How God Fulfills Our Curiosity
Human thought across history is marked by a series of fundamental questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? What is that? Why did that happen? We appear to be unique in our intellectual pursuits. Other animals seem to display curiosity in certain situations, but nothing like the human pursuit for truth has been noted anywhere else on our planet or in the universe as far as we have seen. Curiosity is a marker of a developed mind, and the killing of a person’s desire for truth is a tragic event in the cases that it does happen. Science is a child of curiosity, being the pursuit of material truth according to the senses. It is also our primary source of information, being the material creatures that we are, and for that reason its integrity must be preserved if we hope to live in an intelligible world. But can science carry us all the way through and answer our most fundamental questions? In my last essay, ‘A Response to ‘The Question that Keeps Me Up at Night’’, I concluded that it cannot, because the answers to the fundamental questions that people ask are not fulfilled by material realities, but by transcendent realities. The last video specifically covered the question of knowledge of the origin of all things. Since material things are contingent, they do not provide a suitable explanation for even their own existence. Whatever, then, is the explanation of all things, it must be immaterial, though something immaterial is necessarily inaccessible to our normal modes of exploration (i.e. the senses). The reason that this is problematic is that we are entirely stopped in our exploration of causes at such a dissatisfactory point. That is to say we have found a negative cause. What I mean to say by calling this cause negative is that we are not describing its positive attributes. When we describe objects, we tend to speak about these positive attributes such as, in a rabbit, brown-ness, fluffiness, cute-ness. A wheelbarrow might have one wheel, a basin, and handles. We came to the conclusion of a so-called god of philosophy, but the only way we can describe this god is to say that it is not material, not temporal, not finite, not changeable. I do suppose that we can give some positive attributes to this god, such as all-powerful and all-knowing, but these are practically derived from the god’s infiniteness and are ways of stating how the god is different from us limited beings. The god is not limited in power nor in knowledge. Our reasoning is stopped here. But is this necessarily a bad thing? To answer this question, we must first understand the purpose of curiosity.
The Goodness of Curiosity
| “All men by nature desire knowledge” - Aristotle, Metaphysics
Deep within man’s being lies the desire for knowledge, the impulse to understand the world around him. I think that most people would call this inquisitiveness ‘curiosity’. I believe that this is how Dr. Kipping uses the term in his motto, and understandably so, because that is the colloquial meaning. Classically, however, curiosity is a vice opposed to the virtue of studiousness. Temperance, a virtue indisputably needed for right living, moderates all desires according to reason’s bidding. This desire for knowledge, then, is also under the purview of temperance. Studiousness is the habituation of the right desire for knowledge and study. Curiosity, then, is excessive desire for knowledge beyond what reason would ordain. Examples of the sin of curiosity would be nosiness and snooping, asking people about private information, perhaps family affairs that aren’t your business. Being a willing recipient of gossip is the sin of curiosity. Wanting people’s personal information such as how much money your neighbor makes or who other school parents are voting for. Seeking the latest news on who some celebrity is now dating. These also are examples of curiosity. The key to whether or not we sin is whether the knowledge obtained is relevant to us working in our proper role in the world. As a host, it would be relevant to know my guest’s food allergies. The question then is how to discern whether certain knowledge is relevant to our correctly ordered operation. That depends on knowing what we are working for, or in the scope of this essay, what we are living for. Part of an accountant’s job may be to make sure that employees are neither stealing company money nor getting cheated out of their own pay. To that accountant, his coworker’s salary would be perfectly relevant to achieving the end of checking his income against his contract. Studiousness needs a relevant end to look for to avoid becoming sinful–and ultimately sick–curiosity.
The particular case that we are looking at is, of course, our seeking for the ultimate cause of everything that exists the way that it exists. Is that relevant to our purpose in this life? I’m starting from the point of view that we have an objective purpose to our existence. I will address the question of whether or not our lives have an objective purpose in another essay, but in short, a creator does entail an ultimate purpose. To answer the question, we have to look to our nature, what we experience about ourselves, because that is all the information we really have about our end. Firstly, we know that our earthly existence is temporal. We know that everyone dies. Secondly, we know that we have intellects with the capacity to reason, to know, to learn, and to think about immaterial realities. Thirdly, we know that there is a universal desire to know the answer to this fundamental question of existence. I don’t believe that there is anybody who would say that these are evils or defects in us. Therefore, if nothing in us is without some purpose, I’d say that it is reasonable to conclude that this is relevant to our purpose, just as sought after as food and water, certainly necessities relevant to our lives. This is especially convincing considering that a pretty universal use of reason, by humans, to answer the questions of death and existence is for humans to engage in religion. This cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. Clearly, the vast, vast majority of people in history considered these fundamental questions very relevant, even to their daily lives. If, then, this question is not irrelevant to us, can we reasonably satisfy this curiosity?
This brings us back to the limits of human reason. I concluded the last video with the limit of human reason being the god of philosophy, which I don’t think is entirely satisfactory. It technically answers the present question of ultimate origin, but in a very abstract way. We can conceive of the god, but it is entirely impossible to imagine such a being, us having finite capacities of imagination. Obviously, recognizing the lack of formal logic in most places and at most times, most people were not satisfied with this kind of answer. Again, religion is universal among all peoples until the modern age. The spiritual realm does not appear to be occupied merely by an impersonal static transcendent force, but by some kind of intelligence or intelligences. But even if there are multiple personal beings in the spiritual realm that are present in such a way as to be recognized by all civilizations and religions, we concluded that the god of philosophy, the One who actually is the solution, is One and is transcendent–beyond us. So, there is no way to consider any religion an accurate description of the One unless the One came and revealed itself. Without addressing in this audio presentation the arguments for whether or not such a condescension happened or not, this statement means that we can regard no man-made religion to be a fully accurate description of the One in itself because it would be the product of inadequate human intellect. But such a revelation would be a perfect answer to the question of the origin of everything and an answer to why everything is the way it is such that human reason alone could not provide. But to return to the specific point of this section, curiosity, if we are indeed searching for that ultimate perfect answer and not just the technical response, is indeed vain if we can not hope for revelation, even if it is relevant. Therefore our curiosity is not only of the improper variety, but also useless in the end once all other questions have been answered. I, however, come from the perspective that such revelation does exist and that our curiosity is not in vain, but indeed the driver for our diligent search for truth. Let us address the implications of an ultimate answer.
How Can an Ultimate Reality not kill Curiosity?
The question that sparked this two-part video essay was ultimately this question by Dr. Kipping: if there is a final answer to the chain of questions exploring the causes of why things are the way they are, doesn’t that end curiosity? And he particularly struggles with that question because of his motto: “Stay curious.” There would be nothing more to be curious about, right? This problem is only exacerbated by the idea of a transcendent god being the ultimate origin of things. That god would be inaccessible to our intellects, as described in the first part of this video. The only way that we could know anything about this god is if it came down and revealed itself to us first. But wouldn’t that also eliminate curiosity? To a certain extent, yes. We wouldn’t have to search anymore for answers because all questions would be accessible. But, remember, curiosity without an end is in vain, and practically, the god made such a complex and nuanced universe that we could never uncover all its mysteries. At the same time, I would say that from the Catholic perspective, the Judeo-Christian God, Yahweh, the ultimate identity of the god of philosophy, does not eliminate our wonder by His being present to us. Firstly, what God has revealed to man on Earth is so incredibly rich in content that millions of books from the past two millennia have failed to exhaust the depths of Scripture. Even more dramatic is the Beatific Vision. This is the important part to understand correctly and grasp its significance: God is infinite. This is why the nature of God is considered a mystery. It isn’t unknowable, but it is impossible to exhaust the meaning of His existence. One who goes to Heaven will be experiencing God perfectly for all eternity, and what does he do during Heaven? He grows in relationship with God. If you are truly in love with a person, no time together seems like too much. You can never exhaust each other’s company and can keep coming closer together and knowing each other better. It is the same way with God and our relationship with Him. Our desire to completely know God as the ultimate end will never be exhausted, We will know God perfectly in Heaven having all desire fulfilled, and yet continue to grow in knowledge of God and relationship with Him. This is the key—relationship…relationship with an infinite yet perfectly knowable God is the fulfillment of all our curiosity.