>My point in all this is that science can't explain everything
Science that is worth its name begins with a once (and perhaps still) revolutionary assumption that some questions are not worth asking. Stephen Jay Gould puts it this way:
***** I have written these monthly essays for nearly twenty years, and they have brought me an enormous correspondence from non-professionals about all aspects of science. From sheer volume, I obtain a pretty good sense of strengths and weaknesses in public perceptions. I have found that one common misconception surpasses all others. People will write, telling me that they have developed a revolutionary theory, one that will expand the boundaries of science. These theories, usually described in several pages of single-spaced typescript, are speculations about the deepest ultimate questions we can ask -- what is the nature of life? the origin of the universe? the beginning of time?
But thoughts are cheap. Any person of intelligence can devise his half dozen before breakfast. Scientists can also spin out ideas about ultimates. We don't (or, rather, we confine them to our private thoughts) because we cannot devise ways to test them, to decide whether they are right or wrong. What good to science is a lovely idea that cannot, as a matter of principle, ever be affirmed or denied?...
Evolution is not the study of life's ultimate origin as a path toward discerning its deepest meaning. Evolution, in fact, is not the study of origins at all. Even the more restricted (and scientifically permissible) question of life's origin on our earth lies outside its domain. (This interesting problem, I suspect, falls primarily within the purview of chemistry and the physics of self-organizing systems.) Evolution studies the pathways and mechanisms of organic change following the origin of life. Not exactly a shabby subject either -- what with such resolvable questions as "How, when, and where did humans evolve?"; "How do mass extinction, continental drift, competition among species, climatic change, and inherited constraints of form and development interact to influence the manner and rate of evolutionary change?"; and "How do the branches of life's tree fit together?" to mention just a few among thousands equally exciting.... (_Bully for Brontosaurus_, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991, pp. 454-455) *****
The polemical point of Gould's essay excerpted above is that creationists and their supporters misunderstand what science is about, misrepresent what scientists do, and then accuse science and scientists of an inability to answer questions of ultimate origins and purposes, whereas it is in fact the deliberate exclusion of such questions that makes science what it is.
We may become better at making inquiries into social relations more scientific than before if and when we succeed in excluding questions that do not fall into science's purview. -- Yoshie
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