Rod Dreher on the Limits of Science

He reports on a conversation with Michael Hanlon, science editor of the Daily Mail, who "says that scientists who say questions of teleology and ultimate purpose are meaningless, and ought to be ignored, are simply wrong," which "leaves us with the idea that science -- which relies on testable hypotheses and empirical observation -- simply cannot take us as far as we'd like to go" — Cosmology and our strange universe.

He also reports on a professor who "remarked that so much of this theorizing about multiverses and suchlike makes him think that scientists are trying to smuggle religious ideas into science" and also "some talk about how a prior commitment to atheism conditions at least some of this theorizing." Mr. Dreher explains:

If you cannot or will not admit to the existence of a Supreme Being who designed the universe, then multiverse theory -- the idea that there are an infinite number of universes -- becomes necessary to account for evidence that our universe appears against enormous probabilities to be suited for the emergence of human life. As we will almost certainly never be able to discover whether or not other universes exist, multiverse theory may well be an essentially religious claim to keep God out of the picture, no matter what the evidence.