Philosophy of Ignorance

Science versus religion is always going to lead to heated debates, particularly when it involves people either side of the fence who are very passionate about their beliefs.

But throughout history, even though there is such a divide today, science and religion were closely linked. In fact, many of the great mathematicians and scientists attributed their discoveries to understanding God, and that to understand mathematics was to understand the mind of God.

The following video clip is, once again, Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, talking about "Intelligent Design". If you have a spare 30mins to watch it, I do recommend it, but I will break it down to the main points here.



One of his main points that I really like, is his idea that religion is just a philosophy of ignorance, that it's not necessarily strictly "science versus religion" but they both make up a certain percentage of our understanding of the universe. At the point where our knowledge stops, that's where we attribute those things that we don't understand to God, and most of the great minds of the past two thousand years have done the same.

There are some points that Dr Tyson does not cover in this lecture, so I'm going to start back in Ancient Greece. The scientists of the day were not anti-religious, in fact they were very devoted followers and their pursuit of understanding was their way of getting closer to God. Their understanding was that God is rational and perfect in every way, and so the universe too must be both rational and perfect.

Two very important philosophers in Ancient Greece that begun this trend of thinking was Socrates and his student Plato. It was Plato that believed that to study mathematics was to study the mind of God, because mathematics had order, was always consistent and was completely independent of other influences.

This is a time when the Pythagorean Paradigm was a large contributing factor to the progress of science, essentially the idea of common sense and understanding the universe through precise observations. This meant that it was generally believed that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and that the sun, moon and planets had perfectly circular orbits and perfectly uniform speeds, because after all, if God is perfect, why would he not create a perfect universe?

Their reasoning behind these thoughts came from the idea that Earth is separate from the Heavens, that the stars, the forever bright lights in the sky, never changed while the Earth is made of rock, sand and soil and was always undergoing change. Logic also told them that the Earth could not be moving as birds in the sky, along with other objects, were not left behind as the Earth moved through space.

I don't really want to talk too much about the different models of the solar system used throughout history, as that is not really my point of this post. Basically, following Socrates and Plato came Aristotle and then Ptoelmy as they continued to try to explain the workings of the universe using geocentric (Earth-centred) universe, with each of them adding an increased understanding on top of previous ideas.

It wasn't until the 16th century, at the time of the Renaissance, that these ideas began to change. Nicolaus Copernicus believed that Ptolemy's model of the solar system was too complicated, something God would not allow. He also believed that the Sun is essentially God, the creator of life in the solar system, and so should be placed at the centre (heliocentric model).

Interestingly, another scientist and astronomer at this time, Tycho Brahe, believed that Copernicus was wrong because with the Sun at the centre, he calculated that the stars would have to be 700 times further away from Saturn than Saturn is from the Sun, and he believed that God would not waste so much space. It is now known that distance from Saturn to the nearest star is in fact 28,500 time further away than Saturn is from the Sun.

Then Galileo came along with his telescope and made some significant discoveries, including the four moons orbiting Jupiter, which proved that not every object in the sky orbits around Earth, and that Venus does orbit around the Sun. Obviously, this idea of a heliocentric universe went against the Church and its teachings. That is not to say that Galileo did not believe in God, in fact he was very religious, but his reasoning was that he believed his ideas gave a better understanding on how God worked and he wanted to help more common people understand how the universe, and thus God, worked.

Johaness Kepler then came along and, using Copernicus' heliocentric model, discovered the laws of planetary motion, i.e. the orbits of the planet around the sun.

Essentially, Dr Tyson's main argument here is that after a certain level of discovery and understanding, there comes a point where we can't explain the universe anymore and that's when people, including the more scientifically aware, begin turning to a more "faith-based" approach. All of these "great minds" eventually, after reaching the limit of their knowledge, turn to Intelligent Design to explain the unexplainable. That is until someone else comes along and decides that it isn't unexplainable and without taking the easy way out by invoking God, sits down to solve the problem, which progresses our understanding of the universe.

He quotes a percentage that from a study that 85% of an "elite" scientists reject a personal god and thus Intelligent Design. But that still means 15% of our "great minds" TODAY still believe in a personal god. So what hope do the general public have?

But he doesn't argue that we should stop teaching the theory of Intelligent Design, in fact the opposite, as both science and religion, throughout history, go hand-in-hand, and what better way to understand the way the human brain works than to try and understand why some people believe in the things they do.

"I'm not going to say 'don't teach this' because it's real, it happened. So I don't want people to sweep it under the rug because if you do you're neglecting something fundamental that is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understand"

It is the battle between ignorance and understanding that makes us human.