Science does not claim to be able to answer questions
like “Is there a God?”; “Who are we, and where are we going?” because
it has no way of finding 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 since they can no more support them with
evidence than science can, they can only politely be described as
`misguided' or `deluded'. If they happen to have a plausible
personality and great eloquence though, their `Answers’ may come to be
accepted as such by whatever society they belong to, even today.
To
be fair, in ancient times there was very little that could be described
in modern-day terms 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 irreversibly do have science, we can delude ourselves no
longer. There are no answers to the unanswerable. We are now 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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