Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter One >>>>> Introductory Comments

Given that the Big Bang propelled the primordial soup into a nascent cosmos 13.8 billion years ago, humankind is a temporal newborn.  As the universe expanded and the cosmos gained greater definition, earth took shape 4.5 billion years ago.  Single cell life forms evolved approximately one billion years into the earth’s existence, but not until 500 million years ago did evolutionary processes gain momentum that produced botanical organisms and marine, amphibian, and terrestrial creatures.  And not until the extremely recent juncture at 200,000 years ago did homo sapiens follow hominid predecessors into existence.  

Humanity has only existed for 0.0014 percent of the time that has ensued since the Big Bang and 0.0044 percent of the time since the earth’s formation.  The ratio comparing the temporal existence of homo sapiens to the temporal existence of the universe when applied to a human life span of 75 years would find a human newborn just 1.5 minutes into her or his earthly sojourn;  if the applied ratio were that of the formation of earth compared to the temporal appearance of homo sapiens, that newborn would still be just 4.7 minutes old.

                     

Understanding the infancy of humanity is vital in comprehending the extraordinary ignorance of humankind.

 

After two hundred thousand years of hunting and gathering, people first began to farm intentionally just 10,000 years ago.  Civilizations featuring writing systems, social stratification, occupational specialization, and urban centers appeared between 4,000 and 1,500 BCE in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China.  The great civilization of Greek city-states evolved from 1200 BCE, reaching apogee during the 5th century BCE.  Roman expansion, Republic, and Empire spanned the years 500 BCE to 500 CE;  and as largely independent developments were taking place in North Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and the insular regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, just four major time periods in Europe succeeded the collapse of the Roman Empire:  the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), Renaissance (1300-1600 CE), Enlightenment (1600-1800 CE) and the late modern and contemporary world of 1800-2019.

 

With the Renaissance, Graeco-Roman humanism animated European intellectual life. When that humanistic spirit was applied to great experiments and produced the scientific epiphanies of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, modernity was born.  The Age of Reason and the Age of Science became appropriate alternative appellations describing the intellectual character of the Enlightenment.

 

Note how recently in the temporal expanses of prehistory and history the Enlightenment occurred.  With the Enlightenment came great faith in the capacity of objective data and human reason to solve the problems of and improve the life humankind.  But science produced insights at a high level of objective truth that opposed long-held positions of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches;   and while creating the intellectual questioning that impelled the Protestant Reformation of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, those same applications of science and reason produced objective results that were also at odds with the myriad of Protestant creeds that formed in the context of Reformation.

 

At late 18^th century, revolutions in the British colonies of North America and in France seemed to augur societies built on the political reasoning of Montesquieu, John Locke, and their acolytes, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.  Science and reason were in ascent, but three successive periods of conservative religious reassertion provided antithesis to the scientific thesis.  The tension between scientific humanists and religious conservatives intensified as Charles Darwin published his works on natural selection and evolution; Freud conducted his interviews in Vienna that suggested unconscious and subconscious determinants of human behavior;  Einstein mathematically challenged assumptions about the reality and relationship of matter, time, and space in the cosmos;  and B. F. Skinner powerfully asserted on the basis of scientific experimentation that human behavior is shaped exclusively by biological and experiential determinants, so that human beings only perceive that they have free will.    

 

In the aftermath of these great insights of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the forces of religious conservatism countered with views engendered by dogma and belief, rather than science and reason.  Failure to resolve the tension between science and reason, and thus to realize the promise of the Enlightenment, has stalled the already sluggish trajectory of humankind:

 

Temporally an infant, humanity remains intellectually and spiritually infant, as well.

 

Only when astute thinkers from each of the world’s great religious traditions congregate to agree on ethical principles consistent with scientifically observed conditions of nature and humanity will the ascendant trajectory of humankind ensue.

 

The thesis and antithesis of science and religion must gain synthesis, so that people live lives on this one earthly sojourn that are both rigorously rational and spiritually nourishing.

 

Failure to gain this synthesis undergirds all of humankind’s current dilemmas;  attainment of the synthesis for unity of science and religion would impel humanity toward conditions of life described by abundance, equity, and spiritual satisfaction.  

 

In the succeeding pages I detail the foundations and consequences of human ignorance and the better life to come via the astute conciliation of science and religion.