Science can only describe; it cannot explain. Surely this is wrong, you say. Science explains a lot. Well, that depends on what you mean by “explain.” Science can tell us why we don’t float off into space (gravity), and can even tell us what creates gravity (the warping of space-time), but these are not explanations. They are merely descriptions of physical phenomena. The deeper questions go unanswered. For example, why gravity exists in the first place, and why does it assume the value it does? Scientists can describe the history of the universe all the way back to the Planck time, but they cannot explain why the universe started the way it did, or what caused the universe to come into being.
If science can only describe physical phenomena but cannot explain it, then it is naïve to think science alone is sufficient to answer every question of human inquiry. Science is an amazing discipline that has been wildly successful in doing what it is intended to do, but it cannot do everything. The role of science should not be diminished below its usefulness, but neither should it be exalted above its limits. If you want explanations, you’ll have to look beyond science.
Thinking to Believe 
November 12, 2012 at 8:44 am
As a matter of course, science treats everything as if it has an underlying mechanistic explanation (this is what it means to be methodologically naturalistic). We see that this is a recursive problem, and eventually you need “that thing which has no underlying mechanistic explanation.” But science would look at that and say, “that has some heretofore unknown underlying mechanistic explanation,” because that is science’s job: never to be satisfied and content that it has found the “base.” This perpetual dissatisfaction has allowed it to break through floors that had seemed to everyone else to be basic, but weren’t. In other words, science’s blind relentlessness has made it powerful in the past, but will one day be a weakness when and if it finds the true base and refuses to be satisfied there.
So in that way it is true that if you want the base, you can’t ask science: science will never tell you that something is basic. It is not necessarily true, however, that by looking outside of science one can discover what is basic. We Christians may say it is God, but an atheist would see little reason to agree to that.
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November 12, 2012 at 5:15 pm
[…] Science can only describe; it cannot explain. Surely this is wrong, you say. Science explains a lot. Well, that depends on what you mean by “explain.” Science can tell us why we don’t float off… […]
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October 23, 2013 at 11:20 am
[…] the most fundamental questions humans can ask. Science is a marvelous discipline, and can tell us much about the physical world. What it cannot do is tell us why or how something could come from […]
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April 16, 2014 at 7:03 am
[…] Science cannot explain anything […]
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