For there is everything to gain and nothing to lose by knowing the most we can possibly know. Not knowing makes the world large and uncertain, and creates anxieties that can either spur creativity and curiosity, or further our susceptibility to magical thinking.
That is not to say that science can know it all. It can not. It is frankly not the goal of science to answer all questions, rather only those that pertain to perceived reality.
Science, for instance, can not answer questions relating to the supernatural, since the supernatural can neither be measured, quantified, tested, verified, nor falsified. Science is ill-suited as well to address the existential longings and anxieties of humanity. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Definitions of hope and meaning are missing in science, and for many people religion is what fills that void.
Science does not and can not produce absolute and unquestionable truth. Understanding is understood as simply the best fit to the data under current instrumental and philosophical limits of thinking. A scientific theory is merely a way of organizing tested and retested ideas to describe the behavior of natural phenomena.
But scientific theories are not the same as “hunches” or “gut feelings”, which is the context in which the nonscientist uses the word theory. Scientists place a much higher standard on the word theory. To them a theory is a powerful statement about the working of nature, a strong explanation that ties together many reproducible facts from many different sources into an overall, unifying concept.
A scientific theory is always open to falsification, if new evidence is presented. Theories should change, as new discoveries are made, and old theories are updated to account for new data, which is exactly the progress toward better understanding that science seeks. But to say “scientific theory” is not to imply “scientific uncertainty”, a clever term employed by religious and political operatives to cast doubt in the public mind when a scientific theory challenges a traditional way of thinking.
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