Who's YOUR God?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(F8L @ Mar 9 2007, 03:42 PM) [snapback]403072[/snapback]</div>

That's part of the beauty of science - it takes learning how nature works to even recognize there are aspects of nature you don't understand yet. Without some knowledge of physics and astronomy the very concept of "dark matter" wouldn't even have occurred to anyone, let alone that it is still a mystery far from resolved. And when we do finally understand most of what there is to know about dark matter, we'll THEN know enough to recognize some NEW mystery of nature impossible to imagine WITHOUT having first learned what dark matter is and how it works.

It's the old adage: The more you know, the more you realize how little you actually know.

There will always be mysteries. The universe is too vast (and largely out of reach) for us to be able to ever explain every wrinkle and niche in how it all fits together. We barely understand a fraction of the earth beneath our feet; we understand ourselves so poorly there's serious concern we may kill ourselves off through war or ecological mismanagement. There will ALWAYS be mysteries.

The adage above (about how it takes knowledge to recognize how trifling our knowledge is) is exactly opposite the "spirit" of religion, which both suppresses the seeking of knowledge and claims it possesses ALL knowledge. Only someone deeply ignorant (forgive the oxymoron there) could ever believe he possesses ALL knowledge, and if religion were distilled down to a single property, its extreme, WILLFUL ignorance would be the hard grains of dust left at the bottom of the beaker.

Mark Baird
Alameda CA