CHIEF AIM #4: the effort to keep alive our sense of wonder about the world

But there is still another. Most of us, as human beings, are naturally curious. There are certain things
which we encounter and various experiences which we have that make us wonder. Something may strike us as
odd or strange or mysterious or difficult to comprehend, for example, the vastness of space. This sense of
wonder and the desire to learn, to know to contemplate the mysteries of life and the universe have given rise to
philosophy, science, religion, art, and culture. Surely such activity makes us what we are human beings, not
mere animals. It does not matter if our wonder cannot always be satisfied. Indeed, it may be the case that our
recognition of how little we know and how much there is to learn is precisely what makes life so interesting.
In our age of science and technology, with its continuous knowledge explosion (which makes the bits of
information we learn by rote as outdated as last week's newspapers), it is important to keep this sense of wonder
alive. We must appreciate how important it is to nurture our curiosity, not just to appreciate the significance of
new breakthroughs in science but to help us recapture our sense of wonder about everyday life and experience.
All too often we tend to leave it to experts to tell us what it all means. And all too often the experts are
interested only in the practical dimensions of new discoveries in science, technology, medicine, and so on. But
this is not enough. We want to keep in touch with these developments and connect them with our own search for
meaning and understanding. We have to learn how to learn: how to adapt our beliefs and values in the presence
of continuing changes in our understanding of things. It is only by doing this that we can avoid feeling alienated
from developments in science and technology. And it is only by valuing the human need to ask basic questions
about the cosmos and our place in it that we can preserve our sense of balance and our human qualities of
curiosity and interest in the world around us.
Once again, it will be helpful to be a bit more specific. We live in an age governed by science and
technology. The knowledge we receive from the sciences is often taken to be the highest or the only form of
knowledge, capable in principle of answering all our questions and solving all our problems. Political decisions,
our educational system, our personal outlooks, and our self understanding all are governed by what has been
called scientism, or the view that science is the measure of everything. Politically, this amounts to the idea that
"'experts" must make all decisions because only they have the knowledge to do so. Should we build a neutron
bomb or more nuclear power plants? Should we engage in recombinant-DNA research and develop techniques
for applying genetics to change society? What becomes of democracy in a technological age? And what about
education? Is the only knowledge worth having connected with the sciences? Is all learning just the
memorization of isolated and all too often useless bits of information? Does this view of learning even help us
understand science and the curiosity of scientists about nature? In short, while human curiosity has given us
science, do we now live in a society in which the dominance of science actually stifles human curiosity and
creativity, and in which education is more like training than it is an adventure in ideas?
Obviously, these are complex and difficult issues; and they only scratch the surface in terms of the
impact of science and technology on our society, our educational system, our individual lives and outlooks, and
the issues of what knowledge and learning are and how best to nurture and satisfy our natural curiosity. One can
only hope that this curiosity will continue to flourish, even if this requires us to rethink our basic assumptions
about knowledge, science, and learning. So here we have another good reason for philosophizing.