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Originally Posted by willravel
Science is at a loss to explain nothing. People simply haven't discovered that science yet. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle has been explained. Does that mean it's unexplainable? Of course not.
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Depending on how i read that first sentence, we either agree or disgree.
1)If you mean that science can't explain "nothing" as in science is incapable of evaluating the things on which it cannot focus its analytical lens then we agree about this. What we don't agree on is whether it is prudent to make up your own explanations for things on which science has nothing to say. I say that it isn't a problem, it can sometimes be incredibly useful, and is generally to be encouraged as long as in the process one doesn't lose sight of the things that science does have to say.
If the above interpretation is correct, proceed to 3), otherwise, if you meant to say that there is nothing for which science is at a loss to explain, given enough time to figure it out, well...
2)Let me put it like this. To my knowledge there is nothing anywhere, ever, that should lead anyone to believe with any amount of confidence that science is capable of explaining everything. There is no proof for this belief. There isn't probability for this belief.
It is a hypothesis that is by definition completely untestable- you can't test something if it is impossible for you to test it. If there did exist some phenomena that was beyond the scope of scientific testing, you'd have no way of knowing because all the means by which you could find out would be useless from the get-go.
The fact that as a hypothesis it is completely untestable means that it is not a "scientific" idea, and i doubt you'll find many people in the who do a lot of science who are willing to go on record as believing that science is capable of explaining everything. Even if they were willing to claim this, the fact that they have no way of knowing whether the idea is even plausible means that they are committing an act of faith very akin to a belief in god.
A systematic way of making sense of the world(science) does not necessarily lead to some sort of macroscopic omniscience, where at some point everything to be known will be known and everything can be explained.
I'm finding interesting parallels between your insistence that science can explain everything and the insistence by some theists that heaven awaits them. Is there such a thing as salvation empiricism? Can you live comfortably in a world where some things are unknowable?
3) Whether the heisenburg uncertainty thing has been explained or not is irrelevant when you pay attention to what it says- namely that there is a limit to what we can know about a particle at any particular time- aka there are some things we can't know regardless of how much science we throw at them. This is scientific evidence for limitations on scientific knowledge.
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Originally Posted by pig
i have to chime in at this point and say that i am quite convinced that 1. 'science,' or objective descriptive systems, will never fully explain the universe, how it got where it is and why it's there. 2. there is no proof that any scientific theory is 'true;' only that these theories are convenient and that they make predictions which are sufficiently close to our interpretations of what we observe such that we call them 'true.'
i hold that there are types of knowledge and experience which are cleanly outside the purview of science.
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I concur. A molecule is nothing more than a convenient concept. A horse is a pig that don't fly straight.