• Question: Can science ever answer awkward questions such as how the universe exactly began or is God real? Will any scientists ever find answers for such questions which are very hard to explain?

    Asked by to Ian, Mathew, Naomi on 26 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ian Stephenson

      Ian Stephenson answered on 26 Jun 2014:


      Science can certainly have a go at answering those questions.

      Physicists have lots of theories about how the universe began, and the experiments they do a places like the Large Hadron Collider are testing parts of those theories. A few years ago a satellite called the Kobe Background Explorer collected data which pretty much proved the big bang.

      “exactly” is tricky, as there is always going to be “one more thing”…

      Proving if something is “real” or not is also VERY tricky. There’s a saying that “abscense of evidence, isn’t evidence of abscense”. There’s no evidence that god exists, so science assumes he doesn’t. There’s no evidence that flying unicorns exist, but that’s not the same as proving they don’t – someone just needs to find one.

      However its not really sciences job to prove god exists or not… We’ve got no evidence to suggest that god exists, so we’ll assume that he doesn’t. If someone wants to claim that god exists, then they need to provide evidence. Once we have that evidence is provided then we science will accept it.

    • Photo: Naomi Osborne

      Naomi Osborne answered on 26 Jun 2014:


      With something like religion, science cannot explain it because there isn’t evidence to suggest God is real. But with the birth of our universe, science does try to explain it because there’s evidence that an explosion happened – which is background radiation that can’t explained by anything else.

      The same goes for explaining what the universe is made of. We don’t know what over 90% is – but our galaxies would have been torn apart many years ago if it wasn’t for an unexplained force keeping them together – and this they call ‘Dark Matter’. Because there’s evidence that something exists, science tries to explain it, even if it can’t prove it yet.

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