The Limits of Knowledge

I loved Carl Sagan: his joyous curiosity, his expansive faith in the power of reason. But when he said, “We make our world significant with the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers,” he was wrong. “We” do not make our world anything. The transcendent mysteries of this world—a world of soaring beauty and grinding horror, of purposeful life lost in often meaningless death, of consciousness and abstraction arising incongruously from simple need—these are not of our making. Yes, there is an inevitable subjectivity in life. While grasping for reality reason is colored by the filter of our senses. Our prejudices and imperfect mechanisms of discernment and reflection make perfect understanding unattainable. The fact that the filter limits an individual’s ability to know universal truth, however, doesn’t mean that such truth doesn’t exist. Only a pathological cynic doubts that an unheard tree falling in the woods makes no sound. Further a universal truth underlies our intrinsically subjective human experience: all of us desire to know and to be known. So in manifold ways, the world’s meaning is intrinsic to itself; it does not need us to create its meaning.

However, I’m still drawn to Mr. Sagan’s quote, “We make our world significant with the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers.” To me its beauty lies in both the recognition of the courage necessary to question aspects of our lives and the power that robust answers can have to enrich them. Asking questions has two aspects: one direct and simple, the other subtle and metaphysical. Seeking answers in our lives—through science, for example—can fill life with meaning … but only up to a point. What science does well is to explain the mechanics of things and—having gleaned underlying principles—providing the basis for helpful technologies. We ask, we get. Science has yielded many wonders that have helped us master much in our world. For many since the Enlightenment, science has all but conquered religion—having climbed the highest hills we find no burning bushes there; when our telescopes can see all the way to the beginning of time there’s not an angel in sight. So where can heaven find a home? However, since the emergence of the industrial age technological utopianism has been replaced by an understandable dread recognizing that through science and technology we have created the ability to destroy ourselves. So how do we find solace? In what do we believe? The answer to this conundrum arises from the metaphysical nature of all questions themselves. Just posing a question—even an unanswerable one—can have a profound impact on the questioner: it turns us out into the world and, thereby, offers us a connection to something greater than ourselves. As such, a question can defeat the limitations of science and draw upon the mysteries of incipient faith to conquer the existential angst arising from pure rationalism.

If the above is true, it is not that we lack answers to our questions but fail to see that the questions are the answer.