Unknown vs. Unknowable

There are a great many things in this kooky world of ours that no one knows. Ask a scientist if you don't believe me. Or ask a priest. They'll probably both agree.

The difference is, of course, that most scientists will speak of things yet to be discovered, problems yet to be solved. A priest is likely to speak about mysteries, possibly to be revealed, possibly not. Contrary to what you might be thinking, these two points of view need not be incompatible. And neither side holds the high ground on this issue.

If there were nothing left to learn, life would be fairly uninteresting. I imagine that must be why being God gets tedious enough that one decides to create plagues of locusts and such. But if all things must be revealed rather than learned or discovered, then what is the impetus to do anything other than sit and stare and wait for revelation. Many people believe that God works through humans, so discovery and revelation are really the same thing, but it still leaves an awful lot of the responsibility to the divine.

The adventurous part of me wants to know everything. I can readily understand the Faustian bargain (and the sex probably wouldn't be bad either). Knowledge is powerful, not just because people say, "Knowledge is power." We seek it because we seek to understand. Certainly, knowledge can be used for other purposes, but some knowledge is simply intrinsically interesting to us.

The other part of me, the more spiritual part, doesn't want to know some things. I don't think there are things "man was not meant to know," but there are some things which we cannot know because if we knew them, we wouldn't be human any more. There's something frightening and yet comforting about the idea that there are some things no one will ever know. These things aren't the unknowns that drive my adventurous side crazy; they are simply questions we don't know the answers to, and possibly don't even know the questions to. How do you really ask what the meaning of life is, for example.

The problem is that many people, scientist and priest, seem to believe the either all knowledge is knowable, or that all unknowns are unknowables. They mix the two up as well; no one, for example, should attempt to mathematically prove God's existence, nor should one take the Bible as literal scientific truth. We know too much for either of those things to be realistic.

But I won't discourage people from attempting to discover simply because I think they will fail. If you believe that some things are unknowable, you really shouldn't worry about being proven wrong. The only people who fear discovery are those who fear being proven wrong, and how can a belief ever be proven, one way or the other?