Can Science Reveal the Truth?

In St John's gospel, Jesus Christ tells Pilate that he has come into the world to bear witness to the truth. To which, Pilate famously responds: "What is truth?" - a question that, for me at least, makes Pontius Pilate leap off the page as one of the most human of Biblical characters.

Perhaps the single greatest strength of science is that doesn't have to face up to the meaning of truth: Science's very methodology allows it to sidestep the whole issue of truth. The scientific method is a way of translating our individual responses to the world into something that's collective.

We can personally validate a scientific description of reality by repeating an experiment (or, more likely, by believing that experiments are repeatable, since many experiments require considerable effort and resources to duplicate).

More obviously, we see that science works because we live in the material world that science has made for us: the world of indoors that is largely separated-off from Nature. The steam-engine, drugs, central heating, weapons, particle-accelerators and i-Phones all convince us that the world is as the scientific method describes it, and somehow is getting more real (by which presumably, we mean more like Nature) the more science progresses.

It's easy to forget that no matter how elaborate the material world has become, it is always a sieved-out part of the larger reality of Nature. A hard-line materialist might claim, as a matter of faith, that science will ultimately pass all phenomena through the sieve of the scientific method. A sceptic like myself (sceptical of certainty in all its forms: material and spiritual) must, then, be able to indicate ways in which the Universe might always be much larger, perhaps infinitely larger, than our ability to describe it materially.

This doesn't seem to me to be such a tall order.

But what do we mean by 'reality'? And what are scientific 'laws'? Read on to find out more....