“Can science explain everything?”

I share here a couple of passages from Roger Trigg, Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2015), which I read and marked up some time back. Dr. Trigg, the founding president of the British Philosophical Association, was a student of the late A. J. Ayer, one of the principal thinkers of the school of “logical positivism.”  He is currently a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Warwick and a senior research fellow at the Ian Ramsey Centre of the University of Oxford:

Can science explain everything?  If so, the practice of science would need no justification.  There could then be no other ways of reasoning validly, and everything would have to conform to scientific standards of evidence and proof.  So-called “metaphysics,” by definition beyond the remit of science, would have to be discarded as pointless, if not strictly meaningless, speculation. . . .  [Logical positivism] held that everything that could not be verified scientifically was to be ruled out as meaningless.  Metaphysics was to be regarded as nonsense. . . .  Swathes of human reasoning and experience were arbitrarily dismissed.  Ethics, aesthetics, and religion were all considered to be beyond the pale of proper reasoning about truth.  Only science, it seemed, could provide the answers.  Whether that was contemporary science, as it was some fifty years ago, or some ideal, or possible, science was one of the unresolved problems.  (ix-x)

I am . . . suspicious of attempts arbitrarily to restrict all reasoning to the capabilities and reach of science.  They have to be self-defeating.  Because science is a human practice and needs justification, it must depend on a wider understanding of a reason that can provide a rational basis for some confidence in science as a means to truth.  That is where metaphysics enters. . . .

[A] strong cultural current gives scientific reasoning a monopoly on so-called “public reason.”  A typical instance is the manner in which “faith,” usually in the context of religion, is made the province of a subjective, “private” attitude, as opposed to what can be allowed into debate in the public sphere,  Many think faith has to be restricted to what is admissible according to universally accessible standards of thought.  Our beliefs must then be answerable to canons of public evidence and reason, as these are understood in science.  The result is a deliberate exclusion from public debate of religious, ethical, and similar matters.  It is thought that such beliefs are private and cannot — and should not — be brought into the public square.  (xi-xii)