Science does not claim to be able to answer questions
like “Is there a God?”; “Who are we, and where are we going?” because
as yet it can find no evidence to support any possible conclusions.
Whether it will ever be able to is itself another question it
can’t answer.
Many
folk like to point to this as a fundamental weakness of science. Quite
the reverse. If science cannot find answers to such questions, neither
can anybody else. Many people claim
to have such answers, but also usually claim they
don't need evidence `to explain the obvious'. If such
people have a plausible
personality and great eloquence, their `Answers’ may come to be
accepted as such by whatever society they belong to. Welcome to mass
delusions, from Naziism to alternative medicines.
To
be fair, in ancient times there was very little that could be described as `science'. Such Answers were all we had. The
`systems of knowledge', mostly Religions, that grew from them might
seem extravagant and absurd to rational folk of the modern age, but
they nonetheless played a crucial role in our cultural evolution as a
species.
But
now that we do have science, we can delude our- selves no
longer. There are no answers to the unanswer- able. We are (or should be) too adult
to accept `made-up' ones of the kind we loved in our cultural
childhood. While we might wonder at the Universe that science has shown
us, it doesn’t yet allow us the knowledge of how it might have come
into being.
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