Yesterday I watched the newest House episode that had the underlying message of, basically, what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you and it got me thinking, how much of what we don’t know really matters. Religion, of course, seemed like a natural adversary to go against.

I’ve often said that religion is pretty much just a cruch for the weak who can’t fend for themselves and need something to lean against in their day to day lives. Do they know god exists? No, most probably do not. Do they believe god exists? Yes, very much so. But how does this relate to far from the eyes, far from the heart? Rather easily in fact, it shows that the only thing that matters is what you believe rather than what is actually there.

Take science for example. Despite whatever scientists will tell you the fact remains we know practically nothing about how nature works. We have many functional models of nature of course, everything ranging from gravity to the laws of thermodynamics is just a model we’ve found that works and thus helps us understand nature. The ones we haven’t blundered upon a counter-example yet and are pretty certain work in all cases are called laws and the rest are theories, some are even far from proven hypothesis. We don’t know if what we observed and calculated is the truth, but we do know that it works and useful to us, so what the hell does the truth matter?

In the case of hypothesis it gets even more interesting because you get a bunch of scientists defending one unproven and untested hypothesis and another bunch defending another unproven and untested hypothesis. Usually these groups then engage in various kinds of flamewars and go to great lengths to prove their favourite – sometimes even making leaps of logic and raging assumptions to hint at the possibility of provedness. But, isn’t that rather much how their arch nemesis behave? You know, the religious freaks? The answer is yes, theoretical scientists are nothing more than religious nuts passing their ideas off as hard science.

All of this gets a little more difficult when it comes to personal relations wherein even something you don’t know has the potential of affecting you in one manner or another. Be it that your spouse is a cheater and even though you don’t know and are happy with the relationship others might know and act differently towards you – the pussywhipped man, or a miriad of other possibilities. There’s also the thing about emotions and honour that intertwines with these things making everything even the more complex.

Anyhow,a person can be very happy and successful even when they don’t know important things, but once they do find out it can destroy their lives. Guess this is why science keeps poking at things that “work well enough” to find out if they do in fact work well enough, and spouses keep trying to find out things about each other.

Curiousity killed the cat, they say, but luckily we’re not cats.

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