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Knowledgeable Ignorance

Posted June 22nd, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

I just spent a couple of days totally absorbed in a book that celebrates ignorance.  Even better, it celebrates ignorance in science!  Or to be a tad more precise, it’s about what the author, Stuart Firestein, a Columbia University neuroscientist, calls “the exhilaration of the unknown.”

So ignore the way the cover makes the book look ominous and boring.  It’s anything but.  In fact it’s a delight.  Because of course Firestein isn’t talking about willful stupidity, that “callow indifference to facts or logic that shows itself as a stubborn devotion to uninformed opinions.”  Not that at all.  He’s talking about “a particular condition of knowledge:  the absence of fact, understanding, insight, or clarity about something.”  This he calls “knowledgeable ignorance.”  Also known as “perceptive ignorance” or “insightful ignorance.”

Essentially, Firestein’s book is a celebration of mystery.  That is, of uncertainty, doubt, and unknowability – terms which apply as much to my agnostic inquiry of religion as to his equally agnostic inquiry of science (which originally meant ‘knowledge’).   Some scientists call his approach “agnostology” – a coinage that makes me laugh out loud and imagine a bunch of angels dancing like crazy on the head of a pin.  Me, I call it accidental theology.

Knowledgeable ignorance, says Firestein, is the kind that leads you to frame better questions.  And not with any single answer in mind.  “One good question can give rise to several layers of answers,” he says.  A perfect image:  layers of answers, like layers of clouds, each one shaped and influenced by the ones above and below it, each one distinguishable and yet part of the whole most of us dismissively shorthand as “sky.”

And then this:  “Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt.  There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be sure of its outcome.”

“Having faith in uncertainty” — if I believed in perfection, that would be a perfect definition of agnosticism!

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File under: agnosticism, existence, science | Tagged: Tags: doubt, Ignorance: How It Drives Science, knowledge, mystery, Stuart Firestein, uncertainty, unknowability | 3 Comments
  1. Tafacory says:
    June 24, 2012 at 9:37 am

    I love that there is an author willing to make such claims. There is no need to be absolutely certain about everything in one’s life. That’s part of life’s mystery. But authors like these have also taught me an important lesson: science is a wonderful tool but it has not uncovered anywhere near a majority of what is explorable. Great post.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 24, 2012 at 1:10 pm

      Thanks, T — just clicked to follow your blog too, and looking forward to reading through it. — L.

  2. Zahida Murtaza (@zmurrad) says:
    June 26, 2012 at 7:25 pm

    ” From the cowardice that shrinks from truth;
    From the laxness that is content with half-truth;
    From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth;
    O God of Truth Deliver Us!”

    A prayer by a great-grandson of the Prophet.

Faith, Falsehood, and Fiction

Posted October 8th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Here’s Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the newly crowned Nobel literature laureate and a proud agnostic, talking about truth, lies, and fiction in a piece called “Is Fiction the Art of Living?“:

THE lies in novels are not gratuitous – they fill in the insufficiencies of life. Thus, when life seems full and absolute, and men, out of an all-consuming faith, are resigned to their destinies, novels perform no service at all.  Religious cultures produce poetry and theater, not novels.

Fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis, in which it’s necessary to believe in something, in which the unitarian, trusting and absolute vision has been supplanted by a shattered one and an uncertainty about the world we inhabit and the afterworld.

I’m not at all sure about that idea of novels providing a “service,” but this is nevertheless an excellent explanation of why totalitarian societies clamp down not only on civil rights and freedom of expression, but on that most essential and potentially most subversive of individual rights — freedom of imagination.

Now it’s time to catch up with Vargas Llosa.    Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter sounds like farcical fun, but this accidental theologist really has to start with The Storyteller, in which a saintly, disfigured student presents himself as the official storyteller for a rainforest tribe and the repository of its collective memory.

Long live stories!

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File under: agnosticism, art | Tagged: Tags: accidental theologist, faith, fiction, lies, literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel prize, truth, uncertainty | 2 Comments
  1. Andreas Moser says:
    October 8, 2010 at 12:11 pm

    I can’t decide which book of Mario Vargas Llosa to read first. Help me please by taking part in my poll: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/mario-vargas-llosa-poll/
    Thanks 🙂

  2. The Books She Carried « The Accidental Theologist says:
    November 13, 2010 at 12:11 pm

    […] Faith, Falsehood, and Fiction […]

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