Is science pointless?

Answer

Your question is a meta-scientific and rather philosophical question. It transcends (or underpins) scientific praxis because it deals with the status of science itself.
1. How narrow or broad do you want to see ‘science’? For some, for example, philosophy is not a science….
2. A science is concerned with ‘facts’. But the nature of those ‘facts’ can be different. Facts can be eg material things, but also material events. But it can also concern immaterial events or facts or phenomena. eg. ‘autumn’, ‘love’, ‘mobility’, ‘unemployment’, ‘Arab spring’,…. The nature of these facts will of course also determine the research possibilities. (Examine further the concept of “paradigm”)
3. The model of science is physics: trying to find causal connections between natural phenomena. But with mere ‘causality’ alone you cannot study all the above-mentioned facts or phenomena, if only because different causes/influences sometimes play through each other.
4. A ‘good’ science tries to be critical. Critically derives from ‘krinein’ (Greek) = to distinguish. Here between important and less important matters, main and secondary matters. A critical scientist also knows that there is a difference between ‘observation’ and ‘reality’.
5. The big question now is: why does that scientist do that, knowing that this is not easy? You can at least say “because he/she ‘believes’ in it”. Believing this is not entirely unreasonable. But at the same time, you cannot exhaustively (exhaustively) give all the reasons why a scientist does what he/she does in her/his scientific activity. By looking for causes, influences, connections, structures, systems, the scientist expresses that facts/phenomena are not isolated matters. But it remains a ‘surplus’ that man places in the nature of things/facts/phenomena that he/she believes can help him/her/society.
6. The science historian Thomas Kuhn has shown that it has to do with ‘belief’ by examining the (irrational?) struggles waged over certain ‘paradigms’, even in the field of physics.
7. You’ve got it by now: positive sciences in particular claim to be ‘objective’, apart from any human subjectivity. It is better to say that scientific knowledge is ‘intersubjective’ knowledge, ie shared by as many people as possible who have each reached the same insight – at least in principle or in theory – on the basis of the necessary evidence, argumentation, experiments, etc. ..
8. If you now wish to further analyze the phenomenon of ‘belief’, you will arrive at human sciences such as psychology (why do people believe?) and philosophy (what exactly is ‘believing’? what is the object of ‘believing’?: human beings , nature, science, god, nothing,…) as with theology in which the ‘object’ of believing in ‘God’ is interpreted from a certain ‘revelation’ (hermeneutics).
9. Most scientists will find their activity useful (a matter of not going crazy). But if they were to make further statements about the meaning of this meaningfulness, they would become philosophers or even theologians (when they would involve a ‘revelation’ = Bible, Quran, ….) because the statute of a sacred text is different from a statute of a mathematical theorem, an economic or historical study or a biological research.
10. You cannot/shouldn’t separate science and meaning completely. But scientists and meaning-makers must realize that speaking about science and giving meaning are different ‘language games’ (cf. Wittgenstein). The mixing of these, whereby a statement about the other domain from a meaning authority or a scientific authority is actually not correct. That is like reducing love to procreation and procreation to love. And that is somewhat different in my opinion, and presupposes a different language game. So sensible people understand the difference between the creation story on the one hand and the theory of evolution on the other. Mixing up the two only leads to nonsense or nonsense.