There are some facets of the world you can’t fully know until you have experienced them. Think of knowing how to ride a bike. We can read about pressing the pedals to move forward and using our muscles and hand-eye coordination to balance, but until we have gotten on the bike, we don’t actually know how to ride it.

The fifth way we can be confident in knowing is through inference. Science often rests upon inference. We combine our observations, experiences, and hardwired knowledge and we deduce certain conclusions. Every time you heat water it starts to boil at 212 degrees. After many observations, you may conclude that water boils at 212 degrees. This is an example of inference.

The final way we accept something as true is through authority. We know a great many things on the authority of someone else telling us they are true. We are confident in many of our beliefs because a reliable witness or an expert in a particular field has told us it is true, and we base our knowledge on these authorities.

So, what is the significance to Christians that science is not the only way we know something to be true? It is this: by combining these other types of knowledge we can affirm our faith and grow in confidence that the Bible is true. We can weigh our moral intuitions against the moral standards of the Bible. We can hold the theory of creation up against our sensory interactions with the physical world around us. We can experience the world and draw inferences from it. We can go to the Bible and test its claims against reality. And as we experience Christianity, we can see whether it makes good on its claims. We can read the New Testament and test whether the eyewitnesses were reliable. Most importantly, we can go to the Scriptures and see that this is a divine book. When this realization dawns, we believe its claims on the authority of God himself.

Don’t be fooled into thinking science is the only way to real knowledge. You can know Christianity is true and hold confidence in that belief.