Can Science Offer An Ultimate Explanation Of Reality?

Abstract

It is argued that science cannot offer a complete explanation of reality because of existing fundamental limitations on the knowledge it can provide. Some of those limits are internal in the sense that they refer to concepts within the domain of science but outside the reach of science. The 20th century has revealed two important limitations of scientific knowledge which can be considered internal. On the one hand, the combination of Poincaré’s nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle leads to a world picture where physical reality is, in many respects, intrinsically undetermined. On the other hand, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems reveal us the existence of mathematical truths that cannot be demonstrated. More recently, Chaitin has proved that, from the incompleteness theorems, it follows that the random character of a given mathematical sequence cannot be proved in general (it is ‘undecidable’). I reflect here on the consequences derived from the indeterminacy of the future and the undecidability of randomness, concluding that the question of the presence or absence of finality in nature is fundamentally outside the scope of the scientific method.