The distinction between ignorance and agnosticism—a distinc­tion which is often ignored in our time—is of great importance. The former is both natural and realistic; it knows itself and recog­nizes its own impotence. To be human is, in the first place, to be ignorant and to accept the fact that there is a great deal we cannot know and, for that matter, a great deal we do not need to know. Idle curiosity is certainly a vice—a lust of the mind—whereas acknowledgment of the fact that we have no intrinsic right to receive answers to all our questions is an aspect of humility as it is of realism. It is said that St. Augustine was asked: “What was God doing before he created the world?” “Preparing hell for those who ask unnecessary questions!”

Agnosticism however raises a personal incapacity to the dignity of a universal law. It amounts to the dogmatic assertion that what “I” do not know cannot be known, and it limits the very concept of what is knowable to the little area of observation open to the unsanctified and unilluminated human mentality. The agnostic atti­tude derives from a refusal to admit that anyone can be or ever could have been our superior in this, the most important realm of all: the true knowledge of what there is to be known. Religion is now seen exclusively in terms of faith rather than of supernatural knowl­edge. In egalitarian terms, faith is acceptable; you may believe in fairies if you wish to. But the claim to a direct and certain knowl­edge of realities beyond the mind’s normal compass excludes those who do not possess it and savors of presumption. The idea that a saint among the saints may have known God—not merely believed in him—suggests “unfairness” and implies the superiority of some men to others. It puts us in our place.

Squatting in this place, this little pool, and hungry for certain­ties, people hold on with a kind of desperation to the current notion of what is (or is not) “rational”; and yet, “the rationalism of a frog at the bottom of a well consists in denying the existence of mountains; this is logic of a kind, perhaps, but it has nothing to do with reality.” This rationalism is inextricably linked with the scien­tific point of view, which is advanced as the only logical interpreta­tion of the world. Unfortunately nothing in this realm is as clear as it should be. The “facts” with which science supplies us are of quite a different order to those registered by our physical senses. What the scientist says, in effect, is this: you may take my propositions as proved, provided you accept all the assumptions which appear self-evident at this time, so long as you agree that the objective world exactly fits the patterns inherent in human thinking (or vice versa), on the understanding that the simplest explanation of a given phe­nomenon must be the right one and assuming that the physical world is sealed off from interference from any other realm. This adds up to a formidable list of qualifications.

Contrary to popular belief, science does not offer us certainties in the way that our senses provide a kind of certainty on their own level. Scientific hypotheses are not facts, and before the scientist can even begin to construct his theories he must make a number of very sweeping assumptions which most people may agree to take for granted, since they are in accordance with the present climate of opinion, but which can never be proved.

He must assume the absolute, objective validity of his own mental processes and believe that the logic of these processes is a universal law to which everything that is or ever could be conforms. Common sense tells him that this is so, but common sense is a vari­able factor which changes from one age to another. He can never be certain that the images which his senses present to his mind are a true representation of realities which exist independently and objectively. Not unlike the man who interprets the outside world in terms of what is taking place in his own entrails, seeing a bright day when he feels well and finding the world a dark place when his system is choked with waste products, he may in fact be applying to observed data the laws which govern his own mentality, an instru­ment constructed for the practical business of living much as the entrails are constructed for the digestion of food. Since inner and outer, subjective and objective, are, in the last analysis, two sides of the same coin, he is likely to find that the protean physical world provides the answers he expects of it (these answers being implicit in the phrasing of his questions) and experiment will confirm the theories he has constructed without, in fact, taking him beyond the subjective realm.

However complex the instruments designed to extend the range of our senses, scientific exploration is always to some extent dealing with patterns inherent in the exploring mind and meeting the mirror images it has projected. Nature mocks and eludes us, seeming to fit herself into our mental categories because our minds are themselves embedded in her structure. We imagine ourselves standing—or floating—above the natural world, competent to survey it objectively, and the intervention of scientific instruments between our naked senses and the objects of observation heightens this illusion; but a mentality which is part of the natural world can never escape and look down as a disembodied agent upon its own matrix. That element in man which does indeed transcend the natural world is in him but not of him, and the objectivity of its awareness is very different from the fictional objectivity exercised by one facet of nature in relation to another.

But while the scientist, in his increasingly private and abstract sphere, finds a marvelous concordance between his thinking process and the movement of a needle on a dial or the traces of radiation on a photographic plate, the ordinary man of our time faces a widening gulf between scientific theory and any kind of objective experience known to him.

No longer can men be told that the truth of things will be con­firmed in their own intimate experience if only they will look and listen. The proofs and arguments of contemporary science are so abstract and so technical that they are no longer open to criticism by the non-specialist and cannot be tested against any kind of expe­rience known to man as a living creature. Informed that the elec­tron’s position does not change with time, but does not remain the same, and that, although the electron is not at rest, it is not in motion, Francois Mauriac remarked: “What this professor says is far more incredible than what we poor Christians believe!” The theo­ries employed by modern physics have not merely by-passed the contours of the rational mind; they have gone beyond the range of human imagination.

“In those never-never, through-the-looking-glass abodes,” says Professor Huston Smith, “parallel lines meet, curves get you from star to star more quickly than do Euclid’s straight lines, a particle will pass through alternative apertures simultaneously without dividing, time shrinks and expands, electrons . . . jump orbit without traversing the intervening distance, and particles fired in opposite directions, each at a speed approximating that of light, separate from each other no faster than the speed of light.” After this no one has any excuse for finding obscurities or improbabilities in the higher reaches of theology and metaphysics. If the majority of people still imagine that the physical sciences relate in some way to their normal experience this can only be because they are living in the past, comfortably immured in the mechanistic science of the nineteenth century.

- Gai Eaton, “Knowledge and its Counterfeits”