Science won’t ever make philosophy or religion obsolete
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The information we have in the Universe is finite and limited, but our curiosity and wonder is forever insatiable. And always will be.
The farther away we look, the closer in time we're seeing toward the Big Bang. The latest record-holder for quasars comes from a time when the Universe was just 690 million years old. These ultra-distant cosmological probes also show us a Universe that contains dark matter and dark energy, but many questions remain unanswered at the scientific frontiers. (Credit: Robin Dienel/Carnegie Institution for Science)
The farther away we look, the closer in time we're seeing toward the Big Bang. The latest record-holder for quasars comes from a time when the Universe was just 690 million years old. These ultra-distant cosmological probes also show us a Universe that contains dark matter and dark energy, but many questions remain unanswered at the scientific frontiers.(Credit: Robin Dienel/Carnegie Institution for Science
KEY TAKEAWAYS
As we come to understand the Universe to better precision and more comprehensively, many questions which were previously pondered by philosophical and religious thought-leaders grow to have definitive answers.
However, the information we possess within our observable Universe is now, and will always be, finite and limited, implying that there's a fundamental limit to what's knowable.
As long as we remain curious about the unknown and the unknowable, there will always be a place for philosophy and religion both, independently of whatever becomes scientifically known. Here's why.
For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of the biggest existential questions we could formulate. How did humans come into existence on planet Earth? What are we made of, at a fundamental level? How big is the Universe, and what is its origin? For countless generations, these were questions for theologians, philosophers, and poets.
But over the past few hundred years, humanity has discovered the most compelling and convincing answers we’ve ever had to those questions and many others. Through the process of performing experiments and making observations, we have increased our definitive, scientific knowledge tremendously, enabling us to draw conclusions rather than merely to engage in unprovable speculations. Yet even with as far as we’ve come from a scientific perspective, philosophy and religion will never become obsolete. Here’s why.
