More than 2500 hundred years ago knowledgeable “scientists” argued that the world was flat. “Look out or you will fall off the edge!” At the time, Socrates was considered the wisest because he alone seemed to recognize and acknowledge how much and what it was he did not know. As recently as five hundred years ago their counterparts were certain that the spherical earth is at the center of the universe and all else orbits about the earth. And there are people living today who can remember when the best scientists of their early years fully believed that “The universe is no bigger than our own Milky Way Galaxy”. It is said that just a few decades ago Albert Einstein and his students, some of the world’s most knowledgeable scientists, agreed that we still only “know” somewhat less than two percent of all there is to “know”. Have you ever heard a modern scientist acknowledge that he actually might not know 98 percent of all there is to know?
    Over the years, as science learned what our universe is not, as we pushed back the horizons of understanding, old models were abandoned and new and improved models were immediately hypothesized. But in 1931 a brilliant mathematician named Kurt Godel (1906-1978) proved that:

Within any rigidly logical mathematical system there are statements that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system. (An axiom is a statement that is regarded as self-evident.)

There seems to be a useful physical analogy:

Within any closed physical system there are always some characteristics that cannot be proved or disproved, or even fully defined, using only the obvious, self-evident characteristics of that system.

    We are within and are part of our observable universe so, according to Godel, there must be some universal properties and/or laws that we simply cannot prove or disprove. And there are. For example, we have long ago concluded and agreed that we simply cannot define “true” values for length, time, or mass -- we really can’t comprehend those concepts. Instead we simply define them as “fundamental properties” (obvious, self-evident characteristics) of our universe, and more or less arbitrarily pick values. To date, the standards the world has agreed to use are:
    Length: a platinum rod with two scratches on it, kept in a temperature-controlled vault in France. The distance between those scratches is called a “meter”.
    Time: one 31,556,925.9747th of a year is called a second.
    Mass: a lump of mass stored in a vault in France is called a kilogram of mass.
    Length and time now have more portable and reproducible definitions based on the speed of light and atomic clocks but these highly sophisticated definitions were carefully established to exactly equal the above crude standards. For example, beyond the crude definition we really don’t even know what time is. Does time “flow” by us or do we “flow” through time? Flow of what? Suppose just a few moments ago, everywhere in the universe, time had ceased to flow for the equivalent of 10,000 years -- would we know it? No. So much of science “cannot be proved or disproved” -- is truly unknown.
    Nevertheless, scientists frequently get so focused and intent that they lose track of how and when they were forced to hypothesize and conjecture to explain uncertainties along the way, and fail to openly acknowledge that there might actually be something there that they don’t know. From time to time the scientist may become convinced that his theory is in fact a proven scientific fact, and may extend himself well beyond the realm of science. Often groups of scientists gather together and reach “consensus” (establish “GroupThink”) on what they know to be the “truth” (establish “GroupTruth”).
    In college-level teaching on the origin and evolution of our living and non-living universe science educators usually invoke the philosophy of “naturalism”, actually claiming that it is a known, basic fact that everything has simply grown “naturally” (whatever that means) from earlier stuff, and that nothing has ever been “created”. But if you can’t explain naturalism how can you be certain there was no creation?
    Fortunately, peculiar to the field of science, the conscientious scientist operates under a discipline called the “scientific method”, a system that provides a means to remove personal biases from the “truth loop”. Under that method the scientist makes observations, hypothesizes, and then tries, by repeated experiments, to prove / disprove his hypothesis. The closest a scientist comes to the “truth” is when massive experimental efforts fail to disprove his hypothesis. Whatever those experiments show (prove) he is obligated accept as truth, no matter what he might personally believe, or what the current consensus might be. And if he is unable “prove it” he is equally obligated to disavow any special truth in his hypothesis -- he must confess, “I don’t know.”
    The point here is that, to keep our world internally consistent, to properly define our reality, we are forced to set up arbitrary standards (fundamental properties) and to compare everything else against those standards. We cannot reference those standards to anything else - they just are. And according to Godel, we never will be able to prove or disprove them.
    It seems that the very need to define basic, underlying standards like these clearly establishes that man is simply not capable of fully understanding his universe, his reality. Everywhere we look in time and space we quickly encounter limits, horizons beyond which we cannot see. The best science can ever hope to do is push back those horizons, a little at a time. In the forward direction in time the horizon is right here, nobody can see beyond this instant into the future. As we “look” further and further into the past and out into space things very quickly get “fuzzy”. As we look deeper and deeper into the nucleus of the atom, trying to find something solid to stand on, we see nothing but more space and more forces, and more questions than answers. Scientists can theorize and guess but cannot know what lies beyond those horizons. In rigorous science it should be openly acknowledged that, at least for now, what lies beyond those horizons does not even belong in the world of science (“I don’t know any better than you.”).
    And as scientists attempt to push back those horizons they have to start thinking “outside the box”. What they think they know today simply does not yield the answers they seek. The researcher must first identify “the box”, the series of known facts and assumptions which make up a given “horizon”. Then he has to recognize which “sides” of that box are actually not well established -- perhaps shot full of unsupported, unproven assumptions. Only then can he logically modify or make new assumptions and stand a chance of extending true understanding beyond those existing horizons. The history of science shows that many major scientific advances were made by young people relatively new to the field, largely because they had not yet been thoroughly convinced of (indoctrinated with) “GroupTruth” (wherein all sides of the box are already known fact).    Now science is a huge subject and so not much of science can be examined herein. However, areas dealing with ancient history and very distant places are particularly vulnerable and are particularly subject to question because nobody was there in that time / place. If science is unable to re-create and experiment with those conditions then the scientific method, right from the start, indicates that we do not and perhaps cannot really know the truth in those areas.
    The subjects discussed herein (so far) are those that are addressed in the National and Oregon Science Education Standards.
    The Very Beginning
    The Origin of Life
    The Age of the Earth
    Evolution Human
    Evolution

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