Are there things that science cannot explain?

Question

Or are there just a ton of stupid people that no one can seem to explain anything to?

Answer 1

Yes there are otherwise scientist would be out of a job. Think of the cure for aids. But you are right when it come to religion. Science has explained why religion is a lie yet a bunch of stupid people still don't believe it.

Answer 2

What you really mean to say is that you think people might explain everything at some time in the future. Saying that science can or will in the future explain everything is not itself a scientific question. You are into the realms of philosophy and more precisely epistemology here; not science.Real science is always by definition open to revision on the basis of new results or interpretations. How do you know that knowledge itself is finite? Can you prove it is? If we knew everything, which is presumably a vast amount of information, how would all that be stored and who would be clever enough to check it out. It might take a few lifetimes, and one decimal point or number wrong would confound your assumption.

Answer 3

Science can't explain a lot of things, starting with where the mass of the universe came from. Their pat answer is, it was always there.

There are two kinds of science. Applied and theoretical.

I test our chemical waste water weekly for heavy metals using specially treated paper. That is applied science. We know if any metals are present the strip will turn another color.

Theotretical science is applied science waiting to be firmed up or thrown out.

As long as there are things they can't explain, it's still theoretical.

In order to be a hard, applied science you have to be able to explain enough to make it work each week when you test the water for heavy metals.

Answer 4

Absolutely. In fact, most science that we, the uninitiated public, state as fact, is still theory to the scientific community. There is still no Grand Unified Theory of Physics. The numbers that the universe has given us do not, yet, add up. Relativity, quantum theory. There are still holes in all the formula.
I'm not saying science is bunk, I am saying that there is still more to discover. Every new discovery open a hundred more questions. I think the Zen master was right: Everything you learn only outlines the vast void of what you do not know, and learning is understanding that you don't know.

Answer 5

There are definitely holes in science's understanding of the universe (*cough unifiedfieldtheory cough*), but I don't think that means that such things will NEVER be explained by science.

I think that science is our best tool for investigating and explaining the physical world around us. The spiritual world might be a whole different matter, and that is the field where religion comes into play. Trying to use religion to explain the physical universe is, in my opinion, not a very good approach.

Answer 6

No. Now, are their things that science as we know it cannot explain YET? Yes. And that is why scientists still work...because there are things that we have yet to understand. To simply say, 'I don't understand it fully, so it must be the work of a god', is to take the easy way out.

Just think about how long it took for the Pope to acknowledge that, yes, gravity exists, or that, yes, the Earth is round, not flat.

Answer 7

Yes.

The proof derives Alan Turing's Halting Problem which derives from Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. The human brain is a computer. As such, there is an input for which we cannot predict an output, i.e there are questions we can't answer.

Ironically, it is one of the reasons that reverse engineering the brain's algorithm is such a difficult one, aside from just the physics of figuring out how all the neurons are connected.

You can also approach this question from a purely physical stance. Since the fastest that we can get information is the speed of light, there exists a growing sphere around us of what it is possible to know about. For example, we cannot know if the Sun has exploded right now. It would take about 8 minutes for us to find that out. Science can't speed that knowledge up.

Answer 8

Both! :)

There are a lot of questions people ask that are important and meaningful--but aren't within the area of science. Bear in mind that science is restricted to questions that can be answered by empirical evidence and a process of observation and analysis.

But --for example--here's two questions that you can't answer based on science: Is killling someone morally wrong? Is the novel "Jane Eyre" (or any work of art) good or bad art?

These are not nonsense questions--and they (especially the first) are certainly important. But you can't answer them by using science.

Answer 9

Not only are there things that Science cannot explain -- there is even a theorem that proves it.

Look up Godel's Theorem. It states that any system of logic strong enough to encompass number theory is either incomplete or inconsistent. In other words -- either there are truths of mathematics that cannot be proved or mathematics does not work at all -- and we can never prove which.

One thing that this means is that we have to make a leap of faith to believe that Mathematics works.

Answer 10

Yes, there are things science cannot explain, unfortunately, most of those things are so far out of the realm of our day to day existence that it's a long trip just to see that frontier. Remember science comes from the latin word for knowledge - if we don't know it, it's not science (so saying science has an explanation we don't know yet - is simply not true).

This doesn't mean there aren't people who have built up an immunity to rational explanation. Such people exist.