 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
Learned Ignorance | Genesis 3.4; 11.1-9 | September 9, 2001 |
To know that we don’t know is the beginning of wisdom. It is a philosophy not easily accepted in our culture where we think we know everything. We men are the paradigm when it comes to asking for directions. And someone quipped that that’s why Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years, because Moses wouldn’t stop to ask for directions. We live in a culture that brags about curing all diseases given enough time, a culture that thinks we know what God thinks about stem cell research, and abortion, sexual morality, etc, etc. Religious people especially think it is their mission to provide answers, even if they’re wrong and misleading. The wrong answer is better than no answer, for some people. It is the scientists who are leading the way in learned ignorance; the more they explore outer space and the inner space of our brains, the more they realize they don’t know. To know that we don’t know is the beginning of wisdom. Al Ginsberg said that ‘if I were to create a new religious symbol it would be a question mark! And I would turn it upside down so that it could plough furrows in the mind.”
Ebenezer Scrooge’s epiphany on Christmas Eve centers on his acquired ignorance. What was a very stingy and cantankerous man became a man of great generosity and congeniality. In the movie that stars Alistair Simm in the title role, Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning drunk with the joy of his conversion, and dances around the room like a madman in his nightshirt singing: “I don’t know anything. I never did know anything. But now I know that I don’t know anything.”
The Divine Center is to be experienced more than known. Questions in life are to be lived more than answered and experiences with God are to be pursued more than analyzed. Barbara Brown Taylor likens it to human beings trying to approach God like night owls trying to look at the sun. The fact that we go on being blinded does not keep us from wanting to look. Nicholas calls it our innate desire to ‘to know that we do not know.’ “If we can attain this completely,” says Nicholas, “we will attain learned ignorance. For nothing more perfect comes to a person, even the most zealous in learning, than to be found most learned in the ignorance that is uniquely one’s own.”
Readers of the bible will recognize the territory. God warns Adam and Eve to steer clear of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The Tower of Babel again illustrates the divinely set limit to human knowledge which mortals trespass at their own risk. We can handle only so much information before we explode, partly because we are often unwilling to harness the knowledge we have. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who played a major role in the creation of the atomic bomb, had a change of heart when he saw what his invention could do. Two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he made a remarkable confession. “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” (BBT, The Christian Century)
Perhaps the dumbest people in the world are those who think they know. Our certainty about what is true not only pits us against each other, but it also prevents us from learning anything new. If we think we know the answer, we will never expand our limited knowledge. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” We do not know what we do not know, and our unlearned ignorance keeps us in the dark as it regards truth.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman says: “If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation.” Uncertainty is as high a value in science as it is in religion. He is willing to leave the door to the unknown ajar, as should we. A philosophy and theology of ignorance is paramount to faith. Every person of faith should be an agnostic, never confident about who God is, always questing to touch the mystery of God; being certain of who God is makes life comfortable and controllable but it isn’t honest. We strive for learned ignorance as a liberal church, being open to finding God in all the ways God comes to us.
Knowing breeds apathy and hostility. And one of the healthiest things we can do is to struggle with God, to wrestle God to the ground as Jacob did. Jacob came away limping, but he was a better person for it. To wrestle with God is to struggle with truth, to not accept blindly what others are saying about truth, and to find God who is truth inside ourselves more than in others’s ideas of God. The people we revere in history, whether biblical history or modern history, are people who didn’t take it lying down. Job, Jesus, Muhammad, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa. They didn’t just accept without questioning or questing. They were people of character because they challenged and rebelled, they fought and they struggled with what was accepted as truth when it didn’t make sense.
It behooves us to embrace the paradox of learned ignorance with great energy: we must pursue knowledge and understanding of our universe without restriction while respecting its power and our obligation to use it for holy purpose. We have eaten fruit from that tree in the mythical Garden of Eden, and we know something of good and evil. Stem cell research, cloning research that improves the quality of life, exploring life thousands of light years away, have potential for good or evil. It is our compulsion to control the odds that gives concern. A false sense of pride in our accomplishments coupled with our obsession to be first and best sets off the smoke alarm of our souls that the fire of knowledge may be out of control. It will consume us rather than enlighten us.
Now we see through a glass darkly. What we are so arrogantly proud to have achieved is but a drop of water in an ocean of understanding. Each bit of understanding enlightens us into the nature of the divine, but it also exposes us to the allusion of control. Rome in its glory days was at the pinnacle of sophistication, but toppled because caesars in their arrogance proclaimed themselves, and actually thought of themselves, as gods. No learned ignorance here.
Each bit of understanding clears part of the dark glass; we see a bit more clearly into parts of life because of it. But to assume that the glass will some day be completely clear or that the parts through which we see more clearly represent the whole is the beginning of arrogance. It is rather like the blind men who were trying to describe an elephant based on the part of the animal each was touching with his hand. One described the tail, another the trunk, another the leg. Each had a part, but none of them had the whole. Wisdom’s foundation is not in learned facts. It is not limited to our understanding of the way life works or doesn’t work. Like Scrooge, learned ignorance is the beginning of life. To know that we do not know is the beginning of wisdom.
–Gary L. McCann
(With appreciation to Barbara Brown Taylor for her insights
in The Christian Century article ‘Learned Ignorance)
| Copyright © 2001 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |