Ignoring for the moment who "science" might be (and taking "nothing" as "no thing"), we still notice that there are contemporary philosophers (e.g. Colin McGinn) and scientists (e.g. Chomsky) who hold that some things may be unknowable in principle.
From W. G. Lycan, "Chomsky on the Mind-Body Problem":
Methodologically, Chomsky distinguishes between mere “problems” and what he calls “mysteries,” “the former being questions that we seem to be able to formulate in ways that allow us to proceed with serious inquiry and possibly to attain a degree of understanding, the latter including questions that seem to elude our grasp, perhaps because we are as ill-equipped to deal with them as a rat is with a prime number maze.” He suggests, more dramatically, that some of the “mysteries” may be permanently and systematically intractable for us because of innate structure in the human mind.
"The human mind is a biologically given system with certain powers and limits ... The fact that 'admissible hypotheses' are available to this specific biological system accounts for its ability to construct rich and complex explanatory theories. But the same properties of mind that provide admissible hypotheses may well exclude other successful theories as unintelligible to humans. Some theories might simply not be among the admissible hypotheses determined by the specific properties of mind that adapt us 'to imagining correct theories of some kinds,' though these theories might be accessible to a differently organized intelligence." (Chomsky 1975)
"[T]he naturalistic temper ... takes for granted that humans are part of the natural world, not angels, and will therefore have capacities with specific scope and limits, determined by their special structure. For a rat, some questions are problems that it can solve, others are mysteries that lie beyond its cognitive reach; the same should be true of humans, and to first approximation, that seems a fair conclusion. What we call 'natural science' is a kind of chance convergence between aspects of the world and properties of the human mind/brain, which has allowed some rays of light to penetrate the general obscurity, excluding, it seems, central domains of the 'mental.'" (Chomsky unpublished)
Strong stuff, but plausible. Chomsky makes no definite pronouncement on what “central domains of the ‘mental’” he thinks may harbor mysteries. He does speculate that one such domain may be that of “will and choice” (Chomsky 1980): as Descartes said, we human beings are not “compelled” to perform most of the actions we do, as lower animals are compelled, but only “incited and inclined.” The human power of choosing, “[t]his essential capacity of the human to act as a ‘free agent’, able to choose to follow or to disregard ‘the rule that is prescribed to it’ by nature,” is a good candidate for the status of mystery. As another candidate he adds what may be a related point: “Human action is coherent and appropriate, but appropriateness to situations must be sharply distinguished from the causal effect of situations and internal states” (Chomsky unpublished).
Colin McGinn (1989, 1994) has picked up Chomsky’s theme of mysteries, and argued that the mind-body problem is insoluble because, in addition to free will, the qualitative character of experience is a mystery.
[Actually, Chomsky seems to hold that the mind-body problem cannot even be successfully stated: Chomsky (1996) Powers and Prospects, pp. 31-54.
--CGE]
Charles Brown wrote:
>
> C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> [God] is the unknown answer to the question that the universe by
>> its existence poses. To say that God is the reason/cause that the
>> universe exists is to say nothing about how the universe exists,
>> which science investigates.
>>
>
> CB: Isn't God not just the unknown, but _unknowable_ , unknowable to
> humans ? A fundamental difference between belief in God and science
> is that science holds that nothing is unknowable _in principle_. (
> The pun works, by the way). There is a lot unknown, but
> theoretically, nothing is unknowable for science ( except the
> infinite; see below)
>
> This is the problem with God "in" science. God is inherently an
> insoluable mystery for humans, and so the introduction of God into
> scientific discourse terminates its scientific character by giving up
> on being able to know whatever is being investigated.
>
> In science, "God" does enter as the infinite. We are finite beings ,
> so in principle we cannot know the infinite.
>
> Not being able to know the infinite means we cannot know absolute
> truth. Our knowledge of the finite is therefore knowledge of relative
> truth.