Will science understand all things?

The relationship of philosophy/religion and modern science continues to be a vexed one.

After recently running into a scientist friend and visiting briefly about that topic, we exchanged letters.
To a scientist friend:

I think of the scientific method as a method, not a claim about reality. This method is a self-imposed rule that guides you in your work. You seek to understand what can be observed by the senses, however magnified by technology, and verified experimentally. You—as a scientist, but not of course, as a person—excuse yourself from the search for other than empirically verifiable knowledge. You may have convictions about empirically unverifiable reality, but those convictions are not themselves scientific.

One such nonscientific conviction is that there is nothing to be known except through empirical method. Because that claim is not itself testable, believing it would involve you in a contradiction with your practice of science.

You introduce a proposal: that we adopt the scientific method with the confidence that it will deliver knowledge about all things. The confidence would come from past performance, for the track record of empirical science is good. We know much more today than three hundred years ago about the world around us, and much of what we have learned has compelled us to drastically revise religious convictions.

Proposal accepted. Philosophers, you see, are very gracious and accommodating folks. We acknowledge that we have nothing to contribute to the content of scientific knowledge, while you scientists help us focus our attention where it should be, on the task of illuminating consciousness, or our awareness of ourselves.

My prediction is that the scientific method will make little progress in understanding consciousness. Yes, my man Bernard Lonergan claims that “generalized empirical method” can be applied to our conscious cognitive activity. But Lonergan didn’t claim that the results of such a generalized method could be empirically tested. They can be verified only in authentic judgments.

In other words, the scientific method that includes empirical testing is a very valuable but limited instance of a more general pattern of cognitional operations. That generalized method includes operations that we employ in every realm of inquiry: paying attention to data, seeking to understand and develop insights and hypotheses about the data, marshalling evidence for the truth of insights into data, and making judgments about the insights to establish what is and what isn’t true. We employ these operations in all that we think about and do, while in science we limit our search for insight to those realities for which we can marshal empirical evidence.

From my scientist friend:

You have accurately represented my views on science and the scientific method. I believe that science has, does, and will continue to deliver knowledge about our world and universe.

Science as a discipline and way of life has had a long tradition of being right on nearly every issue. Even more important, science, when wrong, has always corrected itself and put itself back on track. Based on its historical record, it seems appropriate and prudent for me to continue to believe that science and its empirical based approach is the only method to gather knowledge about the natural world.

That said, there are clearly some realms of life not currently accessible to science and the scientific method. These include but are not limited to the existence of god, consciousness, the origins of the universe, and emotions and feelings. Some of these may in the future be explained in rational (i.e. scientific) terms. Others may not ever be understood using the empirical methods of science. Time will tell. It is my belief however that most unsolved questions will eventually be resolved by scientific means.

You claim that my "world view" of science allows science to go "from a method to a claim about reality, from restricting oneself to empirically verifiable ideas to making empirically unverifiable claims."

I understand where you might have gotten this impression but I want to clarify that this is not my view. The foundation of science lies in its ability to generate new ideas that are experimentally testable. I believe we both agree with this viewpoint. We also probably agree that science can’t make claims in realms where empirical testing is not possible.

My point is that I believe that science will eventually generate explanations for all natural phenomena (my emphasis added) even those which are currently unexplainable given technical limitations (e.g., consciousness).