"Enlightenment" as a goal has always felt like a sham to me. All understanding is approximate, but comparing science to religion is a false equivalency. Dogmatic belief ends in tautology, a thing is true because it's in the book and the book is true because it says so. A scientific belief is probabilistic and ends in open research questions, the theory of General Relativity models a subset of reality to a reasonable degree of confidence based on the evidence we have collected and makes no greater claims.
Science shows us there is no meaning, purpose, or grand truth. All life is a 4 billion-year old chemical reaction... born by chance in the universe's beautiful dance of physics, fueled by energy and bound by entropy. From dust to dust, the billions that came before us are as forgotten as those that live and those yet to be born.
But, yet, there is meaning.
We don't exist at the abstraction layer of quarks or microseconds, nor do we exist at the scale of galaxies or millennia. Questioning human existence at those levels is a philosophical divide-by-zero. We exist at the human layer, in the context of society, on the scale of under a century. Science gives us a solid foundational existential philosophy for higher order philosophy, which we can probabilistically derive from the evidence available and test as rigorously as any other aspect of our understanding.
Science shows us there is no meaning, purpose, or grand truth. All life is a 4 billion-year old chemical reaction... born by chance in the universe's beautiful dance of physics, fueled by energy and bound by entropy. From dust to dust, the billions that came before us are as forgotten as those that live and those yet to be born.
But, yet, there is meaning.
We don't exist at the abstraction layer of quarks or microseconds, nor do we exist at the scale of galaxies or millennia. Questioning human existence at those levels is a philosophical divide-by-zero. We exist at the human layer, in the context of society, on the scale of under a century. Science gives us a solid foundational existential philosophy for higher order philosophy, which we can probabilistically derive from the evidence available and test as rigorously as any other aspect of our understanding.