I just came across this Modern Age article by Bryce Christensen: The cosmos as memento mori: the ultimate significance of modern science. He has a concern to express regarding science:

Prometheus, it would appear, has stumbled into a very dark and dreary place!

It’s not science’s successes that Christensen bemoans. He expresses a very deep appreciation for its

contact with “external permanency” [by which] science thus overthrows the fantasies of intellectuals who suppose that hermeneutic communities are entirely free to construct their own realities through imagination, interpretation, and dialogue.

He celebrates science’s objectivity, a challenge to “the solipsism and cultural relativism now widely prevalent in a truth-averse world.” You’ll find no complaint here in regard to technology, medicine, or deepening understanding of nature’s fundamentals. You will, however, find a condensed catalogue of ways in which science fails to fulfill anyone’s hope of it leading us to an empirical, objective, and complete encounter with every important truth:

The problem with taking science as a guide to hope, meaning, and morality is that the objective truths of modern science are utterly lacking in metaphysical content. Indeed, on its own terms, science cannot even give a satisfying account of human beings as seekers of truth.

That last sentence opens the first of several ways in which Christensen says science falls short on metaphysical issues, meanwhile showing that this really matters (as Deuce also said here this morning). Humans’ truth-seeking, morality, language, art, emotion, free will, meaning and purpose, consciousness: all of these “disappear in an exclusively scientific world view,” so that

A rigorous and probing investigation of science thus thoroughly dispels the optimism surrounding the scientific enterprise.

This article is not that “rigorous and probing investigation;” it is too brief for that purpose. Strong arguments in favor of these ideas can easily be found elsewhere (beginning in his footnotes), and Christensen does not attempt here to make those arguments. Rather, he is leading toward his central thesis:

One of the benefits of investigating science thoroughly and rigorously is thus the discovery of the profound human need for non-scientific truths.

This need is not just psychological or emotional; it is an ultimate kind of need, for if science cannot explain the human search for truth, or even language, then science cannot even explain itself. Yet as Christensen goes on to re-affirm the great value of science’s objectivity, he takes it in a direction many will not expect (emphasis added):

Nothing in all of religion–not the Enlightenment of Gautama Buddha, not the visions of Mohammed, not the hymns in the Hindu Samhitas, not the creation myths of Shinto–resonates with empirical expectations like the instruction the risen Jesus gives his perplexed disciples in order to verify the truth of his Resurrection: “Handle me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39).

Judaism’s roots are in history, Christianity’s even more so, for God walked incarnate on real roads in a real place in real time. (I turn now from Christensen’s thoughts to share my own.) Jesus’ disciples, seeing Him resurrected from the dead, did not say, “This is great! But I still wonder if this is the one true religion.” No, they did the sensible thing and followed Him, their questions (and ours) having been answered.

We cannot relive that experience, for history has a stubborn way of happening just once. (”History repeats itself,” they say, but they’re talking about trends and principles, not events.) Thus there are frequent disputes over the Christianity’s historical truth. Compare our problem, though, with that of every other religion. Are there disputes over the historical truth of Hinduism? What could that possibly mean? Hinduism makes no historical claims to speak of. Buddhism? The claim is that Gautauma lived a holy life and left important teachings behind, but Buddhism is about its teachings, not its teacher, and as far as I know, nobody claims his life was proof of his teachings. They point to the teachings themselves. Islam centers about a person, but its revelation is not a revelation-within-history like Judaism’s or Christianity’s. There’s a world of difference between God revealing Himself in the flesh and God dictating revelation to a prophet, as the Qur’an is said to have been delivered. Is there any historical test that could prove or disprove Islam, even in principle?

Christianity, quite uniquely, lives both in heaven and on earth. Hinduism and Buddhism would prefer to have nothing to do with the earth; they are anxious to be rid of it. Islam’s “72 virgins” takes the earth too much into eternity–especially from the virgins’ perspective! The sexual inequality expressed there has its obvious reflection in Islamic cultures today. That other major world faith system, scientific naturalism, will have nothing to do with heaven, or indeed with transcendence of any kind.

Only the Jewish and Christian Scriptures–the Old Testament, as known by Christians–teach that God is good, and creation can be too. Only Christianity teaches that creation continues to be good (even if marred for a time by evil): Jesus Christ was resurrected in a body. The physical reality endures. Physical creativity is good and valuable. Science is transcended, yes, but never made irrelevant; and the earliest leaders of scientific Europe considered themselves to be studying God’s mind as they studied His work in creation.

Promethean optimism fails those who hope just in science. But that is not science failing: it is just what happens if we depend on that which is limited, to be the explanation for all.