Like everyone else, I long to know and embrace what is true and trustworthy. Yet as I get older, I have reluctantly come to the view that I know less and believe more – not because I have lapsed into some form of credulity, but rather because much of what I once thought was knowledge now seems to be opinion or belief. It leaves us with the awkward question, which we need to confront honestly: how can we be sure that what we think we now know is not in fact simply a belief? And is the difference between them partly a matter of our location in the historical process?
But let me return to the idyll of my intellectual youth. I was studying the natural sciences at high school, and had set my heart on going to Oxford to study chemistry – in my view, the most interesting and rewarding of the sciences. I loved science partly because of my sense of wonder at the vast complexity of the natural world. I knew what Albert Einstein meant when he spoke of a “rapturous amazement”, and longed to grasp the full truth about this strange yet wonderful world in which I had been placed.
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