The Limitations of Science

February 17, 2011

3 minutes read time

What makes us uniquely human, and why can only God reveal the full truth about our identity, purpose and ultimate destiny?

Our modern civilization is ill-suited to meet the deep-seated spiritual needs of its inhabitants. Science, limited to the observable—the measurable—simply cannot provide us with all we need to know about ourselves. Philosophical speculations are woefully inadequate substitutes for divinely revealed knowledge. Adding to our difficulty in correctly understanding ourselves is the spiritual deception, described in Revelation 12:9, that affects the whole world.

What is so little understood today is that our minds are subject to spiritual laws that are as inexorable as the physical laws that scientists have discovered. Although we cannot actually see gravity, none of us doubts its existence. Just as gravity affects and governs the actions of all physical objects, so do spiritual laws affect and govern our actions and behavior. We cannot transgress God’s spiritual and moral laws without incurring serious penalties.

The scientific method has other limitations. Qualities that have neither weight nor spatial dimensions—such as love, vanity, hatred, the appreciation of beauty, the inspiration of a poet, or even the aspirations motivating a scientist—cannot be scientifically ascertained.

Though science can and does contribute knowledge to the mystery of man, only God can tell us who we are, why we are and what is our destiny. His Word, the Bible, fills in the missing dimension in human knowledge.

God’s Word presents man as a whole—physical and spiritual together. Just as we would cease to exist if our organs were isolated one from another, so would we be less than human if our spiritual qualities were not present. It is to the whole man (or woman) that we must focus our intellectual energies. Above all, the spiritual aspect must not be laid aside and ignored.

As American journalist and professor Norman Cousins wrote in his book Human Options: “The ‘something’ that constitutes human uniqueness cannot adequately be described by any single term. Even ‘man’s spirit’ and ‘capacity for faith’ . . . are not the sum total of that uniqueness” (1981).

Many factors set us apart from the animal kingdom: our speech, our vision or conceptualization, our awareness of past, present and future, our capacity for reason, our number recognition, our bodies and much more. There is, however, an even more important overall factor—characterized by wholeness and completeness—our need to understand.

Geneticist R.J. Berry, in his 1988 book God and Evolution, put his finger on an important distinguishing characteristic that includes all these others and transcends them: “The key factor in understanding our nature as taught in the Bible is to examine the meaning of ‘the image of God’ which distinguishes us from the other animals” (p. 65, emphasis added throughout).

Science