Brilliant Insights Vs Questions Without Answers Poem by gershon hepner

Far more important than are brilliant insights
are skills that help in a dialogue,
bringing down to earth the fancy flights
that float above men's heads in clouds whose fog
can't be dispersed by brilliant suggestions,
even when the insights they contain are new.
Dispersal is dependant on the questions
men ask, with precedence awarded to
awareness that attention must be paid
to those who aren't retreaters but advancers
of the cause of truth when they evade
no questions just because they don't have answers.

In the essay section of the NYTBR of 3/25/12 Philip Kitcher, John Dewey professor of philosophy at Columbia University, discusses Leon Wieseltier's selection The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, by Alex Rosenberg, as the 'worst book' of 2011:

The evangelical scientism of 'The Atheist's Guide' rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too) : Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are. Physics, in other words, is 'the whole truth about reality'; we should achieve 'a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans'; and neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions 'inescapable.' Morality, purpose and the quaint conceit of an enduring self all have to go.
The conclusions are premature. Although microphysics can help illuminate the chemical bond and the periodic table, very little physics and chemistry can actually be done with its fundamental concepts and methods, and using it to explain life, human behavior or human society is a greater challenge still. Many informed scholars doubt the possibility, even in principle, of understanding, say, economic transactions as complex interactions of subatomic particles. Rosenberg's cheerful Darwinizing is no more convincing than his imperialist physics, and his tales about the evolutionary origins of everything from our penchant for narratives to our supposed dispositions to be nice to one another are throwbacks to the sociobiology of an earlier era, unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned: much of Rosenberg's book is evolutionary psychology on stilts. Similarly, the neuroscientific discussions serenely extrapolate from what has been carefully demonstrated for the sea slug to conclusions about Homo sapiens….
Scientism rejects dialogue: the sciences provide the answers; the lesser provinces of the intellectual and cultural world should take instruction. To be sure, well-supported messages from the sciences are sometimes foolishly ignored — think of the warnings from climate scientists about our planet's future. Yet scientism can easily prove counterproductive. However worthy the impulse to trumpet urgent news, smugness, arrogance and delight in shattering entrenched beliefs are as apt to alienate as to convert. The challenge is not to decide who has the Most Important Insights, but to comprehend the knowledge we have, finite, fallible and fragmentary as it is. We should make the most of it.
This poem was also inspired by a discussion I had with Sophie Hingst, after reading Professor Philip Kitcher's article and a day before her return to Germany prior to her starting a doctoral program in the Departments of History at Harvard and Cambridge Universities. In our discussion we agreed that the hallmark of a great scholar was his or her ability to ask great questions.

3/25/12 #9686