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
Orion Nebula: The Hubble View Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (STScI/ESA) and The Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team.
I need some clarification. My understanding is fuzzy on a point of philosophy and science.
Apologist Ray Comfort asks “How do I know God exists?” His own answer stems from the argument from design: that anything that appears to have a purpose or orderly manner must have a beginning and a creator. Comfort says:
Keep in mind that we can’t create anything from nothing. We don’t know how to begin. If you disagree, then make me a seed—-from nothing. Make it living, so that it grows into a plant that produces an edible fruit, and make it with the ability to create more seeds within the fruit, so that you can plant them and make more plants and more fruit. So if we can’t even make one seed, how intellectually deceitful is it for any rational human being to believe that nothing created everything?
I see that he most likely has a problem with the Inflation/Expansion of the universe (aka “Big Bang”) because it comes across like the universe popped into existence without a cause or source.
What I don’t understand, though, is why he and other creationists don’t have a problem with matter appearing instantaneously in the form of minerals, animals, humans, energy, and so forth when God says “Duuuude… Bear! Kneecap! Mitosis! Compact Discs! AIDS!”
I strongly doubt that speaking something into existence is very cohesive with the laws of this universe. How is that explanation the least bit satisfying? In what way is it less puzzling than a natural origin? Is this not the same as “something out of nothing”?
Am I missing something here?
Bonus: the known universe… in video!
Olin Thang on 
Cortez Frisch on 
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