You are arguing for the sake of the argument - and preaching to the choir. Where did I state, or even suggest that wonderment is futile?
See below. And a choirboy you may very well be, perhaps what you infer in jest is lost on me.
We cannot know. We can wonder.
That is an entirely unambiguous statement. In effect, your claim is (however concise or clever) that we are destined to wax philosophical about the nature of all things, but doomed to a meager and pauper's grasp.
This strikes me as pernicious summation of the species. The suggestion or notion that we are dim-witted fools, hapless plebs in the hands of a divine and spooky father-figure, who should be grateful for their mere existence is patently offensive and the foundation for my antitheist stance.
If "we cannot know" then we are 'created' as such, yet, the believers would tell you that
we are created in his likeness; imbued with sense, intellect and reason, yet intended to forgo their use. This singular concept (vicarious redemption being a very close second) is, without a doubt, the most egregious posit put forth by deists.
The wonderers that you list were not proven wrong, their scope was determined to be narrow. Even Einstein scoffed at blackholes. But, what did he know?
Indeed, and exactly my original point. Again, in our collective nascence, we struggle to grasp the data being given to us. Given (and in spite of) their limited tools, they made tremendous leaps in logic to postulate that their observations were conclusive - clearly contravening established dogma.
It is squarely on their foundations that the rest of us have been propelled forward. Einstein was open to the idea of black holes, he simply lacked definitive evidence for them. Ironically, this was his stance on deism, and he repeatedly claimed that lack of evidence does not mean a lack of existence -
rather that the 'leap' was simply unnecessary. Like Laplace before him, he simply knew that this model works perfectly well without divine intervention.
To be fair, black holes are something we still do not fully understand. The singularity is, in all likelihood, one of the stranger phenomena we will have to consider. It boggles the mind but I take solace in knowing that it baffled Einstein, as well.
While we don't yet fully grasp their mechanism, we will - and we will do so by omitting any notions of a celestial chimera.
