Looking for some reading to pass the early morning, I picked up G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy for a bit. Chesterton is brilliant, but tough to follow in bits and pieces (you really need to devote solid blocks of time to his work).
Still, there were words that, even on their own, struck me this morning: “Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. …The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
If you’ve read some of my previous work, you might see how it fits. I support solid science, but reject scientism – that is, a deep faith in science that unreasonably avoids philosophy. The clear reason for this is that there is just too much that science cannot explain. You will never be able to understand the origins of human consciousness (for only one example). What is “thinking” and how is it even possible?
The followers of scientism fill in the gaps with their god as much as the followers of any religion may do with theirs. But Chesterton goes to the impossibility of understanding everything. There is indeed the infinite – the things of philosophy that we are just not capable of understanding. The Bible touches on this in one of my favorite verses. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes that God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” We all have this longing – this deep inner knowledge that there is more out there (and in here). The scientist seeks these things, and rightly so. The origins of science are quite religious – there have always been those who study in order to better understand God’s creation. But some take their faith to an extreme, and I’m telling you, it just can’t be done. The head will split.
Perhaps there will come a day when AI advances so much that it will be able to take over. I have my own answer already, but I wouldn’t be surprised at the answer AI will give us. Some of you already know it.
It’s 42.