Science Can Never Fill the Void Left by the Death of God

God is dead. Can science replace Him?

In many ways, God is a proxy for the mystical — that which might be glimpsed but is not transparent and cannot be understood or explained. Although there’s still lots more that remains unknown than known (by a 20:1 ratio), science has succeeded in explaining certain physical truths that were once God’s sole domain.

Via Big Think:

For hundreds of thousands of years…we had no definitive answers to some of the biggest existential questions… 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?…

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.

Despite this caveat, the author, Ethan Siegel, explains why he believes “philosophy and religion will never become obsolete”:

For all of the questions that science has answered and all of the lessons it’s taught us, it does not teach us everything. Every scientific theory, no matter how robustly supported by the entire set of knowledge compiled by humanity over our history, only has a limited range… no matter how far we’ve come in our scientific understanding of the world and the Universe, there is always a place where our established scientific understanding ends.

Barring the comprehensive unified theory of everything, there will always be room to abstractly interpret reality according to subjective criteria, and there will always be a horizon at which point known knowledge and the Great Unknown meet. Ninety-five percent, for instance, of the world is dark matter — either currently unknown or actually unknowable at any point in time.