mjknight Author, dreamweaver, visionary – plus actor.

Charles Darwin on confidence and knowledge

• February 12th, 2009
• 1:58 am

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

I had to read this twice this morning, because it genuinely seemed to me like it must have been a typo. Surely Darwin, writing in his The Descent of Man (1871), meant just the opposite: that the ignorant were those who thought science would answer all of life’s big questions. Surely he meant to say that what those who know much know is just how little they know!

But no, he is quoted correctly. I am not anti-Darwin. But his words go to show how differently things look from the far side of modernity.

There’s been a great reversal. Whereas back then some fearful cloister walkers denied out of their ignorance that science could answer any of our questions, today some arrogant lab rats claim that science will answer them all. And yet, as all scientists worth the name admit, it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that all the world’s problems have been – or will be – solved by science.

Darwin is not mistaken, things are just different now, and yet the first part certainly still seems true: ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’

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• darwin, epistemology, modernism, religion, science