A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on January 11, 2026 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Matthew 2: 1-12
The creation accounts in the book of Genesis portray cosmic order, the power and purpose of God, and the place of humanity in relation to God, the other animals, and the rest of what today we call nature. They depict a static world, in which God arranges creatures and the firmament in their right stations.
For both the Jews in exile, and the early church, a beleaguered minority, this cosmology offered an inspiring sense that, however lowly their state and desultory their prospects, God was above and beyond, and God was not just their tribal god but the maker of all things who would restore order in due course. Once minority status was replaced, for Christians, by a sense that God had ordered earthly, or at least political, affairs in tune with this heavenly theatre, then the accounts took on a rather different character. No longer were they subversive texts, affirming the legitimacy of otherwise oppressed communities; now they sounded suspiciously like government propaganda, dragooning God onto the side of order and the status quo.
When Copernicus showed the earth circled round the sun, when Galileo highlighted the tensions between astronomy and the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, and when Darwin proposed the theory of evolution through natural selection, the threat was not just to the scientific establishment or to ancient cosmology; it was to the whole assumption that God ordered people in hierarchies and ordained society accordingly.
Resistance to the ‘progress’ of science was never simply obscurantism or the privileged clinging to status and power. It was in significant part suspicion that science would disenchant the world, impoverish existence and dispel the ways ordinary existence could attain divine significance. In the account of the visit of the magi. Matthew portrays ‘science,’ as we may call it, in the wise men searching the heavens and seeing a star. He depicts revelation in the chief priests and the scribes searching the scriptures and finding reference to the birth of a ruler in Bethlehem. The story displays science taking the magi to Jerusalem – very close to where Jesus is born; but only revelation can take them to Bethlehem – that last vital link in the journey. The point is that reason and revelation didn’t begin to clash in the sixteenth century: they’ve been in creative tension with one another since the Bible was written.
The argument about science and faith isn’t whether some Christians have reacted very defensively in the face of scientific discoveries and challenges, and so distorted the faith as reactionary and wooden; neither is it that some scientists have exaggerated the tension, or evidenced an antipathy toward religion so profound and abrasive that it seemed to go beyond a dispassionate argument and become a crusade. Instead, the dispute lies largely in the answers to three far-reaching questions.
First, is Christianity intrinsically founded on certain purportedly historical events that simply cannot have happened? The findings of modern science say the world is a single planet among a universe that comprises a hundred million galaxies; waters of a sea do not spontaneously part, virgins do not conceive, and dead bodies decompose and don’t come back to life. Christians respond that these are unique events, which science, committed as it is to the study of repeatable phenomena, cannot comprehend; and that if there is a God, a concept too enormous for science to encompass, such things are not beyond the power of the one who makes all things.
Second, and more broadly, is the whole mind-set of faith a flawed form of thinking, in which evidence is not properly evaluated, and too much weight is given to culture, inherited values, and mythical stories – where an objective appraisal would rule out such arbitrary elements? Science is all about evidence, and faith is thin on evidence. In that regard, faith lacks the basic conditions of being taken seriously. Science also begins with the assumption that nothing exists unless it can be proved to exist: so there needs to be some kind of convincing evidence that would persuade any clear-thinking person to accept God. In other words, it rules faith out of the picture: science simply offers a better set of hypotheses to explain the same set of phenomena for which religion used to offer the only available explanation. Science proceeds by replacing each best explanation with its successor, and religion, along with magic and astrology, needs to take its seat among the series of now-obsolete debunked explanations. Christianity responds that there’s a difference between a problem and a mystery. A problem is a rational conundrum to which there’s a right answer. A mystery is a unique wonder that can only be entered and explored. Science solves problems. Faith enters mysteries.
Third, does the legacy of Christianity, particularly its claim that God has given humanity dominion over nature, constitute an arrogant narcissism that has led inexorably to the ecological crisis? This is a different kind of challenge, and a more recent one. The words, ‘Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and … over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’ have been taken as the pretext for humankind to perceive itself as set apart from nature (rather than being one with nature) and as charged with exploiting nature without reserve. Some would draw a direct line from this text to the technological destruction of the planet.
I’d like to suggest that the story of the magi is the most helpful account in the Bible for relating science and faith. And that’s because it describes how Christians find knowledge (and knowledge is a different word for science). The story starts in the East, with the first kind of knowledge, awe and wonder at the star. In Jerusalem the wise men experience another kind, which we usually call revelation. They hear, from the chief priests and scribes of the people, the story, about the babe being born, not in Jerusalem, but in Bethlehem. In Bethlehem the wise men find another kind of revelation – they encounter Jesus through service – the giving of gold, frankincense and myrrh – which to be posh we’d call praxis, or an action-reflection cycle, or simply putting faith into concrete kindness. And before returning they have yet another kind of knowledge, the personal discovery – the dream that tells them to go home another way. And the whole story is an example of a profoundly ironic kind of knowledge – the way the truth of the incarnation was more apparent to distant stargazers than to almost anyone among God’s chosen people.
So I hope as we read the story of the magi today, we can see it as an invitation to reconciliation between science and faith. In the end, they need each other, and each goes wrong when it gets out of lane and claims to do the other one’s job. The magi themselves beautifully harmonised the two: and we follow in their wise footsteps when we do the same.
