Over the weekend, the Godcasting production team started to release the interviews taken over the course of Skepticon 5. The first of these was a brief discussion with a famed veteran of apologetical trench warfare — Matt Dillahunty.
About eight minutes into this episode, Matt brought up an excellent point about knowledge and ignorance: As it turns out, you need a certain amount of knowledge to become aware of your ignorance. Matt uses the example of talking to Richard Carrier about the Bible. Matt knows quite a bit about the Bible, having studied it for years first as an apologist and later as a counter-apologist. But when Matt speaks with Richard, he quickly gets the sense that Richard has an even deeper understanding of the text, having learned the source languages, studied the source texts, and spent years learning about the historical background from which they arose. The average pew-warmer or even first-year seminarian might have trouble telling Richard and Matt apart, though, because they haven’t yet developed enough of their own expertise to recognize expertise in others.
One of my early physics profs explained this with an off-the-cuff analogy to the development of telescopes. As we built better and better devices, we became ever more aware of how much more there is out there of which we’ve yet to become aware. So also as the sphere of knowledge increases, the realm of potential knowledge on the outskirts of our current sphere expands ever outward. While I’ve forgotten most everything I’ve known about physics (use it or lose it) that analogy has always stuck with me as I’ve moved on to other fields.
Of course, there are systems of thought wherein ignorance of the wider world is glorified, and only knowledge of the Unquestionable Truth is considered worthwhile. The results of such an approach are on display wherever any kind of fundamentalism has gained the upper hand, from necrocratic Kimism in North Korea to theocratic Islamism in Afghanistan. Structured as such, they can only last for so long as fear and hate keeps them from collapsing inward, and even a military-grade boot will wear out after stomping on enough human faces.
Sam Harris once memorably wrote that “[t]heology is ignorance with wings,” but I prefer to think of theology as a weak and flightless fowl, bound for eventual extinction in the face of far fitter competition. That will be a blissful day indeed.
