"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Too bad the Church didn't feel the same way. Poor Galileo was convicted of heresy and put under house arrest for the rest of his life - all because he had the outrageous audacity to suggest that the sun does not revolve around the Earth.
The Bible - which was written many centuries before even the telescope was invented - implied that the Earth was at the center of the whole universe. And the Church believed the innocent scientific ignorance of this ancient book of myths as the Absolute Truth. So that was that. Galileo, one of the most brilliant thinkers in history, was dismissed as nothing but a simple heretic.
That's the trouble with religion: it always requires you to forgo sense, reason, and intellect. This practice of forgoing rational thought is called faith, which is a euphimism for stupidity and is a prerequisite for all religious thinking.
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To be wise, observe; for observation is the source of wisdom.
"A wonderful, maaaagical animal!"
To be wise, observe; for observation is the source of wisdom.
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Why the learned pig?
In early 19th-century America, a certain traveling show featured a remarkable pig that, on command, could spell out letters to form words. This "pig of knowledge", or "learned pig", baffled superstitious mobs, and excited frenzied accusations of witchcraft. In response, the pig's trainer published a pamphlet that sought to dispel the rumors by detailing his methods of instruction, and demonstrating that this apparent miracle could be accounted for through reason and observation alone.
Tacitus once wrote, "everything unknown passes for something splendid." Humans by nature desire to know, and when they encounter something seemingly inexplicable, they tend to fill in the holes with religion, superstition, or inane anti-intellectualism that dismisses the need for knowledge altogether. But these are cowardly subsitutes for reason and observation. The learned pig reminds us that if we wish to be wise, "observe; for observation is the source of wisdom."
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