With all the pseudo-science and mystical talk swirling around this--what Carl Sagan calls--"demon-haunted" world, Feynman is one of those lonely voices of reason. Sometimes, you just wish we have somebody like him in the Philippines, to push an Enlightenment of sorts. But then again, where public conscience is shaped by fanatics at the pulpit, you can bet he'd be vilified with all the curses of Deuteronomy. You can imagine what the op-ed pages in our popular newspapers would read like.

Anyway, nice heads up, rodsky. To aid you in your objective, I suppose you may have already known there is a link for that entire transcript. Click here.

My favorite part is this bit:

If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are or where we're going or what the meaning of the universe is and so on, then I think you could easily become disillusioned and then you'd look for some mystic answers to these questions. How a scientist can take a mystic answer, I don't know, because the whole spirit is to...never mind that...I don't understand that. But anyhow, the way I think of what we're doing is, we're exploring...we're trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say to me "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world. And if it turns out there is a simple, ultimate law that explains everything, so be it. That would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is. But whatever way it comes out, it's nature, it's there and she's going to come out the way she is.

And therefore, when we go to investigate it, we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we're trying to do, except to find out more about it. The problem is, why do you find out more about it? If you thought that you were trying to find out more about it because you're going to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But I don't look at it that way. My interest in science is to simply find out about the world. And the more I find out, the better it is. I like to find out.

Now, there are very remarkable mysteries about the fact that we're able to do so many more things that apparently animals couldn't do and other questions like that. But those are mysteries I want to investigate without knowing any answer to that. And so altogether, I can't believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large, because they seem to be too simple, too local, too provincial. He came to the earth! One of the aspects of God came to the earth, mind you! And look at what's out there. It isn't in proportion. Anyway, it's no use arguing. I can't argue with it. I'm just trying to tell you why the scientific views that I have do have some effect on my belief. And also, another thing...it has to do with the question of how do you find out if something's true. And, if you have all these theories of the different religions...they have all different theories about the thing...then you begin to wonder. Once you start doubting, just like you're supposed to doubt..you asked me if science is true...I said "No, no. We don't know if that's true. We're trying to find out. Everything is possibly wrong." Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong. Let us see! As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge, which is hard to recover from.

And so, with the scientific view, or my father's view that we should look to see what's true and what may not be true...once you start doubting, which I think, to me, is a very fundamental part of my "soul"...is to doubt and to ask. And when you doubt and ask, it gets a little harder to (just) believe. You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. And on many things, I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit. If I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell...possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Happy reading!