Christianity & Science
Christianity & Science
By: Herman Bavinck (Translated & Edited by N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, an Cory C. Brock)
“At present, the love of truth is in a poor state among people. It is absolutely not a virtue that is innate in all by nature. In daily life, we continually learn by experience that the truth is sacrificed to self-interest. Those who devote themselves to science are usually no exception to this rule.”
Okay, so this book is not for everyone.
And I don’t think I’m the target audience. I had seen Herman Bavinck quoted in a lot of books so when I saw that Crossway was putting out a translated book of his called Christianity and Science, I was intrigued.
But it wasn’t what I was expecting to be reading.
For one, it’s very challenging to read just in the writing style and vocabulary. I think the translators did a good job, but it was just a bit dense and hard to follow for the average reader. Plus I was not familiar with many of the references in the book. There were footnotes to help with that, but I quickly grew tired of also reading the footnotes.
Secondly, I think I was expecting more of a conversational style book on how Christians should interact with science. Today it’s a normal claim to make that Christians ‘don’t believe’ in science or that Christianity is at odds with it.
I was hoping for more of a discussion on that. Which there was some of that I think. I just honestly am not sure how much of the book I was truly grasping.
The editor says in a note at the beginning, “While many secularized Westerners continue to ponder the place of religion in a scientific world, Bavinck’s text challenges us to invert this perspective and learn, instead, to ponder the place of science in a religious world.”
Another important note from the editor gives more background on what Bavinck means when he uses the term science: “The Dutch term is broader in scope and encompasses all higher forms of reflective, critical knowledge… To Bavinck, the question of whether a scientist or a theologian speaks with greater authority would make little sense: to him theology is a science, belongs in the university of the sciences, and is practiced by scientists.”
Who is Herman Bavinck?
“Herman Bavinck formerly professor of dogmatics at the Free University of Amsterdam, and author of the magisterial four-volume Reformed Dogmatics… widely regarded as a modern classic in the Christian literary canon.”
He was a Dutch theologian who died in 1921 and was known for his Calvinist beliefs.
Here is an article on why you should read Bavinck, although this is pertaining specifically to his Dogmatics book.
A few other notes on this book:
It is a companion to Bavinck’s book titled Christian Worldview.
There is often the Dutch word given in parentheses— apparently for greater clarity for those who know the Dutch language, but I feel like those people would probably just read the entire book in Dutch.
The book itself looks nice, but it has a textured cover and for some reason retains some fingerprints making it look dirty.
One of the main philosophies of thought that Bavinck critiques is positivism.
“In Bavinck’s view, positivism was marked by a naive belief that empirical science is somehow neutral, objective, and presuppositionless— for which reason, positivists saw their approach to science as uniquely authoritative.”
So Bavinck talks about how no philosophy is truly neutral and that actually, if science is the pursuit of truth, then it falls back on the Christian concept of absolute truth. He also comments on the requirements of faith in both Christianity and in science (which includes history, literature, etc.)
“Concepts such as thing, property, cause, effect, law, condition, time, space, truth, falsehood, and more are assumed as realities despite their invisibility. Thus, faith is required to maintain objectivity.”
Positivism isn’t as largely held anymore as it was in Bavinck’s time. Today the philosophy is postmodernism. The reaches of this ideology is explored very interestingly in the book Cynical Theories (Cynical Theories is definitely a book I would recommend. It’s not a Christian book. It’s just a book that looks at critical theories’ origins and impact today which does overlap some with the principles in Bavinck’s book). In Cynical Theories, the authors say,
“The central themes of postmodernism include doubting that any human truth provides an objective representation of reality, focusing on language and the way societies use it to create their own local realities, and denying the universal.”
“Knowledge, truth, meaning, and morality are therefore, according to postmodernist thinking, culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which possess the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others.”
In Bavinck’s book there is a lot of discussion on how we come to know things. What is a valid way of ‘knowing’ or ‘learning.’ Positivism says science, but postmodernist thought even rejects that. Postmodernist thought questions whether or not objective knowledge or truth can be obtained at all. It also points to systems of power as controlling or deciding what can be known or how. This bleeds into critical theory and a whole host of other things.
So there are definitely still things to be learned from this book, but as to direct application to American society and culture, I’m not sure if positivism is the biggest ideology at work around us today.
“Research justice- acts upon the belief that science, reason, empiricism, objectivity, universality, and subjectivity have been overvalued as ways of obtaining knowledge while emotion, experience, traditional narratives and customs, and spiritual beliefs have been undervalued.” [Cynical Theories]
One example of how postmodern thought rejects science is given in Fat Studies that reject the science of the unhealthiness of obesity. We also see it in the rejection of the simple anatomy of two genders and their belief in the fluidity of gender in general.
I think there are two attacks on science today: the postmodern left who thinks that objective knowledge and the use of science is a construct for power, and then some sects of the right that think science undermines God and the Bible.
But as Christians we should know that science can’t undermine God. Science is ultimately the discovery of God and his truth and his creation. Everything must be tested against God’s Word— we don’t blindly accept all science, but we also don’t blindly reject it.
Some of the main points of Bavinck’s book (to my far less educated mind) are: a critique of positivism’s claims that science is an unbiased authority on truth and reality; that science is dependent on the concept of absolute truth which is founded in Christianity; argues for Christian education.
Some chapters were harder to read than others. One of the hardest to understand chapters was ‘Consequences of the Verdict’ and one of the easiest to read chapters was ‘The Blessing of Christianity for Science.’
Recommendation
I don’t think the average reader will enjoy reading this unless they are particularly interested in Herman Bavinck’s writing, used to reading old theological writings, or highly interested in an argument for Christian education.
I feel like I’m fairly well-versed in theology, but this was just pretty difficult to get through and requires some time— which frankly, I wasn’t really interested in putting in right now. If you’re willing to reread a lot of sections as well as the footnotes and are devoted to really understanding the writing, then you’ll be able to get out of it a lot more than I did.
If you’re looking for a book you can pick up here and there and easily grasp what the author is saying, this probably isn’t for you.
Also, I’m not super confident in my ability to summarize this book for you, so I would read more than my review when deciding whether or not to take this book on.
Even though my understanding of Christianity and Science is a bit spotty, here is a compilation of quotes that may give you a taste of some of the things you’ll find within.
Quotes
Here were some quotes that stood out to me:
“Philosophy is not in a position to make known the truth we need, not so much because the faculty of reason is so weak and limited but because the human being is so corrupted by sin. One’s pride, one’s self-love in particular, stands in the way of the discovery of truth.”
“Subjective sincerity is not proof of objective truth”.
“This is now the general prevailing concept of science. It is true that people give little or no consideration to the “epistemology” to which they are committed. They take it for granted that the concept of science is fixed and has been elevated above all criticisms and thus they are amazed when someone draws the correctness of this concept into doubt or earnestly disputes them. They are imprisoned in the dogma of the theory of presuppositionless science and hold it to be absolute, though they declare everything else to be relative.”
“There is a hatred against God and religion, against Christ and Scripture, against church and confession, which often clouds the clearest mind and confuses the most lucid thinking.”
“The first thing that advocates of this view [positivism] have to learn is that their definition of science is just one alongside others.. we must always remember that our view is not the only one in the world, and that, in addition to ours, there are others that have equal rights in the practice of life. If we do not recognize this, we become intolerant and exclusive, and we are not far from striving to suppress all others with violence.”
“The struggle for the liberation of higher education is precisely against the monopoly of scientific knowledge from a single direction, and has no other goal than to ensure that the various directions in science can freely wrestle with one another in society, and that competition is not rendered impossible through the granting of state privileges to one but not the other.”
“It is not acceptable to say beforehand that a person sets to work in scientific research without prejudice and proceeds from nothing but sensible or internally observable facts and phenomena, and yet from the outset continually brings along all sorts of assumptions that are not the fruit of empiricism but rather have a philosophical and metaphysical character.”
“[science] cannot strive against religion, against morality, against art… it can never bring forth and may never destroy [life].”
“We are not animals but humans— reasonable, moral, religious, aesthetic beings. The awareness of truth, goodness, and beauty is implanted in our nature; the distinction between true and untrue, between good and evil, between justice and injustice, between godless and pious is just as fixed in our consciousness as the distinction between light and dark, between day and night, between sour and sweet, between sound and silence, between use and destruction, between welcome and unwelcome. We would have to eliminate human nature itself if we wanted to rid ourselves of this awareness.”
“The purpose of science is to expand and correct ordinary knowledge.”— Julius Kaftan
“Art, religion, state, society, law, [and] morality are always subject to the direction of the age; it is a miracle when the practitioners of science make an exception to this [rule].”
“The practice of science needs not only a sharp view, a clear head, a diligent zeal, a good method, and a focused investigation. At the same time, it also demands a creative imagination, a gifted intuition, a surprising divination.. It has been the geniuses, not only in art but also in science, who have been given first place.”
“If religion is objective truth, then it is clear that religions that emerge among humankind cannot all be true to the same degree. Religions have this idiosyncratic quality, distinct from, for example, languages, in that they stand directly opposed to one another, in that one regards as lies what another counts as truth…”
“There is no science of religion in general unless God exists, is knowable, and has revealed himself. It is thus untrue and superficial if one person says to another ‘You are dogmatic, but we are scientific; you are prejudiced and sectarian, but in my research I set to work wholly objectively and accept nothing other than by evidence.”
“The concept of science did not arise through Christianity. The whole history of humankind has been a search for truth… [science] did not offer unity; it did not satisfy the heart. The world in all its wisdom did not know God. Christianity then saved science. The gospel was the proclamation of an eternal, undeniable, indubitable truth, which was revealed in Christ.”
“The tacit assumption of all science is that there is a sovereign, unchangeable truth, and that it is knowable to the human being… In Christianity, the truth is not a subjective idea, not the mutual relations of human ideas, but, rather, it is an objective reality that stands high above and yet remains accessible to the human being. Through this, science is given a fixed, strong, and essential foundation. For if there is no certainty to be had in matters of religion and morality and in respect tot he unseen, spiritual things, science loses a great deal of its value. It runs the risk also of falling prey of skepticism in other fields and is threatened with decay and ruin as a whole.”
“Sharp self-criticism and stern self-denial are necessary in order to remain faithful to the truth and not deny or falsify it by the craftiness of the heart. There is much truth we do not want because it is in conflict with our lives.”
“If there is no supernatural, if God is not to be thought of other than as the “personification” of natural laws, if there is no higher power than that which works in nature, then the human spirit is subjugated to matter, the religious-ethical life loses its foundation, and belief in the triumph of the good is a vain dream.”
**Received a copy via Crossway in exchange for an honest review**
This book released August 29, 2023. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below or the Crossway link directly.
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