The discipline of not saying: knowledge bounded by a confession that reality exceeds our formulations, in theology and in science alike.
Apophatic restraint imports the discipline of apophatic (negative) theology into knowledge generally: a confession that the most important realities exceed our formulations, and that method must include silence about what the method cannot reach. In science it appears as principled agnosticism about ultimate questions and as resistance to premature synthesis; in ethics, as the refusal to let technical possibility define the good.
Lemaître’s refusal to baptize the Big Bang is the model’s emblematic act: the restraint of a man who had every motive to claim the synthesis and declined, because the claim would have been false to both of his disciplines.
References
- Helge Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy (1996)
- John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing (2000)