2025-03-22

I'm not well-versed in epistemology but I know that there is a valuable aspect of being human that we can learn in being aware that there are things in this world that are unknowable. To elaborate my yesterday's stance further, this position puts you in a mindset that allows you to remain intellectually humble while remaining open to the mysteries of life. As I think more about it, this may be a path towards a refusal to commit and refusing Pascal's wager because this sounds like one is not ready to pursue the possibility of nothingness despite everything that exists.

This position can be stated as the ambivalence towards the existence of God, a lack of conviction, and a certain agnosticism. But I would like to state that my point is otherwise and it is towards the affirmation of the divine. We only recognize that there are things that we cannot know, either by the limits of human knowledge or cognition or an absolute incapability of perceiving the world through the infinite possible ways of seeing. With all this, I still believe in the potential of human evolution. Science, art, and cultural progress has been taking us in leaps in the past decades despite the seeming slowness of it all. Perhaps it is still delicately slow but the significance of this progress is to push the limits of human capabilities. To redefine what it means to be human.

But if we continually evolve as a species, won't there be a time, take a thousands, millions, or billions of years, when we would have known everything about the universe?

I would answer this in two ways:

  1. Yes, if we were able to know everything about the universe, in any way it made itself possible to our evolved human brains, it would mean that we have become God. Possibly, this is another version of singularity.
  2. No, we won't be able to know everything about the universe because when we declare our absolute knowledge of it only reflects our understanding of it, not the entirety of it. In this case, unknowing or a version of ignorance is caused by knowing. We won't be able to transcend, we still remain human.

Seen from this lens, understanding the universe becomes a problem of transcendence and the belief in God.