Can science explain everything?

There once was a construction worker named Don. One day Don bought a new screw driver, and it sure was a beauty. It had a shiny red handle with removable bits. With great aplomb Don began using his new screw driver for slotted screws. But then one day he discovered that it had a bit that fit Phillips screws, and soon he was off again working on every Phillips screw in sight. Shortly thereafter he was even more delighted to discover that his handy tool could even tackle that strange Canadian import, the Robertson screw. Don was in love with his screw driver and its seemingly limitless use on the construction site.

But then one day Don's fellow workers were shocked to see him attempting to hammer in a nail with the handle of his screw. Tentatively they informed him that his screw driver was made for screws, and that the current job required a hammer. But alas, Don would not listen. So impressed was he with the power of his tool to put every screw in its place that he surmised it must be good for nails (and everything else on the construction site) as well.

Many people are bedazzled with the marvelous achievements of that fine tool we call science in the same way that Don was smitten by his screw driver. Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to an attempt to absolutize science no less erroneous than Don's attempt to meet every task with his screw driver.

William Alston refers to this erroneous leap from "this tool does a lot" to "this tool must do everything" in his incisive essay "What is naturalism that we should be mindful of it?" (available online). Alston observes:

"The problem is that one can unreservedly acknowledge the stupendous achievements of the scientific method - theoretical and practical - and still wonder whether this is our only cognitive access to the world. One can still wonder whether reality is limited to what science can reveal. So one can unreservedly acknowledge the stupendous achievements of J. S. Bach and still wonder whether he completely exhausted the resources of musical expression. Isn't there still room for a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Wagner? So one can unreservedly acknowledge the supreme subtlety and finesse of French cuisine and still find a place in one's culinary world for Chinese and Italian cuisine.

"To take an analogy closer to home, suppose that one, dazzled by the dizzying heights to which modern mathematics has ascended, should forthwith conclude that nothing exists except what is disclosed to us by pure mathematics. Pythagoras would have been revived, but to what purpose? Isn't it arbitrary to conclude from the stupendous achievements of one mode of inquiry that no other putative mode of inquiry can tell us anything about the world? And isn't the scientistic naturalist guilty of just this kind of arbitrariness in moving from the spectacular success of science to the conclusion that there is no other way of finding out anything about the world?"

Alston is correct. It is arbitrary to absolutize science in this way. And that is the short response to all the atheists I have been debating who have been so confident that science can explain morality (and no doubt ethics, aesthetics, and religion as well). Science is a grand tool, but your insistence that every aspect of reality must be accessible to that tool is arbitrary and obscures the proper use of science behind a vale of reductionism.

So I agree, the screw driver is a fine tool. But maybe, just maybe, there might be other tools fit for other jobs in the toolbox as well. Why not take a look? Believe me, the screw driver won't mind.