Science Does Not Have All the Answers

Toward the end of the eighteenth century a certain philosophy started coming into vogue known as materialism. Materialism is the belief that the only thing that exists is matter, and that all things can be explained (including life, and consciousness) by the material the universe is made of and its interactions. It is a product (or its popularity at least) of the Age of Reason--though I would argue that it is the product of poor reasoning. As a philosophy, it undergirds most modern scientific thinking and secularist thought. In short, it is the atheist viewpoint.

Let me be clear that I am speaking in general terms and trying to keep things simple for a blog post. The concepts brought up in the first paragraph of this post alone could keep the curious reader occupied for years. I do not wish to over-generalize, I am sure there are exceptions (involving cognitive dissonance, in my opinion), but understand that modern scientific thought is founded on materialism as a philosophy and that materialism at its heart is the rejection of a Christian viewpoint, even a theistic viewpoint.

No, I did not say that all scientists are atheists and, no, I did not say that science is opposed to Christianity or vice versa. What I have pointed out, however, is why there has been so much tension between the scientific and Christian communities for the last 150 years or so. The scientific community as a whole embraced materialism around 150 years ago and that philosophy has been at its base ever since.

Pointing that out, however, is not the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate that there are questions which science cannot answer, legitimate questions for which the scientific method is inadequate. These questions do not lend themselves to ordinary scientific means of testing and observation. They go beyond science in that sense. But, for all that, they are not illogical or unreasonable, in spite of what the atheist community would have us think.

In fact, it is the opposite. The idea that the only things that are real are things which can be tested and observed through the five senses is absurd on the face of it. It is wholly unreasonable to assert that no other dimension of reality exists beyond the observable simply because we have no means of observing it. In fact, it is arrogant.

Now, let me quote myself from a previous post:

We have a universe. That universe consists of matter and energy. It consists of space and it consists of time. It consists of life. What caused those?

Science cannot answer that, but that does not mean that there are not other means of coming to those answers. Nor should we dismiss any means of inquiry beyond the scientific as purely fanciful thinking . . . as many atheists do.

To me, this is what makes a guy like Richard Dawkins look the most ridiculous, for he is guilty of doing just that.