"In an interview with Diane Sawyer of ABC News in 2010, cosmologist Stephen Hawking stated, “There is a fundamental difference
between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is
based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works.”
---Hawking is correct that religion is based on authority. For example, at
the end of the Sermon on the Mount, we read that people were astonished
at Jesus’ teaching, “for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matthew 7:29). After his resurrection, he told his disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18).
---Hawking is also correct in the sense that experimental science is 
based
on observation. That is, scientists make conclusions from observations
of repeatable events in the physical world.
However, events in the past
cannot be observed or repeated. Any evidence left over from the past
must be interpreted. The kind of science that tries to reconstruct the
past is historical science. There is a significant difference between
experimental science (most of biology, chemistry, physics, engineering,
and medical research, which by repeatable, observable events—usually lab
experiments—find cures for disease or produce new technology) and
historical science (such as historical geology, paleontology, and
archeology, which deal with the evidence from the unobservable,
unrepeatable events of the past).
These naturalistic presuppositions are not based on reason but on a bias
against any theistic explanations, especially against the inerrant
eyewitness testimony of the Creator in Genesis
1–11.
---For example, similarity in the features of living beings is
supposed to be due to common descent; common design is arbitrarily ruled
out, because it implies a Designer.
---The fossils and rock strata are
supposed to be the result of slow processes over millions of years;
explanations consistent with a global flood at Noah’s time are
arbitrarily ruled out because they imply judgment on sin by a Creator.
---Modern cosmology (including the big bang)
assumes that we live in a universe that is unbounded and has no center.
Stephen Hawking and Edwin Hubble before him arbitrarily ruled out a
universe with a center because that could mean there is a special place
with God’s attention—like the earth." ICR
