Experts 4: The Getting of Wisdom b

The theologian at this point wants to say to the atheist or agnostic – ‘you have a working assumption of the universe’s coherence, but no reason to believe it in particular. There’s plenty in the universe that is mysterious and confounding: take the baffling business of quantum mechanics, for example. Why should we simply assume that it all makes sense, rather than that simply being a fantasy in which we indulge?’ The theologian, on the other hand, has a way of explaining why the mystery of the universe is only mysterious because of the limitations of our finite and terrestrial minds. This is not a proof of the existence of God, of course. But it is a choice for a kind of consistency.

The business of human knowing is also rightly described as an ‘ethical’ concern because human knowledge advances within certain ‘societies of knowledge’. That is, knowing things is a fundamentally and inescapably social activity. The relationships that help us to know things exist as traditions (one’s forebears in a discipline) and communities (one’s contemporaries). Even individual geniuses in the history of human knowledge built on the things that had been bequeathed to them by the generation before; and had to operate in relation to academic guilds and societies and so on. What awareness of your place in a tradition and a community helps you to see is that what human beings know and learn is profoundly linked to where we sit in relation to others. I used the word ‘ethical’ at this point because, wherever human communities are concerned, we are called upon to consider how we treat one another. Even if you are standing on the shoulders of a giant, and thus seeing further than the giant, you are still dependent on the giant. 

Let me take this thread of thought a little further. If we understand the importance of traditions and communities in helping us to know things, we will have to acknowledge how dependent we are not only on their accuracy of mind and commitment to the truth but also that, if there is a malevolent strain lurking within a tradition or a community, that we will be able to recognize it and weed it out. There is implicit in the ideas of tradition and community some vision of what it is to act rightly – an ethos, we might say.