Take the blue pill

An atheist asked if I would take "the blue pill." Would I take a pill that would reveal to me the "truth of the universe?"

I answered that one of the most profound things ever uttered came courtesy of one of history's famous bad guys, Pontius Pilate, when he asked, "What is truth?"

Too many people have taken socratic dialogue and platonic argument to an excessive extreme - the idea that if you simply go far enough down the deductive road, there is some master truth, the "theory of everything" as Einstein once called it (although he was speaking of a more limited theory in scope by which he hoped to unite quantum mechanics and relativity-based physics.)

However, one possibility my questioner did not consider is that there simply may not be a "theory of everything" - a one definitive truth of the universe in which all can be understood and comprehended in a few simple words or formulas.

I'd take this theoretical matrix pill - but I'd take it with the expectation, really, of knowing no more coming out of it than I did going in. Any wise person knows that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Knowing the "truth about the universe" would likely do no more than give you a vast but still limited knowledge; one raising an infinite number of questions about all the strange things and wonders you perceived at the edge of your new knowledge....