This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Aug 2007, by Jeremy Price.
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10 Aug 07
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In this post, I'd like to address fear of the unknown.
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We tend to be afraid of what we don't know, but are soon emboldened through contact, information, and a kind of narrative sense
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the very laudable goal of science is to translate the unknown into the known. To bring more of the world into the province of human understanding. One potential conclusion to draw from this is that, given enough time, all of the world will be brought under the auspices of human knowledge.
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This enlightenment ideal gets repeated, I would argue, in contemporary responses to religion.
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Does this persistence of the unknown go some way toward explaining (though not necessarily justifying) the persistence of religious belief that can operate as a bulwark against change and uncertainty?
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For Roquentin, the categories of understanding, of classifying things as separate and meaningful, can fall away and leave nothing in its place.
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It seems relatively human to hold onto some kind of certainty - be it faith in religious dogma, or a specific scientific schema, or a general scientific methodology which will sure reach its apex. It's not for nothing that Plato defined knowledge very precisely, as being immutable and eternal .
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there will always be some element of unknown in the world
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to overcome the reactionary glom onto religion in the face of scientific uncertainty, we can seek to reconcile science to an embrace of irreducible unknown-ness.
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it doesn't involve, necessarily, a turn to the irrational. It may, instead, open up the world, if only slightly.
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that is the province of art - to "express the inexpressibility of the inexpressible."
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what we need is space for richer experiences and to not simply fear the unknown (we will always do that, I think, to some degree), but to also see in it possibility and humility.
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