Are there any questions science can't tackle?
Even though science is an excellent way to test ideas, some questions aren’t suitable for science to tackle.
In every day life we use a range of ways to look for answers to questions. Past experience, historical documents and intuition are just some of the methods we use.
Which of these questions is a good one for science?
Why doesn’t the water soak into this leaf?
Why did Henry VIII marry six times?
Take a look at the video below about science questions
Does God exist?
What about the question, “Does God exist?” – can science tell us the answer to that?
Here are ideas from two students in Year 10.
We can’t investigate whether God exists using science. This leaves everyone, including scientists, to make up their minds based on other reasons. Some scientists conclude that God exists and some conclude He does not.
Scientist Rodney Holder has written many books to explain why in his view, we need science and religion in our lives.
Scientist, Richard Dawkins has written many books explaining why in his view, God doesn’t exist.
The drag-and-drop game below will test your ability to sort questions.
Over the years, people have developed different forms of enquiry to explore different kinds of questions. So we use scientific enquiry to address scientific questions, historical enquiry to address historical questions and musical enquiry to address musical questions. The challenge is to decide which form or forms of enquiry to use for a particular question.
Conclusion
This section explained that scientists come up with ideas which can be supported with observations. Science can be used as a way to test ideas. It can tell us the height of Everest and the strength of a piece of string. But it can only test ideas when there is something to observe.
If there’s nothing to see, science is stuck! This means science cannot tell us whether God exists, because God cannot be observed.
Taking it further
Even if science cannot test religion’s claim that God exists, it certainly seems to have lots to say about other claims made in the Creation story.
For example the Creation story says everything was made in six days!
On the Creation page, we look into this issue further.