Do all questions have answers?

Have you ever wondered why your brain is so big? Is this a question that has an answer, or is it a meaningless bit of speculation?

Quotes and comments;

A. “Why are human brains so big?” asked Live Science. [i.e. relative to body size] Rachael Rettner reported on various answers.
Rettner evaluated three hypotheses about why early human ancestors developed large brains. She summarized ideas that revolve around climate change, the demands of ecology, and social competition. “But with several competing ideas, the issue remains a matter of debate.”
Can any of these theories be tested, to see which is stronger?' [1.]

- There's no way to know which of these theories is best, for the simple reason there's no way to know why the human brain is so big. People in our day have come to believe the claim (fantasy) that if you can ask a question you can answer it; that if there is an answer to every question. I don't believe this is the case at all; certainly one can't prove such a belief. We might ask why this should be so? We know that language is so flexible that we can easily use it to talk about nonsense.

e.g. I can tell you that 'the Hurkle is a happy beast' or that 'on the planet Lihrt, the Gwik are the dominant race' and so on; none of which has any connection to reality. This same process can be applied to asking questions. I can ask you, 'why is it that the Hurkle is a happy beast?' You might do some research on the Internet, and find 3 main theories. Can we test these theories to find out which one is best? Can we know the answer to our question? (I leave it to you to answer that for yourself.)

My point is that not all questions have answers; and that not all questions have answers that we can answer. The trouble is knowing what these questions are. I don't have a solution to this, but it's clear that questions that concern history are difficult to answer; this is especially the case for events no one witnessed. As a general rule we can say that the further we go back in history the more difficult it will be to answer questions. I also believe that there are no certain answers for things that were unobserved.

- Let's address the particular question at hand. Why is the human brain so large? The biblical answer is that since God created man; the size of man's brain goes back to that original act of creation. (Given what we know about entropy over time, and the process of mutation, we can assume that the brain is not bigger than it originally was, and that it's likely to be smaller now than it originally was.) If we reject the Genesis account (if we claim that it's not historical, or that historical accounts aren't relevant) we are left in the position of being unable to answer the question. i.e. since the event happened so long ago, and since no one observed it, there is no way to know (with certainty) what happened. This then is an example of a question that has no answer that's available to us by autonomous means.

- In my opinion, there's a great many similar unanswerable questions in the whole field of evolutionary biology. (I sometimes wonder if such questions don't dominate what's popularly known as Darwinism.)

- So how do we know if a question has an answer? How are we to have any confidence that a question might have an answer? Maybe there's a hint in the etymology of the word real. If we trace the word back it has roots in terms like; actual, matter, thing, etc. We might then say that the real (or reality) is roughly equated to physical things one can observe. So then if our question concerns a physical object we can observe we have at least some reason to believe it can be answered. The further a question strays from one that concerns a description of a physical object that exists in the present and can be observed, the less confidence we have that it has an answer.

All questions aren't equal. We should ask ourselves whether (in each case) there's any reason to believe a question makes sense; whether or not it can have an answer; whether or not we can (autonomously) find an answer to it. It's my contention that many of the questions people are working on have no answer. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is likely related to funding. If you offer money to people for trying to answer your question you can be sure you'll get some suggested answers... no matter how meaningless the question, no matter if it can be answered or not.

Notes;
1. The Early Man Gets the Big Brain: Creation/Evolution Headlines 07/13/2009
- New Scientist [July/13/2009]