Page 202 from the book, Feynman.
Like a blind man in a cluttered room, we’re bumbling around blindly knocking our shins into coffee tables in the dark trying to figure out how this universe works. But as we wander and experiment we continue to discover small pieces of it that we can understand, eventually building up our knowledge of the confusing space enough to avoid the tables and construct a map of how the space fits together.
Robert Krulwich of PBS writes about Richard Feynman and this messy universe:
We think great scientists know so much, but really, they know very little. “Science,” said the physicist Richard Feynman, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Feynman told his audiences, even though the subatomic world looks so messy, so unintelligible, bit by bit, we are learning some of its secrets. They don’t add up yet. The rules Feynman and others discovered don’t even work all of the time, the parts don’t coordinate, but scientists learn to stay humble, roll with new information, we will learn more.
The key, he says… is accept the universe as it is. We must instruct our minds to live with the facts we discover.
The facts don’t make sense at first. They may never make sense, but hey, this is our universe. We’re stuck with it. We don’t have another one, not yet. So the best we can do is try to fit our minds to universe we find.
Isn’t this what we skeptics joyfully espouse? There is a humility and wonder in science that allows us to both embrace the unknown and mold our minds to the discoveries made along the way that help us explain this amazing reality. It may not be a perfect understanding—in fact, I’m sure it isn’t. But just because it all seems jumbled at first doesn’t mean the solution is to dream up a supernatural puzzle piece to fit in where science has yet to tread.We should not be afraid of neither the mess nor the mystery.
Dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude (“He who has begun is half done: dare to know!”) -Horace
Loading ...A few months ago a reader, Roofwoofer, posted a question in response to my Love questionnaire:
Many atheists state that one of their primary objections to the existence of God is that there is no evidence for it that would stand up to the scientific method.
So the question is, are there things that are real but that reality isn’t supported by results of scientific testing.
So, in what sense is love real? Does it exist? If you believe someone loves you, what would you say if someone asked you to prove it?
I was recently asked this same question by my mother, and I’ll admit I hadn’t thought it through very well and was feeling defensive at the time, so I didn’t have a good answer for her. In fact, this comment sounds so creepily similar to the words my mother said to me that I wonder if Roofwoofer is my mother or if they get their debating points from the same source. Maybe this is a more common argument than I realized?
How would the atheist community answer questions like this one?
You can’t go wrong with hand signals! And no, I don’t see one in there for giving the middle finger—though I imagine it would signify “Your premise is bullshit. I’d rather be watching Will & Grace.”
Originally by Landon Schurtz, a graduate student of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma
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