On theism, gnosticism and agnosticism

[unixronin]

Through a chain of thought that started out with the FDA rejecting an artificial blood substitute because it had a higher chance of adverse effects than real blood (an issue which I shall discuss separately), cymru and I ended up talking about mental rigidity and knowledge.

From that discussion came the insight that part of my problem with accepting organized religion relates to knowledge. The way I see it, knowledge and the ability to learn are vital. The universe contains many questions, and enlightenment comes through finding the best answers to them (and in particular, ferreting out the more interesting questions and finding the answers to them). At the same time, though, it’s OK to say “We don’t know yet”, or just “I don’t know.”

But many people, particularly many Americans, have a strange and irrational aversion to ever saying “I don’t know”. It’s as though they think saying you don’t know something is an admission that somehow makes you a lesser person.

Plato, I believe, talked about this. (Or it might have been Aristotle; I don’t have the original quotation handy. I need to make a note of it if I can ever find it again.) He said something like this:

“He that knows, and knows that he knows, is a wise man. He that knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. But he that knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a scholar.”

There’s a similar quote here, variously attributed to Confucius or to some unknown Persian. There’s also a related Japanese proverb: “Kiku wa ittoki no haji, kikanu wa matsudai no haji.” Perhaps the best semantic translation into English is, “While asking others something that you don’t know is a temporary shame, not asking at all causes a lifetime of shame.” Or, more pithily, “If you ask a stupid question, you look stupid; but if you don’t ask, you remain stupid.” The key point in all the forms is constant: There is no shame in being able to say “I don’t know”. You can never learn something until you first acknowledge, at least to yourself, that you don’t know it, because you can’t learn something that you believe you already know.

And that’s a big problem with the majority of organized religion. Because organized religions tend to have a bad habit of deciding that there is only one possible version of the truth, and it is exactly as set down here and beyond any further question — even when it contradicts logical sense, and worse, even when it contradicts itself. Any question whose answer is not set down in the Official Truth then becomes one to be answered with “God did it” or “Because Allah said so”. Let’s generalize that to “A Wizard Did It.”

The reason this is a problem is because once you’ve declared that A Wizard Did It, instead of acknowledging that We Don’t Know Yet, you have halted inquiry into the question. You’re presented an answer that isn’t really an answer at all, and written off the question as answered. Instead of answering the question, you’ve passed the buck, pushed the question off to a higher level of abstraction and, by implication, forbidden pursuing it there. That proscription can fall anywhere from “That answer should be good enough for you, just accept it”, to “It’s impious and presumptuous to continue pursing that question”, to branding the questioner as outright heretical.

That’s the big problem with declaring that A Wizard Did It. Not only have you not answered the question, you’ve now actively discouraged any further attempts to answer it — and often solely because you were too vain, too arrogant, too insecure, or simply too doctrinally rigid to be able to say “We don’t know.”

There are many ways to answer a question, particularly a philosophical question, to which you don’t know the answer. “A Wizard Did It” is among the worst of all possible answers.

Possibly the best is, “We don’t know the answer to that question yet. Why don’t you see if you can find out?”

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I wasn't intending to apply the comment to all organized religions. I probably didn't phrase it as well as I could have, though. I was trying to get it all down before I lost the thread of what we'd been talking about. (Buddhism, with its underlying idea that there can be no such thing as a wrong path to enlightenment, because any path that leads to enlightenment must by definition necessarily be right, is another example that falls into this class.)

I should revisit that specific part of the wording and revise it slightly.

(Revised, by the way. And see also the reply below to ithildae.)

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I like to think of it as everyone has unique experience and outlook in this life. If there is a single point on a page that everyone needs to travel to, and we each start at some random location on the page, each person's path will be very likely unique to achieve the destination point. Some start closer, some have further to travel. That doesn't lessen the value of "enlightenment". (That works for me, except I think of it in terms of solid space.)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup. Even if we start out in the same place, there may not necessarily be a single "best path" that applies to both of us. In this field, the shortest route is dependent not only upon the starting point, the desired ending point, and the intervening terrain, but also upon the traveler. What's more, other people you meet upon your journey can either shorten your journey by assistance, or lengthen it through either malicious or well-intended misdirection.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Precisely!