Can science explain consciousness?

Not completely, and this isn't a religious objection to science—it's a live, unresolved puzzle within secular philosophy of mind itself.

Scientists have made real progress explaining what philosopher David Chalmers called the "easy problems" of consciousness: how the brain processes information, controls behavior, and reports on its own states. What Chalmers named the "hard problem" is different: why any of that physical processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all—why there's something it feels like to see red or taste coffee, rather than the same information simply being processed with no inner experience whatsoever.

Philosophers, including many with no religious motivation, disagree sharply about whether this hard problem can ever be fully explained in purely physical terms, or whether it points to something science's current methods aren't equipped to capture. This remains one of philosophy's most actively debated open questions, not evidence that settles any particular religious or non-religious conclusion on its own.