Colin Blakemore is talking about science-versus-religion. He reckons religion may be close to being on its last legs in that fight. I won't be taking him up on this. I have my doubts about it, viewed as an empirical forecast about the likely staying power of religious belief. At the same time, I don't think religious belief is necessary to us as human beings. Although it has obviously had and continues to have a wide appeal, plenty of people manage without it. This is all ground I've been over more than once.
Blakemore, however, comes pretty close to saying - or maybe he is just saying - that science could have the answer to every question, at least to all the questions worth asking. He says:
I'm dubious about those "why" questions: why are we here? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Either they make no sense or they can be recast as the kind of "how" questions that science answers so well.
What is true is that there are few, if there are any, questions the answers to which aren't reshaped by fresh scientific discoveries and advances. In principle, there's nothing we might not have to rethink in the light of new knowledge. But this isn't the same as the claim that science can answer every question. If, for example, it is the case that love or morality have biological explanations, that doesn't mean that all of the issues internal to those two spheres of human experience can be given scientific answers. What is due from you to your children on account of either love or morality or both? If your love for them or for others has biological sources does this mean you should reconceptualize your love accordingly, seeing it only from the outside, so to speak, and forgetting the previous 'inwardness' of it - as being, this, a mere illusion? What is the meaning of life, or of your life? What is the place of your inevitable death in the way you think of your life, and of the future, and of the universe? I don't say (because I don't think) that religion is needed to answer these questions. And I do think that scientific and ordinary knowledge is indispensable to reflecting on the answers to them. But the suggestion that science could suffice as an instrument of human understanding is over-ambitious.