Monday 24 August 2009

A Little Reminder

“I certainly cannot explain how we got here, but I’d rather wait a thousand years to see if science can push back a few more layers of our ignorance before positing what seems to me a somewhat metaphorical explanation for our place in the universe.” [1]

My dear lady, I do not know how to break it to you, but there is a fairly good chance that you will be dead in a thousand years from now.

[1] Heather MacDonald, “The Evolution of God”, Secular Right (weblog), 9th August 2009.

5 comments:

xlbrl said...

When Chesterton was finished explaining that some things must be believed to be seen, he would inform Heather Mac that it is not that she does not know the answer, but that she does not know the question.

F A Hayek--
Since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science. Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientist, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing.

Deogolwulf said...

Xlbrl, I think the intellectual perversity of modernism has a ready answer: if we steadily reduce the range of rational enquiry, and make the mind ever narrower so as to ask fewer questions of greater knowledge, then the illusion can be created that the range of our ignorance is diminishing.

georgesdelatour said...

xlbrl

some things must be believed to be seen - like UFOs?

Do you seriously believe that we are becoming more ignorant about the workings of the human brain, or the genetic basis of disease?

Deogolwulf said...

"Do you seriously believe that we are becoming more ignorant about the workings of the human brain, or the genetic basis of disease?"

Is that addressed to me? In any case, it is difficult to see why you would ask such a strange question.

Anonymous said...

"Is that addressed to me? In any case, it is difficult to see why you would ask such a strange question."

Like Chesterton, you are quite happy to pretend to be stupid in order to avoid answering the question.