The Limits and Limitations of Science

What the heck does "Science will inevitably transcend any human limitations" really mean?

ok, let me edit for clarity. better?

Much clearer, thanks.

Do I "believe that Science will eventually answer any and every question about the universe"?

Yes.

Sometimes the answer will be: we do not have enough information.

If you had said, "I believe that God will answer all my prayers" and then said, "sometimes the answer will be: 'no'," I bet that plenty of the folk on the forum would be delighted to point out the error of your ways.

As it is, I suspect few will venture to correct you. Why is what you just wrote significantly different?

The comparison you are trying to make is nonsensical but I shall try to help anyway.

The closest we can come to certainty is an admitance of ignorance.

The safest assertion that exists is that one does not have enough information to reach a conclusion if it is, in fact, true that the individual does not.

Asserting that God speaks to you is an assertion of an inherently different nature.

What is the difference between the two? Well, one stands up to the test of burden of proof and the other does not.

I should have known this was bait for Christian silliness. I will probably not be back so have a good un.

I sincerely dounbt tht science will ever answer all the question. We have only our tiny little brains to work with to try to comprehend infinity. We don't even have a clue as to the nature of our own minds. There will always be things the mind can't comprehend.

jnhofzinser,

Of course God, should one exist, answers all prayers. It is His privelege to answer, Yes, No, or Maybe.

I pray for the health of _______ . He is sick. He will get better, get worse and die, or he will suffer till he dies or gets better. In an evolving Universe no supernatural intervention is necessary. And it agrees with observations and any other principle that records changes.

Our friend Pascal should have realized that In my naievety I suspect that he probably did . In my cynicism I suspect that he realized there is no money in showing obvious truths. In reality it can be traced back to the interactions between Darwins evolution, Adam Smiths economics,and Pascals willingness to prevaricate. None of these have been shown to be inspired Saints, merely thinkers. :wink:

Well, to just jump in cold, ignoring all the other stuff here, and answer strictly mechanistically: to truly know everything, you would have to be able to record (supposing you could freeze time) the location and status of every bit of matter and energy in the universe. Problem is, storing information decreases entropy -- the amount of matter and/or energy required to record all of that information is greater than the amount of matter and energy in the universe.

There's a bullshite answer for ye...

Bloody hell - science is NOT about 'explaining everything', it is about setting boundaries on ignorance.


<some-one a great deal smarter than me pointed this out in a book I read recently - at least I remembered the salient points!>

Not. One just couldn't help noticing that the "faith in Science" position is akin to "Christian silliness". Note that my prediction came true, however: Mechsmith was very quick to address the one position without a thought about the subject of the thread.
Very well put. If you can find a reference to that book, I'd be grateful.
Indeed. I am convinced that "the nature of our own minds" represents one of those "boundaries of ignorance". But that discussion could legitimately be relegated to The Consciousness Thread

Patiodog: I'd be more generous to your own position You certainly establish an ultimate(?) limitation on science, but I suppose the more interesting question is: are we near any practical limits of science presently?

Some people believe that science will eventually answer all questions because its track record tells us that many things once thought to be impossible are now easily understood. We have learned so much about DNA, medicine, engineering, and cosmology that sometimes nothing seems beyond our grasp.

There are many questions that are probably answerable but would require significant advancements in technology and/or the evolution of scientific theories, such as how life began, cures for cancer and genetic diseases, how consciousness arises from organic brains, what the early earth was like, what dark matter and dark energy really are, string theory.

But there are questions that can probably never be answered even in principle, given what we think we know about how the universe operates. We can never know what kinds of life currently inhabit planets in other galaxies or even on the other side of the Milky Way since it would take hundreds of millions of years for information about them to reach us. We can never know what preceded the big bang or whether we are just one universe in an infinite multiverse. We can never know whether gods ever interfered with life on earth. Science may tell us how we got here, but cannot answer the question of why.

Your first point, while entirely correct, does raise the question of the legitimacy of the extrapolation, especially when considered in the context of the "unanswerables" (i.e., your final point).

As a result, the "really tough question" centers around where we believe the "boundaries of ignorance" will be drawn. In effect, what makes us choose to assign some difficult problem (for example, "how life began") to the "probably answerable" category?

Excellent post, btw.

Terry

Well, since I'm in the biological sciences, I'd offer an emphatic no. We're just scratching the surface (seriously, we know so so so little about life). Dunno about physics and the like. You'd have to ask a physicist.

Craven,

You will please note that I was not the first to mention "prayer" on this thread. I merely noted its relationship to reality. Whatever that is.

I do not agree that there are any inherant limits to reason, any more than I would agree that there are any inherant limits to imagination.

Pascal generally seems to be the most craven :wink: of the classical philosophers. He seems afraid to "try his wings" or to accept responsibilities. Personally I would rather risk hell everlasting than to reiterate as truth that which I cannot or don't KNOW.

( I admit that for me it's rather a small risk )

Another attempt to refute Voltaire and Adam Smith was more recently done.

"Voltaires Bastards", The dictatorship of reason in the west, John Ralston Saul, Vintage Books, 1993.

IMO- Mr. Saul doesn't get the job done any better than Mr. Pascal did.

You're funny, Mech;
I don't believe that you have read Saul any more than you have read Pascal (which likely consists entirely of my quotes of him)! An attempt to refute Voltaire! Indeed! Saul is a fan of Voltaire, you nitwit. And Pascal was long dead when Voltaire was born! And this from
Please!

John Rodgers once said that the 4 questions of science , in ascending difficulty are

What

how

why

why not

If ole blaise were living today, I wonder if hed make up the same bumper stickers with as much conviction as in 1690

Just for the record, M. Pascal died in 1662, and those "bumper stickers" you refer to were anything but: the Pensees were published from a collection of private notes collected after his death. And while Voltaire had issues with those notes, he publically acknowledged Pascal's brilliance (take notes, Mech )

Johny, youre the one who began the 'quotefest of Pascals "after death ' writings, so why remind me when he died except to be self congratulatory.
I find the quotes of many dead scientists and philosophers amusingly of their time, sort of like Leonardo.pascal , Leonardo, Avogadro, steno etc, all made some very silly statements as well obvious or profound ones. They were all capable of making lots of naive statements with silly assumptions that are long obsolete and we use them because they are so quaint.

why not proceed forward a few more centuries and see what our own contemporaries have to say as well.
No scientist spends much time worrying whether their contribution will be the end point, most are too busy trying to work on one or two tiny corners of the
sky.