Even if there were an objective reality to comprehend, would it ever be comprehensible? Maybe we just need more time, more technology, and more progress and we’ll figure it all out.

He’s thinking about ducks, not calculus.

There’s a compelling argument to make that we can never know everything about the universe. There are physical laws preventing anything travelling faster than light (the aforementioned Theory of Relativity) and therefore limits to observing the far-reaches / origins of the universe (they’re actually the same thing, see Cosmic Inflation below), and limits to the amount of energy that’s required to observe the microscopic (the aforementioned quantum world). The best theories we have for each are Cosmic Inflation and String Theory respectively, which will (arguably) never be able to be empirically tested.

And why are we arrogant enough to think that we even could figure it out, even if it we could travel faster than light and build a microscope the size of a planet? After all, there’s no amount of tools, explaining, or learning I could give my dog to make him understand astrophysics. He’s a dog, and will never be able to comprehend what a planet is, let alone such an abstract concept as gravitational pull. Why do we think that we have any special status as humans, given that we’re just highly evolved animals?

Again, so what? One of the tacit assumptions in a purely rational worldview is that reality is defined by what we can conceptualise. The idea being, if I can’t conceive of it, it doesn’t matter. But the irrational, unfathomable, positive belief in the unity of creation (which can be experienced in an indirect way, without the intellect), does have a profound effect to the individual and to their relationships, therefore it does matter. If rational proof is an incomplete way of explaining the universe, and is particularly lacking in explaining our place in it, an inconceivable and intellectually inaccessible super-reality matters all the more. We don’t need to understand it, or conceptualise it, or explain it… we never will. The point is to live it.