We receive some interesting questions at askanyquestion.info and we make our best efforts to respond. But we also have questions. Here are some that have come to mind since I have been away for a while. I thought you’d want to know. Perhaps you can answer them for me.
Why is science so intent on searching out new worlds on Mars and colonizing the Moon? Why is science looking for the “origins” of life there? Is it because science can only explain the very simplest of chemical constructs such as those found on distant barren wastelands of uninhabitable worlds? Isn’t it because they can’t really explain the origins here on Earth of molecules so complex that it confounds even the wisest scientists?
Isn’t it because a scientist determined that DNA holds the incredible amount of intelligent information it contains in order to tell each living cell what to do and how to do it? Could it be because the answers to these questions about Earth confuses scientists who struggle with the obvious conclusion that something or someone must have been present at the beginning to give intelligibility to molecules, DNA, and all of life? Isn’t science beginning to question its own research protocols and conclude there must have been something there there at the beginning of all things?
Is this why some struggling atheist scientists are making statements like: “Would you not say to yourself . . . Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly miniscule. Of course you would . . . A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” Why did atheist Sir Fred Hoyle admit that his reflections here left him “greatly shaken?” Why has atheist David Hume admitted that the universe didn’t just “pop” into existence? “I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that any thing might arise without a Cause.”
Is this where science has figured out it can explain the how’s and what’s of the universe but not the why’s and who’s? Why do people think that science undermines the existence of God? Why can’t people see that “God makes science possible?” Why can’t people understand that, “without God, we have no reason to trust the regularity or the comprehensibility of the universe that underlies the entire scientific enterprise?” Why can’t science go to the Moon and the other places looking for the transcendent, first cause of the universe, and if science finds God there, acknowledge it?
Well, I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. As a kid, I wanted to go into space as much as anyone. That’s why I became a pilot. I got close enough to space. And, I studied science enough to know how to ask questions like the ones on this page. It’s just that, for the life of me, I can’t understand why it “is one thing to say (correctly) that science cannot answer questions of ultimate purpose. It is quite another [for science] to dismiss purpose (and beauty and truth) as an illusion because science cannot deal with it.” My wife is beautiful. Science can’t deal with that, but it doesn’t make her any less beautiful. My life has significance and purpose. Science can’t deal with why I have purpose and meaning in life, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have it. And, I’ll keep pursuing questions of truth. You can’t replicate truth in a test tube. But that doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist.
If you’re a scientist or someone who can, go ahead and answer these questions for me. I’ll wait.