Penn Jillette – I don’t know, so I’m an atheist libertarian:
My friend Richard Feynman said, “I don’t know.” I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill’s Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
“I don’t know” is not an apology. There’s no shame. It’s a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn’t know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn’t know, he said, “I don’t know.”
I like to think I fit in somewhere between my friends Harold and Richard. I don’t know. I try to remember to say “I don’t know” just the way they both did, as a simple statement of fact. It doesn’t always work, but I try.
I’m a Feynman fan. I like his idea that part of the freedom of science is the freedom to be wrong and the freedom to not have all the answers. A good science education should teach you that there’s a lot we don’t know.
In college I worked at a local nature center. We’d take school kids on tours and show them plants and things. During the training we were told that kids will ask a lot of questions, some of them unexpected. We were told if were asked a question we couldn’t answer we shouldn’t feel like we had to make up something or guess. It was OK to say “I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out.”
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I don’t know either, but I find Catholocism more comforting in my ignorance than atheism. Og can probably explain it to me, but I’m not smart enough to follow his explanation.
Funny, thanks for posting this. I surely agree with Penn’s conclusions, but I get there a different way. In a twist, I am a libertarian because of what the Bible tells me about human kind, and about God.
Penn Jillette writes, “I don’t believe the majority always knows what’s best for everyone.” This statement is a premise he accepts; for practical purposes, he operates on this premise as a truth–something he “knows.” Implicit in the premise is the misunderstanding that the majority would do what is best for everyone, if it could discern what is best–that the majority means well, it just isn’t smart enough to do well.
I go one further: I don’t believe the self-anointed hold what is best for everyone dear to their hearts. I don’t believe we can trust in a fundamental goodness of the heart that does not exist and, I might add, that my observations do not confirm. Penn’s position is based on his perceived degree of wisdom among men. My position is based on the fundamental nature of all men: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Believing that and seeing it confirmed daily, I reason that there is no such collection of “the best and the brightest” that may be trusted as our benevolent dictators. In answer to “How do we solve the problems of war and poverty?” I don’t know, but I know that a chosen committee of our most ambitious fellows don’t know either.” So, I say, set the basic rules based on fundamentals (stated in Scripture) we all believe in, such as “Thou shalt not commit murder,” and “Thou shalt not steal,” punish those who do and leave the rest of us alone.
But, maybe Penn and I do agree on that point about the nature of man not being something you want to trust with your government, your property, and your life. He adds, “The fact that the majority thinks they have a way to get something good does not give them the right to use force on the minority that don’t want to pay for it.” That is a moral statement, based on Penn’s observation that one side in this great debate is real fast to resort to force–to guns–to get their way and make the rest of us obey. As he puts it, try withholding your “enforced compassion” by not paying your taxes, and watch the federal marshal eventually show up. Like Penn says, compassion is one person’s act of kindness toward another. Government is just force.