Passed to me the other day was this choice quote found in an article on a MMO currently in development:
Ragnar Tørnquist, the lead developer lamented:
“I also think that the Western world has lost the sense of religious mystery too. People knew there was something bigger, but they didn’t question it. Now we question everything, and everything has been reduced to facts or data.”
Cue needle scratching on record.
What?
This quote exemplifies muddled thinking. Moreover, that this phrase was uttered, as if in resignation that people bothered to question how stuff works, boggles the damn mind.
Show me a time in human history when, even under the threat of death, that people haven’t questioned things.
As for the whining that everything has been reduced to facts or data: Ragnar, perhaps you missed the part where the computers and Internet upon which you make your money is the direct result of questioning, of facts, and data. Has that reduced the awe behind computing? Has that, in turn, failed to produce even more wonders and mysteries to be explored?
Questioning everything and reducing it to facts and data is what allows us to build bigger and better things like the Hubble telescope which captures those amazing deep field shots. Look at that image and tell me there isn’t more mystery to be found there than in any millennia-old story that could scribbled down and passed off as religion. In all those stars and galaxies we’re looking at billions of possibilities.
A plague of locusts pales before the devastating power of a supernova. The ability to measure galaxies and send probes into the heliosphere takes us places never before imagined by people who considered themselves separated from the cosmos by a luminiferous ether.
In short, purposely not questioning something in order to retain some sort of mystery is downright the most asinine thing I’ve heard this week.
