Ignorance & Awe
Scripture
Isaiah 40:26
“Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.”
Psalm 8
1 LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
2 Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
5 You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
7 all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
8 the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
9 LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Ecclesiastes 3:11
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the human heart;
yet no one can fathom
what God has done from beginning to end.”
Hot text
The following quotes come from a podcast series called ‘The Long History of Ignorance’ by former British MP Rory Stewart. In this wonderfully thoughtful and short series, Stewart celebrates ignorance. He argues that we flatter ourselves when we say know so much: about science, medicine, technology and even the psychology of the human mind.
Knowledge gives us so much power that we forget the opposite is true.
“Ignorance is the central overwhelming fact of life. We know far less than we don’t. The philosopher, Brian McGee, evokes what it is like to move about in a world that we can never fully classify or know.
‘Take a simple and every day experience as the sight of a towel dropped on a bathroom floor. Is inaccessible to language. And inaccessible to it from many points of view at the same time. No words to describe the shape it has fallen into. No words to describe the degrees of shading in its colours. No words to describe the differentials of shadows and its folds. No words to describe its spatial relationship to all the other objects in the bathroom.
And even our focus on that towel is only shining a weak and narrow beam of light into a universe, of which we can see and describe even less.’
“Our science is a drop. Our ignorance, a sea.”
Sermon
If I tell you’re ignorant, is that insulting?
What’s something you don’t know or don’t understand?
In that Hot text we’re reminded that ignorance isn’t an insult - it’s really our state of being. We know so little about the universe and each other.
But that’s not what we normally think about ignorance. We prize knowledge, facts and understanding. We are children of the Enlightenment - science and progress will eventually tell us everything about the world. There’d certainly be no need for religion or magic or even God.
Biology? Well that’s just molecules interacting. Thoughts and feelings? That’s just chemistry. The mind? Just a brain firing on all synapses. Love? Pheromones and cortisol.
This sort of reductionist thinking is a horrible idea but it’s also tempting to think it may be true. Just because we want there to be poetry, love and meaning in universe does mean there is. We must invent it to comfort ourselves, right?
I think that idea is common but actually I think it’s less common than it used to be. It’s certainly going our of fashion in scientific and philosophical circles.
Two ideas to share from science.
The first is about the brain. Has anyone heard of Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary?
He talks about two hemispheres:
The right hemisphere (“The Master”) - comprehension
Grasping broad, contextual understanding.
Integrating experiences.
Appreciating metaphor, music, and empathy.
Engaging with the world as a living whole.
Left Hemisphere (“The Emissary”) - apprehension
Narrow focus, abstraction, categorization.
Analysis and manipulation of isolated elements.
Creating maps and models of reality, often substituting them for reality itself.
Our society is dominated by the left brain - especially scientific and technology: reductionist, definitional and numeric. It’s about apprehending the world. It’s managerial: ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it’.
The problem is that some of the best things in life can’t be measured in such terms. How do you measure friendship? The touch of wool on your finger tips? How do you measure a good meal? I suppose you could reduce all those things metrics - the colour blue after is a measured on the electromagnetic spectrum. “Your eyes my darling they’re such a piercing 380 to 500 nanometres in wavelength”.
According to Gilchtist, the dominance of the left brain this robs us of poetry, awe, meaning. It’s a mistake. We’re only using half our brain.
For most of human history humans have looked up at the stars and felt awe—an intuition that this universe is not a cold machine but the handiwork of a Creator. In our age, science has given us extraordinary tools to explore reality, yet some of its most careful thinkers are rediscovering the mystery that faith has always proclaimed: the primacy of consciousness, the centrality of meaning, the irreducible depth of being.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls this the hard problem of consciousness—the fact that no matter how much we explain the workings of the brain, we still cannot explain why there is something it is like to be. Why you and I are not just bundles of chemistry but living souls who feel joy and sorrow, love and longing.
And psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist takes this further. He argues that consciousness is not a latecomer, an accidental byproduct of matter. Instead, it is the very foundation of our experience. Matter arises within consciousness, not the other way around.
This is not theology spoken in church; it is science and philosophy in the lab and the library. And yet, when we listen carefully, it sounds like an echo of our oldest scriptures:
“In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
“In Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)
What these thinkers remind us is that meaning is woven into the fabric of reality. That love and beauty are not illusions or mere survival strategies. That our consciousness, our capacity to care, our yearning for justice—these are signs that the universe is more like a mind, more like a heart, than like a machine.
And if that is so, then it is reasonable—indeed, it is hopeful—to believe that behind and within all things is a Presence who knows us, who calls us by name, and who is love itself.
We do not need to fear that science has taken God away. On the contrary, science, when it is honest about the limits of its tools, leads us back to wonder. It leads us to humility. And humility is the beginning of wisdom.
So today, let us give thanks:
For the gift of consciousness.
For the capacity to love and to know.
For the minds that dare to ask the hardest questions.
And let us remember that the vastness of the heavens, the mystery of our own awareness, and the promise of God’s love are not enemies, but companions pointing us toward the same truth:
That we are fearfully and wonderfully made,
That we are known,
That we are loved.
May this faith sustain us,
May it inspire us,
And may it call us to live lives worthy of the miracle of being.
Amen.
Iain McGilchrist Videos
https://channelmcgilchrist.com/free-videos/
Chat GPT responses
🧠 Chalmers and the Hard Problem
Let me begin with David Chalmers, one of the leading philosophers of mind in our time. In the 1990s, Chalmers proposed a distinction that is now famous:
The easy problems of consciousness involve explaining how the brain processes information—how it perceives, remembers, and reacts. These are “easy” because, given time and research, we can expect to build models of them.
But the hard problem is altogether different. It asks why any of these processes should be accompanied by subjective experience—by the feeling of being.
In other words:
“Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?”
Chalmers argues that no account of brain mechanisms—no matter how complete—can ever fully explain why you feel sadness when you lose someone you love, or why you feel awe when you look up at the stars.
🌿 McGilchrist and the Primacy of Consciousness
Another voice we must consider is Dr. Ian McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and thinker who spent decades studying how our brains relate to our experience of the world.
McGilchrist goes further still. He suggests that consciousness is not an afterthought, not a late product of evolution, but something foundational. As he puts it:
“Consciousness does not arise from matter, but matter arises within consciousness.”
He argues that our culture has become dominated by what he calls the “left hemisphere” mode of thinking: the analytic, reductive, abstract mindset. This way of seeing has given us great technological power, but it has also left us spiritually impoverished—unable to recognize the mystery and sacredness of being itself.
McGilchrist challenges us to remember that everything we know of the world comes to us through the medium of consciousness. If we ignore this, if we pretend that experience itself is an illusion or an accidental byproduct of neurons, we lose the very ground beneath our feet.
⚙️ Materialist Responses: Dennett and Dawkins
Not everyone agrees with Chalmers and McGilchrist. Prominent thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett take a very different view.
Richard Dawkins argues that natural selection and genetic competition explain all aspects of life, including the emergence of consciousness. In his view, the feeling that our minds are special is simply a byproduct of evolutionary processes.
Daniel Dennett goes further. He suggests that consciousness is an illusion, or at least, no more mysterious than digestion or respiration. He says:
“There is no such thing as the hard problem.”
According to Dennett, if we fully explain the brain’s functions and information processing, we have explained everything worth explaining. There is nothing left over—no secret ingredient called “qualia.”
🧩 The Explanatory Gap
Yet, here is the difficulty. Even materialists must admit there is something peculiar about consciousness. It is the only thing that is immediately real to us. You can doubt everything else—whether the world exists, whether your body is really there—but you cannot doubt that you are experiencing something.
Chalmers calls this the explanatory gap—the chasm between objective descriptions of brain processes and the subjective reality of feeling and awareness. McGilchrist insists this gap is unbridgeable if we cling to the idea that the universe is nothing but matter.
In other words: the very existence of your consciousness is a sign that there is something about reality deeper than mechanism.
✨ From Consciousness to God
This is where we take the step toward faith.
If consciousness is not reducible to atoms in motion, then we have reason to ask: What is the source of this awareness? What is the ground of being that makes our experience possible?
If consciousness is fundamental, relational, purposeful—then reality itself is more like a mind than a machine. And if it is more like a mind, then it is not absurd to call it God.
This is not a “God of the gaps”—not an attempt to plug holes in our knowledge with superstition. It is a recognition that the most basic fact of our existence—our awareness—requires an explanation beyond material causes.
As McGilchrist writes:
“The universe is not best conceived as a machine, but as something more akin to a mind.”
And the Christian faith proclaims that this Mind is not a cold intelligence, but a heart of love. The Gospel of John tells us:
“In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God.”
The word “Logos” means reason, meaning, consciousness. The Source of everything is not blind chance or mechanism, but a creative, purposeful, loving reality.
💫 Faith and Humility
This does not mean that science is our enemy. Science is a gift—an expression of our God-given capacity to understand and steward creation. But science alone cannot tell us why we love, why beauty moves us to tears, why we yearn for justice.
Those things belong to the realm of meaning, and meaning is a signpost pointing beyond itself.
🌌 Conclusion
So when you look up at the night sky and feel small, remember that this very feeling—this sense of awe—cannot be explained away. It is the echo of the Spirit speaking in your heart. It is a sign that you are not an accident, but a creature made in the image of the One who is love.
Let us then be humble before the mystery of consciousness. Let us be open to the possibility that our experience of life is a window into something eternal. And let us have the courage to believe that the Source of all being has a face—and that face is turned toward us with compassion.
Amen.