Originally Posted by
Nick Capozzoli
How can you be sure that we will never be able to understand how life began (from non-living matter)? Certainly the question of how the universe began (or "was created") is even more difficult, but can you prove that these things are unknowable? And even if they are unknowable as you assume, why is the pursuit "wasting our time?" It was this pursuit of understanding that led to us being able to build Hoover Dam (your example of something beyond the ability of our ancestors), along with a whole lot of other modern marvels.
And there is a difference between religious and scientific understanding of the world. Both views depend on reason and even faith. The faith part of science has to do with basic assumptions about reality (number. the nature of mass, space, time, force, cause and effect, etc). The faith part of
religion is bigger than that of science, but there is also a qualitative difference. Science allows for experiment, which is the testing of scientific explanations of the world, which allows scientists to judge the validity of their understanding (i.e., reasoning of how things came to be and work.
It would be an error to say that science is based on reason while religion is not. Both employ reason. The real difference is the attitude towards experiment, checking our reason against what is.
Aquinas and Aristotle employed reason in their arguments. Neither were
scientists. They could be called philosophers or religionists. They employed plausible and convincing arguments to explain many things, but their explanations ultimately failed to conform to scientific reality.
Today we think of science as mathematical. Certainly mathematical reasoning is a powerful tool in understanding the behavior of the universe. But mathematics is just a form of reason. It reflects the way our minds work, and may or may not reflect the way the universe works. We can never be sure that the universe follows the patterns of our reason, but a scientist accepts that we can ask questions and perform experiments to see if the universe seems to follow the patterns of our reasoning.
Pythagoras was a great mathematician, his mathematical genius advanced science, but he was not an honest scientist (or even mathematician), if the story about his followers drowning a disciple who proved the existence of irrational numbers is true. Aristosthenes, who may have been a lesser mathematical genius than Pythagoras or Euclid was a far better scientist. He used geometry to measure the circumference of a spherical earth, and his calculation was quite accurate.
