Introduction
To approach the mystery at the heart of religion, we must first understand how belief and ignorance entwine. We will start by introducing ordinary and higher ignorance. On one end of the spectrum, a complete lack of familiarity about a subject can mean that no beliefs exist—a state we will call ordinary ignorance. Yet, as experience and interest accumulate, beliefs tend to form.
Some beliefs can be tested against real-world evidence. Scientists design experiments to test their ideas and theories. When evidence contradicts a belief, that belief needs to change or be discarded. Evidence connects our beliefs with objective reality, improving the accuracy of our model of the world. But not all beliefs can be tested. Awareness of the limits of knowledge is what we call higher ignorance.
Some questions will always remain beyond the reach of investigation, and it is higher ignorance to know which questions are which. Due to its abundance of intractable questions, religion offers a compelling context in which to explore belief.[1] With examples and discussion, we will delve deeper. Along the way, we will introduce a third category of ignorance.
Galileo’s Trial
The famous story of Galileo Galilei’s trial will help to show the interplay of types of ignorance.
In 1633, the Inquisition summoned Galileo, then an elderly and ailing man, to Rome. Despite his frailty, he made the long and difficult journey from Florence, carried on a litter through mostly dreadful weather. Even so, Galileo remained confident that the Inquisition would rule in his favor. He had good reasons for his optimism: Pope Urban VIII had long been a supporter of his work, even composing an ode in his honor. Galileo stood at the height of his career. His discoveries had sparked controversy, especially within the Church. Still, he had admirers at all levels of society. At the time, he was likely the most famous person in Europe. Before his death, he would receive visits from prominent figures such as Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. To Galileo, the trial was a bothersome inconvenience, disrupting his groundbreaking work. He also muttered that it was unlikely that the pope would make himself a fool in the estimation of the intellectual world.
Yet, Galileo was not naive. He knew there were powerful individuals deeply angered by his ideas. He also understood that the outcome of any Inquisition was unpredictable. Lurking in the background was a remote but real threat. Torture and imprisonment were common punishments in ecclesiastical trials.
Galileo’s confidence was misplaced. After enduring months of interrogation, the exhausted seventy-year-old finally capitulated to the Inquisition. He signed his now-infamous "abjuration." It rejected Copernicus’s revolutionary idea that "the earth is not the center of the universe." Galileo swore it was false and vowed never to teach it again. He was further coerced to promise that, “Should I know any heretic or person suspected of heresy, I shall denounce him to this Holy Office.”[2]
The confession, extreme as it was, softened but did not prevent his punishment. The authorities exiled Galileo to his farm in Arcetri, near Florence. There, he lived under virtual house arrest for the last eight years of his life. Galileo’s personal tragedy reflects a larger intellectual conflict. It’s often cast as a conflict between science and religion. But a closer look at history reveals more complex dynamics at play.
Reframing Galileo’s Conflict with the Church
Galileo’s trial is often miscast as a conflict between religion and science. On one side stood religion, a body of unchanging beliefs. On the other was science, defined by its open and dynamic inquiry into the physical world. Yet such a view overlooks the historical context. The conflict actually centered on a more nuanced question: what kinds of evidence should shape and guide belief?
Heliocentrism—the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun—was first proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus in the mid-1500s. By the time Galileo advocated this view, the Protestant Reformation had shaken the Church. Tensions over interpreting scripture had escalated. Church authorities felt threatened by challenges to their traditional readings of the Bible.
The Catholic Church relied on its traditional evidence. The Bible was often seen as supporting a geocentric view. Passages like Joshua 10:12-14 were taken to imply that the sun moved around a stationary Earth. Also, the old Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model said the universe was Earth-centered. It held that the heavens were perfect and unchanging. The Church condemned heliocentrism as heretical in 1616.
Galileo, however, believed that faith and science operate in separate domains. He argued the Church had no authority to judge scientific findings, as science couldn’t invalidate religious beliefs. The phases of Venus had no theological relevance. The Bible didn’t address the velocity of falling objects. Galileo’s telescope showed clear evidence for heliocentrism, but his confrontational style angered Church leaders.
The standoff between Galileo and the Church cannot be fully understood through ordinary ignorance alone. Neither side lacked information. Galileo’s discoveries were available to Church authorities, and Church doctrine was well known to Galileo. To understand why this conflict got so stuck, we must look at a third kind of ignorance. This type doesn’t come from a lack of knowledge; instead, it comes from resisting knowledge. This willful ignorance helps explain why intelligent people sometimes reject evidence. Let us pause Galileo’s story here to explore this crucial concept, which will shed new light on his confrontation with the Inquisition.
Ironically, modern cosmology has moved beyond both Galileo’s and the Church’s views. The heliocentric model works well for our solar system. However, discoveries like the cosmic microwave background suggest the universe has no center at all. Heliocentrism explains our solar system accurately, but not the entire cosmos.
Stepping Deeper into Ignorance
Willful Ignorance
Willful ignorance happens when someone knows a truth but chooses to ignore it. We see this often in daily life. You might avoid asking a friend for honest feedback about yourself. Parents may ignore signs of their teen’s complex social life outside the home.
Instead of criticizing willful ignorance, we should understand its protective role. It shields us from outcomes we fear. I might avoid honest feedback because I fear feeling hurt. Parents might avoid digging deeper because they fear the urge to control their teen’s social choices. The drive to remain willfully ignorant often stems from good intentions. It protects us from discomfort, conflict, or loss of control.[3]
In personal relationships, willful ignorance causes limited harm. But in the public sphere, it can distort complex social issues. For example, right-to-life advocates might claim science proves personhood begins at conception. But this misunderstands science. The concepts of personhood and life still lack clear scientific definition. When advocates claim scientific backing for views on personhood, they likely engage in willful ignorance. This applies equally to those supporting abortion rights. Both positions stem from personal or moral beliefs rather than scientific facts.
Willful ignorance is often adaptive, but it can become dangerous when used by in-groups to antagonize out-groups. Political oppression and war often involve willful ignorance. Those perpetrating such harmful actions often exhibit a form of calculated obliviousness. They may, on some level, see the harm they cause. But they fail to fully confront or internalize the consequences of their actions. They limit their empathy, stopping short of genuine solidarity. This partial empathy lets them compartmentalize their feelings and continue behaving in ways that may be detrimental to others. Willful ignorance is often regarded as morally justified within the in-group’s belief system. It can be necessary to perpetrate an injustice to redress a greater injustice.
A particularly dangerous form of willful ignorance is unlawful obedience to authority. After World War II, the Nuremberg trials established a legal principle: "following orders" is not a defense for war crimes. This principle stresses individual responsibility. It obliges us to disobey unlawful commands. Yet, the inclination to obey is strong. Between 1961 and 1965, psychologist Stanley Milgram ran experiments at Yale University. He tested how far people would go in obeying authority. An authority figure (who was an actor) told participants to administer electric shocks to another person (also an actor). The shocks increased in intensity, supposedly becoming painful and posing a risk of death. Many participants continued to obey the experimenter, despite believing they were causing severe harm.[4] These experiments revealed the powerful influence of authority on people.
The U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice tries to address unlawful orders. It requires obedience to lawful commands and disobedience to unlawful ones. This principle has been applied in some high-profile cases. A court convicted Lt. William Calley for his role in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. He led about a hundred American soldiers to massacre hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. But the application of this principle has not been consistent. For example, evidence of U.S. involvement in torture, as revealed by WikiLeaks, has resulted in few indictments.
Willful ignorance may bring some comfort in personal relationships. But it is often destructive in larger contexts. Calculated ignorance has contributed to some of humanity’s darkest moments. This dynamic persists today. People deny historical atrocities or ignore systemic injustice. The choice to exercise willful ignorance is not a personal failing, but it is a civic one that threatens our collective future. To create a more just society, we must confront uncomfortable truths.
While willful ignorance involves choosing not to know, higher ignorance represents a more sophisticated relationship with the limits of knowledge.
Higher Ignorance
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) was a talented polymath. He was an astronomer, mathematician, theologian, and philosopher. He is often regarded as the most brilliant mind of the fifteenth century. Nicholas described an aspect of higher ignorance with typical elegance: “Every inquiry proceeds by means of a comparative relation,” he writes, “whether an easy or a difficult one. Hence, the infinite, qua infinite, is unknown; for it escapes all comparative relation.”[5] By “comparative relation,” Nicholas refers to the manner in which one finite thing can relate to another. No matter how many of these relations we perceive, they will never add up to the infinite. Thus, our ignorance of what things truly are. Truth, after all, is not only infinite, “but is something indivisible. . . . Hence, the intellect, which is not truth, never comprehends truth so precisely that truth cannot be comprehended infinitely more precisely.” No matter how many truths we may accumulate, our knowledge falls infinitely short.
In a New Testament verse, the Apostle Paul tells unbelievers on the Areopagus in Athens that his God is that one “in whom we live and move and have our being.” We cannot view this God from without. We can only know it through our partial experience of it. In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a character spoke of a letter addressed to “Jane Crofutt; The Crofutt Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; the United States of America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.”[6] Everything has an address somewhere within the universe, except for the universe itself. Where, after all, is the mind of God? At first, the Crofutt farm seems to have a place in the settled order of things. It is a tangible and material reality. But, when we learn that the universe has an unknown location, we can’t say where the farm really is. Wilder makes this point by examining the vast context that surrounds us.
Nicholas sought to show that higher ignorance is not the kind of unknowing that we are born with. Neither is it the same as Socrates' ironic claim to ignorance. That was a pedagogical trick to lead others into dead ends or contradictions. It was a kind of willful ignorance. Nor is it the common truism that the more we know, the more we see what we do not know. This is a form of ordinary ignorance. Higher ignorance is to discern the boundaries of knowledge. In Nicholas of Cusa’s book, the Latin word docta in the title De Docta Ignorantia is a variation on the Greek doxa, or teaching.
People can understand higher ignorance as a process of awakening. The more we are aware of the limitations of our knowledge, the more awake we are to the world’s enormous varieties. At the risk of stretching the metaphor too far, ordinary ignorance is a sleep that does not know itself as sleep. The willfully ignorant are awake. But, they pretend to sleep. In the case of Nicholas’s learned ignorance, they are awake and know it, but they can’t shake off their drowsiness.
In 1931, nearly five centuries later, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems expressed a similar idea in mathematics. The first incompleteness theorem states that, for any consistent formal system that can encode basic arithmetic, there will always be true statements that are unprovable within the system. This result echoed Nicholas’s reasoned argument. Nicholas argued that our finite comparisons can never capture the infinite. Gödel proved that no finite set of axioms can fully describe an infinite structure, like the natural numbers. Both thinkers, in their respective fields, argued that our quest for knowledge, no matter how advanced, will always face limits.
Nicholas provided a convenient lens by calling out the symbiosis of learning and ignorance. Looking through this lens, we can identify a wide variety of references to higher ignorance in every age and tradition:
The Roman philosopher Plotinus spoke of the real as One. To observe it, we must be separate from it. But, to be separate from the One is to pluralize it. In that case, we are not observing the One. Plotinus, though a pagan, had a strong impact on medieval thought and especially on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote, "To know God, they often said, is to be God; therefore, not being God, all things divine remain forever hidden from us."
Kant taught that since we cannot know a thing as it is in itself, the ultimate nature of the world is inaccessible to the rational mind.
Nietzsche scoffed at the idea of objective knowledge. He declared that it was only the result of creative thinkers and not a representation of anything.
Heidegger identified the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and remarked that this question is unanswerable.
In Freud’s psychological model, the id is a reservoir of instinctive thoughts and desires that are largely beyond the reach of introspection. If we believe Freud’s model, our self-understanding will always be limited.
Higher ignorance has its most natural home in religion. Enlightenment for the Buddha, for example, is impossible without the temporary pause of the speculative mind. Even then, once achieved, the elevation to ever higher levels of purified mindfulness never ends. Brahman, the sublime deity of Hinduism, transcends definition, as one can only say it is “not this and not that” (neti neti). According to the Tao Te Ching, life is a journey that stops nowhere and is of no permanence. The repeated phrase of Muslims, “by the will of Allah,” reflects an awareness that there is no predicting what that will be. The rabbinical tradition in Judaism is a discourse of many thousands of voices, but a discourse in which no one has the final word.
Reflections on Galileo
Now let’s apply these ideas about different types of ignorance to Galileo’s life. By examining his discoveries and the reactions to them, we can see clear examples of ordinary, willful, and higher ignorance in action.
Galileo aimed his life work at eliminating ordinary ignorance, and he made considerable progress. He solved long-standing questions and found new aspects of reality that no one had thought to investigate before. He explored how objects of different weights displace water. He also calculated the speed of falling objects at different points in their descent.[7]
From Galileo’s perspective, the pope and his inquisitors displayed a very different kind of ignorance. They understood Galileo’s experiments. But, they chose not to engage with his discoveries. After discovering Jupiter’s moons, he invited his skeptical colleagues at the University of Padua to look through his telescope. Some of them refused outright. They knew that their hard-won, Aristotelian view of the world was at stake. Some looked but incredibly reported that they saw no moons. Galileo made no secret of his discoveries. He published his calculations. The phenomena he described were in plain view. If they were not noticed, it can only be that the viewer chose to ignore them, despite looking directly at them. How else to describe this but as an act of willful ignorance?
Galileo presented most of his important theories in a dialogue. It was between three characters. Two of them, Salviati and Sangredo, were actual persons, recently deceased. The third, Simplicio, a kind of fictional naif, who never quite understood what was being discussed. The pope believed that Simplicio was a caricature of His Eminence. But it is more likely that he was a voice of Galileo’s own, as Socrates was for Plato. At one point Simplicio sighs, “When shall I cease from wondering?” Giorgio de Santillana, in his brilliant study of Galileo’s life and thought, suggested that this could be a motto for all of his work.[8] In other words, if it were not for Simplicio’s willful ignorance, these famous dialogues could not have been written. Galileo’s inquisitors, on the other hand, were not inquisitive. The church felt threatened and had to defend its authority at any cost.
Galileo’s questioning did not cease with his abjuration. Even after confinement to his farm in the Tuscan hills, he wrote what many consider his most important work, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning the Two New Sciences. Authorities condemned and often burned all his works in public. But he managed to smuggle the new book to Leyden, where it was published in 1638, three years before his death.
How significant and enduring was the historical impact of these events? History has not forgotten Galileo’s condemnation by Urban VIII but it has all but forgotten Urban VIII. During his time, the pope wielded great earthly power. For twenty years of his papacy, he was a key force in the Thirty Years' War. Like most wars, it was ideologically driven, unnecessary, and exceedingly destructive to all sides. It was a war of believer against believer. The pope’s effect on his enemies was enormous. Galileo, with no legions of his own, had but a negligible effect on the pope. But his effect on the history of civilization cannot be exaggerated.
True believers, unmoderated by higher ignorance, continue to wreak havoc in the 20th and 21st centuries. The power of belief now exceeds the darkest fantasies of the 17th-century church. Belief systems (or ideologies) held with fervor in our own age have had, and continue to have, horrors unimaginable to Galileo’s contemporaries. His inquisitors were not exactly suicide bombers, but they held their views with similar intensity. The recommended treatment for unbelievers was torture, long imprisonment in appalling conditions, and death by the most painful means possible. This punishment applied for even slight deviations from orthodoxy. (In Galileo’s youth, the Inquisition burned the great philosopher Giordano Bruno in Rome for his heretical ideas. Galileo could have witnessed it.) The pope’s Thirty Years War was a horror. But it pales next to Stalin’s starvation of the kulaks, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the Holocaust. For true believers, it is a short distance from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first.
As Galileo’s story reveals, those who possess higher ignorance—an awareness of what they cannot know—often find themselves at odds with those who hold beliefs with strong conviction. But what is the best way to respond? To understand why adamant beliefs can lead to such destruction, we must examine belief itself more closely. What drives humans to cling so tightly to ideas that they would die or kill for them? What structures develop around these convictions? In the next chapter, we will explore how belief systems form, function, and defend themselves against challenges—including the challenge of higher ignorance that might otherwise temper their certainties.
References
[anselm] A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, tr. Eugene R. Fairweather (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1956).
[augustine] Confessions, tr. Garry Wills (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).
[bainton1950] Bainton, R. H. (1950). Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Abbingdon-Cokesbury Press.
[barton1925] Barton, B. (1925). The Man Nobody Knows. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
[becker2022] Becker, P. & Jipson, A. (2022). Replacement theory isn’t new – 3 things to know about how this once-fringe conspiracy has become more mainstream. Retrieved November 22, 2024, from https://theconversation.com/replacement-theory-isnt-new-3-things-to-know-about-how-this-once-fringe-conspiracy-has-become-more-mainstream-183492
[bushman1999] Claudia Lauper Bushman and Richard Lyman Bushman, Building the Kingdom: A History of Mormons in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
[cox1995] Cox, H. (1995). Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century. Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley.
[crossan1992] Crossan, J. D. (1992). The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant. San Francisco: HarperOne.
[cusa1990] Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, tr. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: A. J. Banning Press, 1990), I, 1, 10.
[dawkins2006] Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion. Black Swan.
[desantillana1955] de Santillana, G. (1955). The Crime of Galileo. University of Chicago Press.
[douthat2025] Douthat, R. (2025). Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Zondervan.
[durkheim1995] Durkheim, E. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
[edwards1999] Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeney, eds., The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
[eliade1958] Eliade, M. (1958). Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York.
[fredriksen1988] Fredriksen, P. (1988). From Jesus to Christ. New Haven: Yale University Press.
[froese2004] Froese, P. (2004). Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 43(1).
[gandhi1962] Gandhi, M. (1962). All Religions Are True. Bombay: Baratiya Vidya Bhavan.
[givens2002] Terryl L. Givens’s By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[harris2004] Harris, S. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. W. W. Norton.
[haskins2009] Haskins, Ekaterina V. "Russia’s postcommunist past: the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the reimagining of national identity." History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past 21.1 (2009).
[heschel2010] Heschel, S. (2010). The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press.
[johnson1996] Johnson, L. T. (1996). The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. San Francisco: Harper One.
[johnson2012] Johnson, T. M. (2012). "Christian Martyrdom: A global demographic assessment", p. 4, https://web.archive.org/web/20160303220215/http://icl.nd.edu/assets/84231/the_demographics_of_christian_martyrdom_todd_johnson.pdf
[kant] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trs. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
[kierkegaard] Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941)
[kriner2022] Kriner, M., Conroy, M., Newhouse, A., & Lewis, J. (2022). Understanding Accelerationist Narratives: The Great Replacement Theory. Retrieved November 22, 2024, from https://gnet-research.org/2022/05/30/understanding-accelerationist-narratives-the-great-replacement-theory/
[lindsey1970] Lindsey, H. (1970). The Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
[machamer1998] Machamer, P. (1998). The Complete Companion to Galileo. Cambridge University Press.
[michalson1985] Michalson, G. E. (1985). Lessing’s “Ugly Ditch”. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
[milgram2005] Milgram, S. (2005). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Pinter & Martin Ltd.
[millgram2015] Millgram, E. (2015). The great endarkenment: Philosophy for an age of hyperspecialization. Oxford University Press.
[nelson2009] Nelson, J. M. (2009). Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. Springer. ISBN 978-0387875729
[nickerson1998] Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.
[noah2019] Noah, T. (2019). Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. One World.
[otto1928] Otto, R., tr. John Harvey, Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928).
[patton2000] Patton, K. C. & Ray, B. C., eds. (2000). A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[peters2007] Peters, F. (2007). The Voice, the Word, the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[plato] The Portable Plato, tr. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Viking, 1957).
[prothero2004] Prothero, S. (2004). American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[rauschenbusch1917] Rauschenbusch, W. (1917). A Theology for the Social Gospel. New York: Macmillan.
[reston1998] James Reston Jr., Galileo: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
[rosemont2001] Rosemont, H. Jr. (2001). Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World’s Spiritual Traditions. New York: Columbia University Press.
[sanders1996] Sanders, E. P. (1996). The Historical Figure of Jesus. Penguin Books.
[sapolsky2023] Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Penguin Press.
[schwartz2021] Schwartz, R. (2021). No Bad Parts. Sounds True Adult.
[schweitzers] Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Faschung (Tübingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1913)
[sharp2012] Sharp, G. (2012). From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. The New Press.
[tan2015] Tan, S. Y., & Tatsumura, Y. (2015). Alexander Fleming (1881-1955): Discoverer of penicillin. Singapore Medical Journal, 56(7), 366–367.
[tillich1953] Tillich, P. (1953). The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press.
[tylor1994] Tylor, E. (1994). Primitive Culture. London: Routledge.
[vail2003] Vail, T. (2003). Grand Canyon: A Different View. Master Books.
[van-leeuwen2014] Van Leeuwen, N. (2014). Religious credence is not factual belief. Cognition, 133(3), 698-715.
[wilder2020] Wilder, T. (2020). Three Plays: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
[white2002] Ronald C. White’s Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
[whitehead1927] Whitehead, A. N. (1927). Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan.