I was reading Herman Bavinck’s book Christianity and Science this morning, and this quotation about the limits of scientific inquiry really struck me.

According to Bavinck, scientific inquiry is useful for understanding and investigating the natural world, but it cannot account for or help us make sense of our metaphysical needs and spiritual longings.

The question is, rather, why our capacity for knowing is equipped in such a strange way that we absolutely cannot know the things we would most want to know. After all, seeking the truth is no sin, and the truth is no lesser good than holiness and glory. Still, to say more, one can draw such borders, but nobody holds to them. Each person has his own [metaphysical need]. 

What we seek and need for our life is a worldview that satisfies both our understanding and our inner life. Such a worldview is built up not from details about visible nature alone but just as much from elements provided for us by our inner experience; it must bring unity in all our knowing and acting, bring reconciliation between both our believing and our knowing, and make peace between our head and our heart. We believe in that peace and seek it, because the truth cannot fight against itself, because our mind is one, because the world is one, because God is one! 

Even if the ideal is so far removed from us, the end goal of science can be none other than the knowledge of the truth, of the full pure truth. That knowledge is never, and shall never be, a comprehending of how the human being should be able to find the Almighty fully. Rather, knowledge is something different from and higher than comprehending; it does not exclude mystery or chase away adoration. Alongside knowing, worship increases, because all science is the translation of the thoughts that God has laid down in his works. Pseudoscience can lead away from him, [but] true science leads back to him. In him alone, who is the truth itself, do we find rest, as much for our understanding as for our heart. 

How can one read this last paragraph and not be immediately reminded of the opening lines in Augustine’s confessions: 

Great art thou, O’ Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and thy wisdom is infinite. And man wants to praise you, man who is only a small portion of what you have created and who goes about carrying with him his own mortality, the evidence of his own sin and evidence that Thou resists the proud. Yet still man, this small portion of creation, wants to praise you. You stimulate him to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they can find peace in you.