Science's Holy Grail: "The Final Theory"

This is the final piece that, along with the preceding two, complete the trilogy of posts I planned to write on the topic "Science, Knowledge and Religion". I wanted to understand why some of today's smart scientists, despite their better knowledge of how nature works, still embrace religion. This is not a matter of debate, but personal belief, or as Steven Weinberg calls it, "moral choice". Science cannot prove God does not exist, anymore than religion can prove he does. What science has shown however, quoting Laplace from the late 18^th century, that the "hypothesis of God" is not necessary for scientific progress.

The title should be more aptly called "Physics' Holy Grail", because by broad consensus physics appears to be the only science equipped to handle this quest. Loosely speaking, the "final theory", if ultimately found, should consist of a set of irreducible laws from which will follow a complete explanation of the Universe as we know it. This last italic is significant, because we should not lose sight of the fact that the objective of such a theory is to build a self-consistent description of our perceivable world. For example, if an experiment breaks a new ground, suitable theory must be developed that can successfully explain the experimental finding, while at the same time being consistent with everything that is known until now. If in addition, the theory is good enough to throw up some new predictions of its own, appropriate experiments must be carried out to test and validate these predictions. In either case, if successful, science will add another layer of self-consistency to our description of the world. In the limiting case if and when the final theory is reached, this chain of sequential progress towards the fundamental knowledge will cease. Of course, science will not grind to a halt, because so much is yet to be known even about our day to day life (predicting weather pattern jumps to mind, and there are other equally important and unsettled questions).

As is almost always the case with fundamental issues, physicists themselves are divided on whether it is at all possible to find a final theory (even to the protagonists it is still a dream, though they believe it is a gettable dream). I do not want to get drawn into this debate, because my interest is at the very boundary of human knowledge, a point I attempted to address in this post. I believe the search for the ultimate truth, for example, satisfactory answers to "is there a meaning or purpose of life (any life) and Universe", "what and why is death", "is there a reality outside our perception" and so on, cannot succeed without understanding the essence and limitation of human knowledge itself, not what is merely "unknown" but what is perhaps "unknowable". Assuming, hypothetically, we can find the physicist's Holy Grail, we will only reach the outer boundary of what we can know, given our own biological limitations defined by the five senses and a 3lb brain. Physics, with its strict adherence to the inanimate, is inherently incapable of addressing such human dimension of reality. Biology, on the other hand, is still young. The new science of complex systems that try to bring disparate scientific disciplines together, may hold some promise, but it is too early yet. I do believe however that science alone, and not God, is the only mean of getting there. May not be the current science, maybe a "super-science" that unifies the tenets of physics, biology and all other sciences.