cape cod gape god

One thing that I always get caught up with is how much people mean what they say. I, for one, definitely say pretty vacuous stuff all the time for a variety of reasons but mostly because it sounds good and I don't think there's much harm in that. But sometimes I say what I think is at least glancingly contentful, so I know there's a difference and I like, I guess, exploring that difference.

The question of whether people mean what they say of course holds for loads of things, but right now I'm thinking of this one that I often hear science- and science-adjacent people trot out, something like: The more we learn the more questions we have. That rings roughly true to me in my experience trying to learn things, though maybe it's some artifact of the drive to justify future employment in investigating things. 

Do people really mean this? Maybe I'm being naive, but that kinda sounds to me like learning things has this side-effect of shrinking the ratio of what we know to what we don't. Sure, what we know probably grows absolutely (though I think this is mostly just assumed), but it seems pretty notable that people appear to be saying that learning about the world proportionally shrinks our knowledge. You'd think this would make scientists mystics generally. That's nearly how I feel myself but maybe people don't really mean it when they say it.

This idea taken seriously also seems to interact interestingly with the derided 'god of the gaps' that some talk about. My understanding of this idea is that god is taken as an explanation of the world except in areas where science offers explanation. Since science is assumed to be ever-increasing our knowledge and filling the gaps in that knowledge, god is less and less useful as an explanatory force. But if it is indeed the case that our ignorance is outpacing our knowledge, then it would seem that god explains more and more.

I think this is an interesting idea, but I think in this case it's really just that people don't mean what they say