Sometimes in discussions or debates regarding science and faith, origins, or atheism vs. religion, people give the impression or even state explicitly, that science explains life, the universe and anything worth knowing, or if not quite yet, then for sure eventually. That sort of hubris, known as "scientism", is unfortunately widespread in the popular media and certain groups of people, even including not a few actual scientists. This view often but erroneously puts Christians and others who believe in a spiritual realm on the defensive.
When looked at closely, scientism is not science at all, but a metaphysical or philosophical position, based on beliefs that cannot be proven, and which are often not even recognized or understood by the person voicing them.
To partially correct this tendency and argue against scientism, I offer the following list of things that science cannot explain or has been unable to understand over the centuries, sometimes despite trying hard, and notwithstanding claims to the contrary. Each one comes with a link to some article or page. You can find more about any one of these by appropriate Internet searching.
1. Science has no fundamental understanding of time.
What is time? Why does it pass, and in only one direction? Is the past real? Is the future fixed? Time has confounded physicists and philosophers alike for millennia. Relativity's "space-time" does not solve the problem, it just repackages it and makes it more mysterious. Cosmology struggles with the "problem of time" and the "arrow of time". http://preposterousuniverse.com/timecourse/
2. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible.
Both are superb theories that explain a lot in their own realms, and have been thoroughly tested in great detail. But the two are incompatible with each other, and various attempts to combine them into one large coherent theory of physics have not yet been successful. This is not a problem for most scientific research, but clearly something very fundamental is lacking in our understanding of physics.
http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-howwhy-are-quantum-mechanics-and-relativity-incompatible/
3. Science cannot explain the extreme fine tuning in the universe.
In order to make matter, stars, planets and life possible, the initial conditions for the Big Bang, along with the laws of physics and the fundamental physical constants of the universe had to be just so, sometimes to ridiculous levels of precision. However, from a physics perspective many of these parameters seem to be arbitrary and could have been different, so how did they get their values? http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48937152.html
The main hypothesis to avoid the concept of a Creator doing the fine tuning, is the "multiverse" concept, but that idea is fraught with difficulties, does not really solve the "God problem", and has zero evidence in its favour. Indeed, it is not clear what evidence we could possibly find to support it. Thus the multiverse is not a scientific theory and science is left with the biggest mystery of all.
4. Science does not know what makes up 96% of the universe.
How can you pretend to understand how things all work if you only understand 4% of the 'stuff' in the universe? Science has evidence for "dark matter" that seems to outweigh the "normal" understood matter that we see in galaxies, gas clouds, stars, etc., by a factor of three or more. While cosmologists are searching, and have managed a rough map of how its mass must be distributed in some places, scientists have not found any candidates for this type of matter, despite having tested various theories.
Worse than that, most of the mass/energy in the universe appears to be in the form of "dark energy" that reveals its existence only through the accelerating expansion of the universe, and some constants in physicists equations. No one knows what this is.
http://science.time.com/2013/02/20/telescope-to-hunt-for-missing-96-of-the-universe/
5. Science has no credible account of biogenesis, how life began on earth.
Even the simplest life form needs an enormous amount of internal machinery to make it live and reproduce. This machinery requires a large amount of information to specify it, as well as the machinery to turn that information into the machinery itself. The Darwinian process of random change plus natural selection cannot explain how this information arose before life existed.
Various "origin of life" attempts have been made to explain how life might have begun, but they all fall far short of explaining where this information came from. The basic probabilities for natural processes do not credibly support the necessary minimum. Experimental attempts to create life from basic materials have been quite unsuccessful at producing anything close to a self-replicating entity. And studies show that the chemical deck is severely stacked against any naturalistic mechanism.
http://www.nature.com/news/debate-bubbles-over-the-origin-of-life-1.10024
6. Science cannot explain consciousness.
Everyone knows he or she is conscious, but science has a hard time even defining the term, much less explaining it. Naturalistic scientism tries to "explain" it by voting it out of existence; you just think you are conscious, but it is just an "emergent property" of your neurons firing in ways that will eventually be understood. But the internal sense of being yourself, of understanding a concept, of thinking an abstract thought are not explained. The concepts of truth, beauty, morality and love could also fall into this category. "Artificial intelligence" has not produced anything like a conscious computer, and Gödel's theorem suggests that it cannot.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html
7. Science does not answer the free-will vs. determinism question:
We all assume we have free will, the ability to make up our minds and choose courses of action based ultimately on our own thoughts. Sure there are outside influences, and our background and subconscious play their parts, but if we seriously believed we didn't have free will, our lives would be absurd jokes. Scientism, being stuck with naturalistic beliefs, needs to assume that there is no such thing as free will, and then somehow has to live as if there is. The debate becomes quite complicated.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/history/
8. Science cannot explain why the universe is understandable:
Why should mathematics work to capture physics and how the world works in a few equations? Indeed, why do logic and reasoning work at all? And why is man able to explore, measure, theorize about and even explain at some level the world he experiences. Why are their physical laws? Indeed, why is there anything at all? Scientism just takes all this for granted.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Why_Math_Works.pdf
9. Finally, science cannot tell you what you should do.
Science can study what is and how things in the natural world interact and work, and has done a great job of that over the centuries. But nothing in science can tell you what you ought to do tomorrow, or how you should live your years here on the Earth. That is up to you, using your conscious mind and based on your own circumstances, metaphysical beliefs and values.
http://www.aaas.org/page/can-science-answer-our-ethical-dilemmas-exploring-ought-dichotomy
This is not an exhaustive list, there are, of course, many detailed things that science does not know about the world. Science does advance, learning, discovering, analysing and theorizing, but the above are questions that science per se either cannot address, or will continue having problems delving into for a long time. So, I am not against science, indeed, I study it eagerly, but I am against scientism, especially when it presents itself as scientific.
So the next time someone claims that science can explain everything, that science proves atheism, or that science refutes spirituality, toss some of these items their way. True science is inherently humble, recognizing its limitations and ignorance, and sticking to areas it can properly investigate. Scientism is none of those things and needs to be called out when it pretends to be science.
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