People expect that somehow science can provide the answers to those perplexing questions we all ask about our identity, our value, our meaning, and purpose. Don’t believe it for a minute! Science is hopeless in the area of our existential questions.

Here’s what a bright French philosopher, Rémi Brague, explains: “Simplified literature does its best to make us believe that chemistry, computer science, or any other kind of science can ‘explain’ why we act as we do. However, science has never claimed to ‘explain’ anything at all, if by that we mean ‘to render something comprehensible’”.  Another French philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, concurs: “The sciences do not answer any of the most important questions that we ask ourselves”.

“The dominant view of neuroscience,” Professor John Wyatt tells us, “regards the self as an illusion created by the brain”. That’s a pretty bleak way of understanding yourself!

Yuval Noah Harari has written two books that have been widely diffused, but in them he recounts the same hopelessness: “Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer – and no meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing”.  That, he avers, is the “scientific understanding”; again, science brings no encouraging hopeful answers to our existential angst. Indeed, it adds to it!

Harari continues: “The scientific formula of knowledge led to astounding breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, medicine, and multiple other disciplines. But it has had one huge drawback: it could not deal with questions of value and meaning”. Well-known scientific writer Paul Davies agrees: “I don’t believe that physics can tackle questions about, for example, purpose or morality”.

Since science deals essentially with matter, energy, motion and the chemical elements and their compounds, the tendency is to see human beings only as complicated (and somehow animated) matter. This not only leaves out the very essence of our humanity, it actually destroys our humanity.

This is why Rémi Brague writes:  “We end up with this paradox: modern science is at the same time the highest realisation of man, the glory of the human spirit, and yet also the most radical factor that contributes to his dehumanisation”.

Obviously, somewhere science has got it wrong. Where? In supposing it can answer all our questions and really tell us who we are. 

Compare that frustrating confusion with the appeasing and ennobling clarity of the Bible’s first page, where we are told who and what we really are: valuable personal creatures made by a wise and loving, infinite and personal Creator God – “in his likeness”.

This profound and realistic starting point is unique to the Judeo-Christian worldview, and it is accompanied by the necessary corollary that our original holiness as God’s image-bearers has been corrupted, though we still share likeness to God in our personal reality.

C.S. Lewis wrote: “It is quite astonishing how rarely outside of Christianity we find – I am not sure that we ever find – a real doctrine of creation. In polytheism the gods are usually the product of a universe already in existence… In pantheism the universe is never something that God made. It is an emanation, something that oozes out from him”.

This is why I persist in affirming first, that man’s research, science, and philosophy can never give us the answers we crave to our existential questions, and second, that the key to the answers is a return to the God of the Bible, the Creator who has revealed himself and tells us the essential truth we need to know.

Clive Every-Clayton