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On making sense of science

FTLOG Interviews

Alister McGrath says a bigger picture can explain why science is so good at explaining things.

Transcript

I think many people say, look, science is so good at explaining things that we don’t need to go beyond science. In effect, science is able to give us all the answers we need and that is it. But Albert Einstein, I think, once said something very interesting. He said, “The eternal mystery of the universe is its explicability.” In other words, the fact we can explain it actually itself requires an explanation.

And for me, one of the remarkable things about science is that it throws up questions that actually lie beyond its own capacity to answer. In other words, we need a bigger picture of things to make sense of scientific success. And for me, Christianity gives you that metanarrative, that bigger picture, which actually positions science and helps to make sense of the fact it is so good at explaining things.