Glaube und Wissenschaft

Let’s Declare a Truce in the Culture War — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

I went to a debate recently in New York, between a rabbi and the famous polemicist Christopher Hitchens, on the question “Does God exist?” Hitchens was called on to speak first, and he won the debate with his first two sentences: “I don’t know why I have to speak first. He has the burden of proof.” The mostly secular New York audience heartily applauded this sally, which was based on the premise—never challenged by the rabbi—that science provides an explanation of everything and any need there might be for a Supreme Being is more an artifact of human psychology than anything else.

But it turns out that this premise is false; science has no explanation for any of the major questions about our existence, the existence of the universe, or even the nature of reality. What’s more, by the standards of science itself—the view that if something can’t be falsified it cannot be the subject of scientific inquiry—science will never be able to provide an answer to these questions.