Near the beginning of the story, an old physicist has a conversation with his nephew and comments, “Do you ever wonder… about the questions we can’t ask?”
“Can’t answer, you mean?” the boy responds.
The physicist then points to the boy’s dog and explains that the dog is healthy, alert and a good exemplar of his species. He can make sense of a lot of things in his world. But would a dog ever ask questions about the nature of the universe? So the physicist uncle goes on:
“We’re sitting here,” Stern said, “asking spectacular questions, you and I. About the universe and how it began. About everything that exists. And if we can ask a question, probably sooner or later, we can answer it. So we assume there’s no limit to knowledge. But maybe your dog makes the same mistake! He doesn’t know what lies beyond the neighborhood, but if he found himself in a strange place he would approach it with the tools of comprehension available to him, and soon he would understand it–dog-fashion, by sight and smell and so on. There are no limits to his comprehension, Howard, except the limits he does not and cannot ever experience. So how different are we?….We can ask many, many more questions than your dog. And we can answer them. But if there are real limits on our comprehension, they would be as invisible to us as they are to Albert. So: Is there anything in the universe we simply cannot know? Is there a question we can’t ask? And would we ever encounter some hint of it, some intimation of the mystery? Or is it permanently beyond our grasp?”
It is an interesting thought being expressed by the author through the words of the physicist and it is a thought that is important in the overall plot of the novel. It is both a humbling and a mind-boggling sort of question. As I pondered the question as a theologian, I gradually came to the conclusion that my answer to the fictional physicist is “no.” I do not believe that there are any questions we can’t ask.
Certainly, there are questions that we can’t ask just now. But that’s different than thinking that there are permanent blind spots that will remain forever impossible for us to ask. A hundred years ago, no one would ask, “do you suppose I can install the game Angry Birds on my new cellphone?” But today, that’s a not unremarkable query.
There are several things that a hundred years ago simply didn’t exist to allow the formation of such a question. There are also the more theoretical inquiries that we make so easily today, that our ancestors wouldn’t have even thought of. A hundred years ago, no one would have asked “what is the mass of the Higgs Boson?” Or, “can we find a way of unifying quantum and relativistic physics?” Doubtless, there are similar sorts of questions we can’t ask today because they concern things we have yet to conceive. But someday, the questions will come. They are not forever unaskable.
On Saturday, November 26, 2011 NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, toward Mars. It landed on the Red Planet on August 6, 2012. The one ton rover, the size of a car, was designed to answer many questions that we have about that planet. But, as with all such new instruments, it has raised many new questions: questions that at the time it was launched we didn’t know we needed to ask.
Simply because we don’t have a question yet, doesn’t mean we will never have it. From a theological perspective, this is abundantly clear. In Genesis 11, just before the Tower of Babel incident when God confused the language of the people and scattered them, he commented, “If as one people they have begun to do this, then nothing they imagine to do will be impossible for them.”
Even earlier in Genesis, God announced that humanity had been created in his own image and likeness. That is, God designed humanity to be like him. Later, in the New Testament Paul discusses the “deep things of God” in his first letter to the Corinthian Church; he eventually concludes that people can “have the mind of Christ”—that is, the mind of God (1 Corinthians 2:16).
Since the Bible seems to affirm that God knows everything, theologians generally believe that there are no questions God can’t ask. Therefore, if humanity has been created in his image and likeness, it would seem to follow that nothing—no questions—are beyond the capabilities of the human race. Those who complain that human beings are daring to play God miss the remarkable reality that “playing God” is apparently precisely what God intended of the human race. He made us to be like him.
It is a scary thing, perhaps, to realize that humanity might be unlimited—except by God and our own bad choices. There are no questions we can’t ask.