On Whether Science Can Explain Everything

On Whether Science Can Explain Everything
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Can science explain everything?
What is science? The definition of science can be classified broadly into two; a discipline and a process. Science is the process of acquiring new knowledge through observation, experimentation, testing, and hypothesizing (Ladiges & Mayo, 2017). It is also the body of knowledge of the things that have already been discovered through science. Science has been touted to explain everything. Most scientists claim that science is the answer to everything. Claiming it can explain everything is a stretch, there are some unknowable things about ourselves, our environment, the world and the universe. Can science explain the origin of the universe? Can it comprehensively explain morality and consciousness? There have been attempts to frame the world through the lens of science (observation, experimentation, and testing). These processes that are considered the core of science have fallen short in explaining everything in the universe. 
One of the things sciences has struggled to explain is the universe. While out knowledge of the universe has increased tremendously through scientific research, there are still unknowable things about it. To understand the universe, there are various questions we ought to ask and find definitive answers to. These questions help explain the world and generate new knowledge. These are the questions Isaac Newton asked himself when an apple fell from the tree and wondered why it had to go down, not up. By attempting to answer these questions, new scientific knowledge comes to be. In the process, Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravitation. 
However, there are unknowable things about the universe such as its origin. While scientific observations, theories, and experiments have attempted to explain how the universe came to be, the best science can do to put out theories. One of the key reasons why only theories can explain it is because our planet and solar system has been around for at least a few billion years. Finding evidence of how it came to be is hard and in that period of time, a lot more evidence may have disappeared. The fragments of evidence that scientists have collected can never fully explain how our universe came to be or in the very least our solar system. The best science can do is to front a theory. Theories do not explain an occurrence scientifically. Theories are part of the scientific knowledge generation process and have to be validated by experiments. However, the origin of the universe remains a mystery. One of the most accepted theories of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang Theory. It is a rapid explosion that is believed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago. In a trillionth of a second, the universe came to be. This came from a singularity at a point of infinite density and temperatures beyond human comprehension (Wall, 2011). This rapid expansion formed the universe and everything in it. This theory has a fundamental problem that science cannot explain. Where did the singularity come from? What were the properties of the singularity? Why the rapid expansion? What triggered this explosion? While science has been able to find some theoretical answers to these questions, some do not have a definitive answer. The question on the origin of singularity is unknowable using scientific processes as we know them. 
Some scientists have always pointed out that even religion and faith cannot explain the origin of the universe and have got a lot about it wrong. Some of the oldest religions like Christianity claimed that the sun orbits the earth (Zanatta, et al, 2017). While this is true, it does not negate that science cannot explain everything. If other schools of thought are unable to explain the origin of the universe, then at least science can bridge the knowledge gap. It is likely that humanity will never know the origin there is. We cannot witness the origin of the universe and we cannot recreate it in the lab. We have to live with speculations, hypotheses which may be skewed by our own beliefs to create stories of the origin of the universe. Science is unable to answer this question comprehensively. The best it can do is to front out theories that at times are invalidated by new scientific discoveries. In one example, scientists discovered a star that is believed to be older than the universe itself. Scientists had earlier estimated that the star was over 16 billion years old. It is believed to be 14.5 billion years old and a marginal error of 800,000 years (Crookes, 2019). While the marginal error allows scientists to show that it is not older than the universe, most calculations show that it is likely that the star is older. Another question science cannot explain is what lies beyond the cosmos. While the universe is too big to have billions of galaxies, our current understanding of the universe cannot explain what lies beyond it. We can only imagine. Therefore, science cannot explain the origin of the universe definitively and what lies beyond our observable universe. They are questions that will remain elusive to the scientific community, at least in the foreseeable future. 
Secondly, science cannot explain the why question. There are some other naturally occurring phenomena that science has been unable to explain why they exist. Science has explained how and what some phenomena, and objects exist, but it has not explained why they exist. For example, there are several laws of physics that can be explained mathematically. While we know their existence, what they are, and how they operate, science has been unable to explain why they exist. One of the laws of physics is the gravitational force discovered by Newton. Gravity is the natural attraction of bodies in the universe. Our bodies and matter around the earth are maintained on the surface even as the earth spins at a very high speed because of gravity. The moon is in orbit around the earth because of gravity. Earth is in orbit around the sun because of its gravity. Since Isaac Ne...