How should we deal with the unanswerable?
Take the possibly unanswerable question of the origin of the universe. An atheist might say, “I don’t know how the universe began, maybe we’ll find out someday. Maybe it has even been here forever. I don’t know”. A Christian would say, “god created the universe (or whatever other faith based conclusion)”. If new evidence of the beginning of the universe turns up, science and reason will follow the evidence while religions will protect their idea of the truth. This process will happen forever as long as you have both people of faith and people of evidence making conclusions about things we can answer. But what if this question is truly unanswerable my mankind? Evolutionary biologist Gould asserts that many such questions that “lie beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method” exist and presumably we should turn to religion to answer such questions. Is it more useful in life to be agnostic to these questions or to make faith based conclusions? Are we any good at determining if a question is answerable or not? Will there always be shadows of the unknown that religion will lie in? Can an end of faith coincide with the persistence of unanswerable questions?
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