Perspective of an actual researcher here (as in, I work in a lab and everything).
Science is not about objective universal truths. You touched on the point in the video but then missed it in saying that "Science describes the world but does not explain it." But to describe the world is to explain it, and everything beyond what can be quantified and analyzed is a purely subjective value judgment. When you ask whether or not science can provide ultimate truths, you are asking the wrong questions.
Instead, the purpose of science is to seek out and answer those questions about the world that do have objective and verifiable answers. If something exists that is "beyond science", then it is outside of the realm of objective and verifiable truth: when we know something with any level of certainty, then it's because we've done some kind of science on it.
And that's the important point. Science isn't just a body of facts and to do science isn't just to use scientific instruments in a lab, science is any method of testing a conjecture against observations in the physical world to gauge its validity and to do science is to conduct such a test. That's it.
Notice a particular choice of language here. I don't say that we do science to determine whether or not something is "true". The gravest misunderstanding is the assumption that science is about truth. Rather, it's about established validity. For instance, if you were to ask whether or not classical mechanics were "truthful", I wouldn't say yes because it's long since been established that Newtonian physics breaks down at the atomic and cosmological scales. However, I also would not say no because classical physics, despite not being totally and perfectly true, is still extremely useful for understanding many things about the world.
That there is, in some ways, a sort of zeal around many people who are interested in science popularly but not in a professional manner I think has less to do with science and more to do with the fact that science is inevitably involved in a number of important political issues, or at least that arguing from verifiable information forms the basis of reasoned debate. A number of really heavy questions now have a very major scientific component if they aren't entirely scientific already.
When understanding political issues necessarily involves scientific knowledge, then arguing political issues will necessarily involve arguing about science. And when a political controversy becomes a scientific question, it necessarily means that one position will objectively become more correct than the other, and I think this raises the stakes a little more and as a result gets some people even angrier.
Callate said:
I'm also reminded that for many "science" does indeed become dogma. My self-proclaimed "scientist" friend wrote a long Facebook screed decrying a list of "pseudo-medical" treatments like homeopathy... and acupuncture. In literally two minutes I was able to look up a peer-reviewed study that confirmed acupuncture performed better in treating COPD than placebo.
The study in question found that acupuncture works in managing some COPD symptoms because anxiety can exacerbate COPD symptoms, ergo procedures to manage anxiety can provide some relief. In general, that stress can exacerbate the symptoms of many heart, lung, and psychiatric conditions has never been in question. It is, at most, a part of a "lifestyle management" program that can help a COPD patient, but it is not a treatment for COPD. Plus, I don't think you need to be that much of a scientist to be bothered by the prospect of the CAM-pushers putting people's health at risk to make a buck.
Science, logic, and mathematics all teach us that there are things we literally cannot know, through things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Fitch's paradox of knowability, and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. We would be wise, while
Uncertainty is something that a lot of people misunderstand, and it's to be expected really. What you need to know is that the uncertainty relations do not mean that there is some mystical and impenetrable veil of mystery enshrouding physics at the atomic level but rather it's just one way that physics at that level obey very different rules from physics at the levels we are used to thinking about; it is not that something is obscured from us. It's not hidden variables, it's a chaotic randomness that's just an underlying component of nature at that scale. It does not impose a limit to our understanding, it adds to our understanding by informing us of an elementary part of the behavior of subatomic particles.
Maybe you can think of it this way: you can't know certain things about a particle at the same time past a certain precision in the same way that you cannot fly by flapping your arms. Given either piece of knowledge, a scientist can study that fact to gain more knowledge and improve understanding.
Fitch's paradox is not a strike at science either. If the conclusion to Fitch's paradox is taken to be that there cannot be objective or absolutely knowable truths, then this actually works very well with the scientific method, which works on the same assumption. Remember: science does not deal in absolute truths, it deals with increasingly valid conjectures and increasingly general statements verified through observation.
Godel's incompleteness theorems are about mathematics and not concerned with the subjects of any sort of limitations of mathematical knowledge. Essentially, Godel's theorems state that there can never be a single, closed-form mathematical expression or formula that can take any possible math problem and return a non-trivial answer. This does not limit our understanding, it adds to it by showing us important things about the nature of mathematics and what it means to solve a mathematical problem.