The Courage to Say "I Do Not Know!"

Perhaps all of us have been embarrassed when we have been asked questions we could not answer. But we need not be, necessarily, because anyone can ask questions that no one can answer. And very often the best answer is the frank admission that we don’t know. Surely there are many times when it would be better to say this than it would be to fumble in confusion. If we admit we don’t know, our frankness may increase the confidence of others in us, but if we pretend we do when we don’t, it doesn’t take long for others to discover it, and their confidence drops accordingly. This isn’t true only with adults; it is true also with children. Children discern, often without knowing why, when an adult is speaking beyond his knowledge. And so they sometimes lose confidence in their advisers and teachers; for, having found them unreliable in some ways they may hesitate to heed them in other ways. Of course there are many things we don’t know. It is obviously so because much is continually being revealed, because men are continually making discoveries. And if we knew everything in the present, the zest for the future, the beckoning urge of immortality and eternal progress would lose much that makes them now eagerly anticipated. We may be helpful in stating what we do know, in teaching the moral verities, in restating the time-tested truths, in speaking from our experience, in speculating as to possibilities, in reasoning from the known to the unknown, and in voicing our convictions⎯but beyond what the Lord God has revealed and beyond what man for certain discovered, we would scarcely be justified in making dogmatic declarations, when what we really are doing is proffering opinions. Surely the courage to say, “I do not know,” and the good sense to say it would clear the atmosphere many times and in many places where otherwise misused misinformation might waste much time and destroy much confidence.