No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Fear is seldom wise and never kind.

As for the charge of escapism, what does escape mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?

There really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related? We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, “It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.”

This language reassures me somewhat. For if a poll-taker asked me, “Do you believe in evolution?” my answer would have to be “No.” I ought to refuse to answer at all, of course, because a meaningless question has only meaningless answers. Asking me if I believe in evolution, in change, makes about as much sense as asking if I believe in Tuesdays, or artichokes. The word evolution means change, something turning into something else. It happens all the time. The problem here is our use of the word evolution to signify the theory of evolution. This shorthand causes a mental short circuit: it sets up a false parallel between a hypothesis (concerning observed fact) and a revelation (from God, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible)—which is then reinforced by our loose use of the word believe. I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence. The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief. Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope. I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from...

It does a necessary job. It explains things that needed explaining. It leads the mind on into new realms of factual discovery and theoretical imagination. Darwin’s theory vastly enlarges our perception of reality—our always tentative knowledge. As far as we have tested it and can test it, and always subject to modification as we learn more, we can accept it as true knowledge—a great, rich, beautiful insight. Not a revealed truth, but an earned one. In the realm of the spirit, it appears that we can’t earn knowledge. We can only accept it as a gift: the gift of belief. Belief is a great word, and a believed truth too can be great and beautiful. It matters very greatly what one believes in. I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we’d avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.