What if god...

[exchemist]

10 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

Science excels at describing matter and energy, but it has been less successful in fully understanding life and consciousness.

This is absurd. Science has been brilliantly successful at understanding life. Just take a course in biology, biochemistry or even medicine and you will see how much we know. 

Consciousness is another story altogether, as there is no consensus as to what "consciousness" means in a scientific sense. There is a good article about the issue here, by Massimo Pigliucci, whom I have found to be an exceptionally clear thinker who has no time for bullshit: https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-neither-a-spooky-mystery-nor-an-illusory-belief . We could have a discussion about that, but it would need a separate thread. So let's not muddy the waters by bundling that together with life. They are distinct topics.

What science has not yet succeeded in doing is to produce a model for the origin of life.  That is not, to anyone who understands a bit of biology or biochemistry, remotely a surprise. It is very complicated and the sequence of events involved took place over 3 billion years ago, leaving no fossil trace. So all we have to go on is what we can presume about the conditions on the prebiotic Earth and what we can see are the common biochemical features of all life today, from which we can make inferences about ancestral biochemistry.  

You have no basis for believing there is some fundamental difficulty in principle for science in understanding this. It is simply a hard problem, for the reasons I have just outlined.  So it will take time. In fact there may never be a definitive resolution, just a set of alternative possible models.

It is clear you have some kind of metaphysical bee in your bonnet about the limitations of science in understanding the world. I would quite agree there seems to be more to human experience than the physical world. This is the realm of the arts,  religion and (parts of) philosophy and I do not dismiss their value. But you make a huge error in arbitrarily picking out one feature of the physical world, life, to claim it is uniquely impossible to explain through science. There is just no basis for such a belief.

This error is identical to the one creationists make - and to the deliberately deceptive arguments that intelligent cdesign proponentsists promote. I think it was Cardinal Newman who, in the c.19th,  pointed out that the Christian who bases his faith on things in the physical world that science cannot explain is doomed to have it shattered as science progresses. Whether you are a Christian or not I do not know, but the argument applies. Do not look to features of the physical world to justify a belief in impenetrable mysteries beyond science. 

(P.S. To be strictly fair I should acknowledge that the reason, if any, why there is order in the cosmos, which we express through our "laws of nature", does seem destined to remain a mystery to science.)

Edited 2 hours ago by exchemist