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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Why not? If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside the realm of science and in the realm of belief. Until someone figures out a way to experimentally verify the big bang hypothesis (or any other explanation for the origin of the universe or what came "before"), it's entirely fair to attribute it to whatever you feel like, be it a god or anything else. There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.

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Well, I think surely the entirely fair thing to do is to just admit we don't know rather than make any attribution or imply any possession of an answer to those questions?

Humans have created models for things they don't understand throughout human history. Certainly throughout any recorded history. We don't know, but we have a model that fits pretty well and we can guess at the underlying causes. We'll be wrong more often than right, but over time as we get more data and we can test more things, we get a more accurate model. Not necessarily the right model. We may never get that. But based on those models, "guesses" are far more reliable than "The Sun is a god who circles the world".

While we don't "know" how gravity works we can explain it and model it much more accurately now than when logos was the explanation. Providing those details is far more useful than a simple "we don't know."

Certainly, that's also perfectly fair. The thing to keep in mind is that some people derive utility from belief in some sort of creator, so ultimately it's an argument of values (specifically, you're looking to argue that people should prefer uncertainty to unprovable (but also undisprovable!) certainty).

If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside of the realm of (natural) science and may lie within the realm of mathematics, philosophy, or (gasp) theology.

> There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.

There's a name for a more nuanced version of this "law" and there's a good amount of work being done arguing for and against weaker and stronger versions of it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

I think it's important to clarify that the question of whether or not everything has a cause is itself outside of science. Science is about determining what a cause is likely to be, using the universe itself as a source of truth, and constrained by fundamental limits on our ability to observe and experiment. Which is to say, even if the philosophers conclude that everything must have a cause, there is still no law that says that we (as scientific agents of a universe that is attempting to understand itself) are capable of determining every possible cause.

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