Bavinck’s Christianity and Science
Bavinck’s book Christianity and Science (1904) was designed as “a companion piece to Christian Worldview,”1 written in the same year. It was “meant to explore the more particular ways Christian faith can be generative for the academic disciplines.”2 The editors of the newly published translation set forth Bavinck’s four motives in writing this work:
(1) To show Christianity’s positive intellectual vision;
(2) To outproduce Rome’s intellectual renaissance;
(3) To provide an immaterialist account of science that is neither idealist nor pantheist;
(4) To show that Christianity fills the void in total human experience sensed by moderns.
Now, it has been noted that one can detect “two Bavincks,” one being the churchman, the conservative, the seceder, and so forth, while the other one might call a modern—though perhaps not a “modernist” in the negative connotation. He always wanted to show the superiority of the Christian vision precisely in the language and conceptual framework of the newer sciences. He critiques the premodern view of science, and yet he retraces the usual narrative of liberation with a kind of lament.
Of the various forces that comprised the transition from medieval to modern world, Bavinck wrote that,
“together they are also revelations of a new spirit, which had outgrown the discipline of scholasticism and hierarchy. They have in common the thirst for freedom, the recognition of the natural. This was so because in the Middle Ages, the natural was externally suppressed, but was not internally sanctified. Hence, in the end it threw off its chains and retook its rights.”3
This represents one awkwardness in the present generation of Reformed readers taking up this little volume. Bavinck stands in between the medieval and the modern as much as the phenomena he is describing. His worldview thinking cannot quite fully align itself with the scholastics of old, and yet he senses that there is a worse departure to come if our conception of theoretical thought in general is not tethered to that classical way of thinking.
The Word and Idea of Science
In the Editors’ Introduction the reader is alerted to something of an oddity to us:
“It is important for the reader to know that the English term science functions differently in its Dutch counterpart. In Anglophone culture, science is restrictively tied to forms of knowledge based on the empirical method and occupies a distinctly privileged position within the academy … In our world, English speakers imagine the term science in a way that is profoundly shaped by the history of positivist philosophy … The equivalent Dutch term, wetenschap, is broader in scope and encompasses all higher forms of reflective, critical knowledge … To Bavinck’s Dutch ear, 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.”4
In the midst of this early going, some readers may turn away. It may be that one is expecting something more overtly “scientific” in the sense that one has expected from a work of scientific apologetics in more recent generations. That is simply not what this was written for.
While not a definition, he says, “under ‘science’ we understand, in most cases, no more than scientific investigation, whether that is considered on the side of the subject, who conducts the investigation, or on the side of the object, which is investigated.”5
To be even more precise,
“Empirical knowing [weten] knows [kent] the particular, independent phenomena, but scientific knowing [weten] seeks the universal, the law, that masters them all, the idea that animates them all. Empirical knowing remains standing before the that; scientific knowing moves beyond things to the why. Empirical knowing stands in service of the practical consequence and finds its goal in the demands of life; scientific knowing strives for [something] far above this and aims at the knowledge of the truth.”6
Such a conception is at least compatible with classical philosophy to properly situate the material sciences within the context of all that is higher and lower.
A Philosophy of Science
Without the meta level, there is no science. It used to be that graduates of science programs would have to take at least one class in the philosophy of science. If there is any confusion as to why, simply consider this question: Which of the empirical sciences studies the scientific method? Are its constituent elements the sort of thing that can be quantified, much less put under a microscope, or subjected to repeated testing? And yet, all of the empirical sciences are utterly dependent upon it. This should give us some pause to think.
As Bavinck called for a return to a metaphysical theology in his Reformed Dogmatics, so he reminded the modernist that science rests upon various immaterial foundations. “In full confidence it thus applies the laws of thinking, and not only these alone but all kinds of metaphysical concepts, such as thing, property, cause, effect, law, condition, time, space, truth, falsehood, and more, to the perceived phenomena.”7
Not only so, but “The concept of science is not obtained from observation and experience; it is not a result of empirical research, but it is a philosophical concept that is handed to us in our thinking, in connection with the whole of our worldview.”8
Not every philosophy is equally hospitable to science. That is why it emerged in the modern West in a way that it did not elsewhere. While this is better handled as what cannot be established by the methods of empirical science, Bavinck is more sweeping than makes for useful philosophy.
“Here we merely point out that all scientific research assumes in advance and without proof the reliability of the senses and the objectivity of the perceivable world. These things are not provable. Those who doubt them cannot be refuted by any arguments. Skepticism is more an issue of the heart than of the head. The reality of the world outside us is fixed by and for faith. To accept it is an act of trust; most profoundly [it is an act] of trust in the truthfulness of God.”9
Somewhat ironically, Bavinck sought to show that empirical studies are subordinate to higher disciplines by means of an empirical argument: something a kin to a history of religion thesis.
“After all, being precedes thinking. Humanity lived for epochs before the functions of that life were narrowly researched in physiology. [Humanity] thought before the laws of thinking were set out in logic. [Humanity] spoke and gifted existence to languages before anyone occupied himself with the study of grammar. [Humanity] was a realm that shared in religious, moral, legal, and civil life before a single scientific theory about these had seen the light of day. [Humanity] brought agriculture and industry, profession and business to a high state of development before science worried about its existence. Everywhere, life precedes philosophy. Scientific knowing ... may perhaps be the most noble fruit of the human spirit ... [but] it is certainly not the root from which life springs. Culture does indeed contain within it a certain degree of knowledge: religion, morality, justice, beauty, state, society, industry, agriculture, and so on presuppose the consciousness of the human being; they are all built on senses, representations, and thoughts. But the knowledge that lies in these is of an empirical nature. It is the fruit of attentive perception and practice experience, is related to wisdom, and as such, is obtainable for everyone.”10
Life as a whole precedes science. In his chapter on a Christian conception of science he even develops how the concept of faith undergirds both knowledge in general and scientific inquiry in particular.
Scientism and Positivism
If scientism is the philosophy that the material sciences are the highest (and only) court of appeal in rational inquiry, positivism was its application to all of the other disciplines. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) most explicitly set forth its implications. The way in which a material analysis of things begins to eat up the “objective” dimension, leaving only a subjective dimension for the immaterial life of man communicates that the former is real and the latter is not, which is what the so-called “fact-value” dichotomy began to do.
That is why, for example, by the middle of the next century the subjects formerly called “history” and “civics” were smashed together in American schools and began to go by the title “social studies.” Such changes are not merely cosmetic. The consequence of such a presentation is that the activity of man is as meaningless as that of the lower animals, that virtue and its rewards may have had an evolutionary function in times past, but that these “ought” (irony sold separately) give way to a more advanced mechanism for theoretical and practical analysis.
Additionally, “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.”11 The positivists, including the new psychologists, "dispute internal experience as a specific source of knowledge alongside sense perception.”12 If they did not, they might have to acknowledge two more realities that transcend their experimentation: spirit and sinful bias.
At any rate, positivism involved a tradeoff: metaphysics and ultimate meaning were sacrificed for certainty and control—theoretical and technological. It was observed that, “according to the positivist view, what science loses in terrain, it gains in inner certainty. For it limits itself to the knowledge of sense-perceptible phenomena; and attempting to trace out its mutual relations, it can finally bring about an understanding of the present from the past and predict the future from the present with indubitable certainty.”13
Bavinck drew a line here.
“Natural science remains, therefore, perfectly free in its own sphere; but it is not the only science and must therefore cease striving to construe religious and ethical phenomena after the same physico-chemical and mathematico-mechanical fashion as is warranted and required in the case of numberless natural phenomena.”14
Their definitions of science are question-begging when they offer (as one Prof. Groenewegen so defined it) “science as nothing other than a well-grounded and reliable knowledge acquired by a normal method,” since “the question ... concerns what the normal method for the acquisition of knowledge actually is, and when knowledge may be deemed well-grounded and reliable.”15 So it does not address the “what” and the “when.”
Chief among modern culprits is evolutionary theory operating as a pseudo-metaphysic: “But here the mistake has been made that evolution, which has proved ... useful as a working hypothesis, has been elevated to the rank of formula of world explanation and elaborated into a system of worldview. Therein, natural science leaves her own domain and passes over to philosophy.”16
As he works out in later chapters, with an increasingly insulated expert class emerging, free inquiry was bound to give way to an untouchable status.
“They take it for granted that the concept of science is fixed and has been elevated above all criticism; 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.”17
A Christian View of Science
Bavinck was convinced that in his day there was a “stirring” for a Christian foundation to science in the churches themselves, or in religion. He wrote, “Christians, having gradually sunk into a deep sleep in the eighteenth century, suddenly experienced an awakening at the beginning of the [nineteenth] century, through which the Christian confessional and ecclesial consciousness was shaken out of its slumber.”18 In fact, he even suggested that this paralleled the experience of non-Christians as well.
“Now, we witness how many of the most exceptional naturalists are returning from mechanism to dynamism, from materialism to the energetic [explanation of the world], from causality to teleology, from atheism to theism. After the thirst for facts is initially quenched, hunger for the knowledge of the origin and goal, for the cause and essence of the things above, resurfaces.”19
What is actually needed of scientists as scientists? Following a discussion about the right kind of diversity and specialization, it is not about IQ in any mechanistic sense. He says that, “the practice of science needs not only a sharp view, a clear head, a diligent zeal, a good method, and a focused imagination. At the same time, it also demands a creative imagination, a gifted intuition, a surprising divination.”20 What the modern West got instead was a more un-surprising kind of divination.
By exalting and inflating science at the expense of all else, not only is the soul starved of the transcendent, but science itself was “losing ground as a result.” Bavinck noted,
“All this terrain (the forbidden metaphysical / supernatural), if it exists, must be relinquished to subjective opinion. Whoever feels a desire or need to [do so] can populate this unknown land with the postulates of practical reason, with the judgments of his own values, with the creations of his imagination, with the ideals of his heart, with the representations of his religion. There is even room for ghosts, the spirits of the dead, and demonic powers in this airy realm of the unknown. Positivism leaves room for all kinds of so-called compensations for [the loss of] religion, for a cult of humanity, for a veneration of departed spirits, for an altar to the unknown God, even for a worship of Satan. All this, after all, is beyond science and is a private affair; there is something here for everyone.”21
As usual, the clergy were asleep at the switch, and those who embraced pietism and yet were given charge of the halls of academia could not see the devil in the details. Bavinck explains the significance of the Higher Education Acts of 1876 in the Netherlands. “Theology” was out and “religion” was in—the head making room for the heart, one might suppose. Not quite.
It was similar elsewhere. “They have insisted that the faculty of theology should be turned into a faculty of religious science ... The proponents of this change were all sincerely convinced that they had protected the independent scientific character of theology from all attacks by giving it the knowledge of religion, but not the knowledge of God, as its object ... Many men of science find it unusually pleasing that professional theologians make it so easy for them in their fight against the Christian faith.”22
Implications for School and State
Scientism was the deliberate philosophy of secularism. It was not merely that it made for an intellectually satisfying atheism, as Richard Dawkins has more recently said. It is that it leaves the ever-growing claims of an elite class immune to any criticism from outside of their competencies—which are increasingly conceived as all-encompassing. The first step, as we have seen, is simple enough: “While religion thus remains a 'private matter' ... officially and publicly only the positive is recognized, and only what science says counts.”23 This is the immediate inference from the uncritically accepted notion that science deals in the objective, religion in the subjective.
Naturally this comes with self-congratulations.
“Formerly, religion held all the power. But ‘today it is science that, like the truth of which it is the expression and revelation, is called to world domination. The governance of the world belongs to science rather than to divinity, to science as the benefactor of the people and the liberator of humanity.’”24
This secularized science of the late modern West was a mirror that divinizes the new rulers, since he who makes the rules rules. In fact, it was always about global domination. The defining of terms, the flow of grant money, the gatekeeping of faculty and acceptable inquiry. The principle could be stated in redemptive historical terms, now set to Babylon's gospel narrative: “For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well” (Heb. 7:12). A new religious object and method was required for its new priesthood, if the beast of false religion that emerged could cause everyone to worship the first beast representing the global superstate. The third installment of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, is another, one might say more “prophetic” angle on this trajectory.
It is true that some of the superstructure of what we now call “science” was not deliberate, but systemic. The tunnel vision of the expert class was, to a certain extent, subject to the law of unintended consequences: “to the extent that research advanced and consideration was practiced, this one science was split into many particular sciences. The whole was there before the parts. From the whole, the members of the organism of science slowly grew and came to maturity. And the process of differentiation ... continues apace.”25
As the university gave way to the plural-varsity—that is, as institutions of higher education lost touch with the realist resolution of the age old problem of the one and the many—there was no longer the sun of theology at the center of that intellectual universe, the other academic disciplines in its orbit of explanation. Now, each planetary guard had its own explaining to do. Predictably, each became the lens through which all of the other planets could be deconstructed—each following the likes of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud in refashioning the older disciplines after a genetic fallacy: Man only believed that because of x (fill in the blank of economic, biological, socio-psychological factor). “Science” was now an explaining away of the God-of-the-gaps, and then, in due course, made quick work of man as well.
We might ask whether Bavinck’s view of liberalism and tolerance naive in light of these developments? There is a revealing passage.
“After all, 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. In itself, of course, it is quite conceivable that the state too, has a certain confession and maintains it in all public institutions. But liberalism itself opposed this, made the state neutral, and declared all churches, confessions, and outlooks equal in rights. If, therefore, there is a considerable group within the nation who demand freedom and equality on the basis of the declaration of rights for the church, school, or university, liberalism must support it because of its own principle, but it opposes it just as regularly in practice. That is the antinomy that [liberalism] repeatedly places before itself, and that makes clear to all that it is very liberal in word but highly illiberal in deed. The principle seems to be afraid of its own application.”26
In the first place, principles do not shrink back in fear. People do. The antidote is to strengthen our spines by a greater fullness of principle. Ultimately, Bavinck had not yet learned that the purpose of a system is what it does. This was no antinomy but the very opportunistic slough of deception that makes liberalism. It is a fog of one-way good faith, and therefore a foothold for the enemies of genuine liberty and equality to game the system and replicate themselves like viruses at the command centers where no corrective exists to banish their own brand. According to the rules of liberalism, there is nothing higher than their own right to do so.
Now what about tolerance?
“But with this, we too 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. But this is precisely what is against the nature of science and the character of truth.”27
Perhaps in a “symposium stage” honestly practiced, but truth would care about this difference as well. The so-called “open society,” mistaken as a mere symposium, was really a targeting stage in a soon violent hot war. This was deadly naivete. The twentieth century totalitarians had science programs by which they perpetrated, and planned more, evil. The defeat of their external powers was simultaneously a defeat of their science programs. Someone may agree with the end goal but then claim that only hindsight can justify that force. True science might wonder whether or not there is a foresight that could save us all from hindsight. The blind spots are all the more odd given some very solid statements in the final chapters that Bavinck makes about the non-neutrality of the academic institutions, against a so-called “‘indifferent’ system,” which he praises Kuyper for exposing as Prime Minister.28
What is the last step in the reductionism of science?
“According to some, [to ensure] that its social instincts are followed, the state must, if necessary, force people with violence. Thus positivism, applied to the humanities, leads not only to undermining the foundations of human life but also to a scientific hierarchy that threatens our freedom in a very serious way.”29
All formerly metaphysical and moral properties are defined down to utility; and all utility is defined out to the collective, so that mankind is viewed, by the "innovator," who makes an exception for his own exalted view, as if on a petri dish, like bacteria to be managed or else removed by a techno-medical (including psychological) managerial class.
Concluding Thoughts
I take issue with too much idealist residue on Bavinck’s otherwise realist mind. No doubt, he wants to back the materialist into a corner to make him see the absurdities entailed in the notion that sense perception alone is at work. In doing so, he often inflates the “psychical activity” of the knowing and shaping subject.30 Bavinck rejected the post-Kantian “ethical theologians” well enough. He could spot their insertion of the will where the objective mind used to be positioned; yet he did not sufficiently get back behind the Enlightenment’s spurious rejection of objective nature.
If the nineteenth century outlook was presumptuous, might it be said that Bavinck’s heralding the return to theistic science was equally so? In one sense, perhaps. A telling statement is:
“Faith in such a highly self-conscious modern culture has been shaken. Exact science has not delivered what men like Renan had expected from it in their youthful hubris. And so, one returns to the formerly scorned religion, by no means always in true repentance but nevertheless in despondent doubt.”31
That last line is interesting. No real repentance indeed, and certainly no surrender. Here we are a century later, and the same battle lines are drawn and no real gains made into culture by theistic science. This highlights the necessity of capturing the institutions, and especially the government. The maintenance of materialist science, given its intellectual bankruptcy, has been entirely a forced product of statism. It is said that a new study shows that 99 out of 100 scientists will show whatever study results the grant money tells them to. If the man who hailed himself as “The Science” just a few months ago, with a vaccine needle and pain of loss of income and social status, has been thoroughly discredited, complete with apologies from virtually every medical journal, national health institute, and periodical, one might ask why no one has been held accountable, no financial remedies effected, and no real policy changed. I submit that “the science” is still firmly fixed in Babylon’s temple.
If there is to be a new secular power to smash that idol, it must have help from the classroom. A rival elite class will not emerge from the pietistic church that cannot be forced to believe it has a claim on either science or state.
Bavinck is excellent on two rival conceptions of academic independence. There is, on the one hand, “the neutral concept, and practice of science also clashes with the reality of life. Universities are not castles built in the sky, but are rather institutions with a prior history that are bound to all manner of traditions, that stand under the influence of the entirety of their surroundings, and that, to the extent that they have become organs of the state, have lost their freedom and independence.”32
In contrast to this, the secularist would insist that it is a community of dogma that threatens academic freedom and precisely the state, with its public funding, but guarantees its ongoing scientific character. Bavinck at least saw through this, and allowed himself to see the need for a counter-revolution of science.
“Now that the government has lost the opportunity to advance the kingdom of Jesus Christ directly, its moral duty is all the more to support and encourage every effort that the nation itself is employing to that end.”33
_______
1. N. Gray Sutanto, James Eglinton, and Cory G. Brock, Editors’ Introduction to Christianity and Science (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 10.
2. Sutanto, Eglinton, and Brock, Introduction to Christianity and Science, 11.
3. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 64.
4. Sutanto, Eglinton, and Brock, Introduction to Christianity and Science, 11, 12.
5. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 113.
6. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 114.
7. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 95-96; cf. 131-32.
8. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 89.
9. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 93.
10. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 107-08.
11. Editors' Intro to Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 20.
12. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 96.
13. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 73.
14. Bavinck, Philosophy of Revelation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 2018), 72.
15. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 79.
16. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 42.
17. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 72.
18. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 74-75.
19. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 46.
20. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 136.
21. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 73.
22. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 152.
23. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 74
24. Bavinck is quoting one A. Malvert’s Wissenschaft und Religion (see footnote no. 4), Christianity and Science, 74
25. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 129.
26. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 88.
27. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 87.
28. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 205.
29. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 145.
30. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 94-95.
31. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 47.
32. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 208.
33. Bavinck, Christianity and Science, 211-12.
