The 'Revolution of Ignorance'

Key Insight

The Scientific Revolution, rather than being solely a revolution of knowledge, was fundamentally a 'revolution of ignorance'. Its profound genesis lay in the revolutionary discovery that humans do not, in fact, know the answers to their most important questions. This realization sharply contrasted with premodern knowledge traditions, such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucianism, which posited that all essential truths about the world had already been revealed by divine or ancestral wisdom, enshrined in sacred scriptures and oral traditions.

Premodern traditions only acknowledged two limited forms of ignorance. An individual might be ignorant of something important, but the necessary knowledge was assumed to exist and could be obtained simply by asking a wiser person; there was no need to discover anything truly unknown to the collective. Alternatively, an entire tradition might be ignorant of 'unimportant' matters; for example, a medieval peasant's question about how spiders weave webs would be deemed irrelevant because if it were vital for human salvation, God would have included it in the Bible.

Modern science, however, uniquely embraces collective ignorance regarding even the most fundamental questions. Unlike ancient prophets who claimed ultimate truth, contemporary biologists admit they lack a good explanation for consciousness, and physicists confess ignorance about the cause of the Big Bang or how to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. This open admission of what remains unknown, coupled with a willingness to continuously debate, revise, or discard theories based on new evidence, has made modern science uniquely dynamic, flexible, and inquisitive, vastly expanding human capacity to understand and shape the world.