More about Science . . .

After writing my little thoughts about Science the other day I happened to look at the new Harpers and the lead essay took up similar ideas. Here is an extract. Grab the April 2008 Harpers and read the rest if you can: (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/0081967)

THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN
Like democracy or justice, science is a word exhausted by its examples. Since the great scientific revolution of the West was set in motion in the seventeenth century, we have been vouchsafed four powerful and profound scientific theories--Newtonian mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. These are isolated miracles, great mountain peaks surrounded by a range of low furry foothills. The theories that we possess are "magnificent . . . difficult, sometimes phenomenally accurate" as the distinguished mathematician Roger Penrose has observed, but, as he adds, they also make up a "tantalizingly inconsistent scheme of things."
These splendid artifacts of the human imagination have made the world more mysterious than it ever was. We now know better than we did what we do not know and what we have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is here. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from "a warm little pond." The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial doctrine of how the brain functions. Beyond the trivial we have no other doctrines. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the good is found. On these and many other points as well, the great scientific theories have lapsed. The more sophisticated the theories, the more inadequate they are. This is a reason to cherish them. They have enlarged and not diminished our sense of the sublime.

David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its scientific pretensions, excerpted in Harpers Magazine, April, 2008