Thought for the Day - 17 Sep 2025
Below is the transcript of my Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. But you can catch up on my Thought for the Day on BBC Sounds here.
Good morning,
Have you ever considered that… you might be… wrong?
It’s something that occurred to me while listening to this programme yesterday.. Professor Brian Cox was interviewed about his appointment to a new role at the Francis Crick Institute championing the role of science in shaping our world. He explained how scientists provide a great example to the rest of us of being open to being wrong, to having our preconceptions challenged.
Cox quoted 20th century physicist Richard P. Feynam who described science as “a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance”. For Cox, science provides a “flexibility of thought” that means you’re not upset if your worldview turns out to be wrong in some way”.
One of the markers of the polarised age we’re in is a seeming unwillingness to concede we might be wrong. So many of us are uncompromising in our views of the world; we know where we stand on immigrants, or flagwavers. We’re unable to see that these views might be shaped by echo chambers and what we’re being fed by the algorithm. When St Paul said that in this life we “see through a glass darkly”, he was saying that when it comes to divine truths, none of us has the full and objective picture; our view is obscured.
The New Testament has many stories of people getting things wrong and being surprised by their assumptions of who Jesus is versus what they had expected him and the kingdom of God to be like.
Jesus had this habit of making people rethink what they had thought before. You’ve heard it said an eye for an eye, but I say to you turn the other cheek, he said in his Sermon on the Mount.
He said it was servanthood that was the marker of greatness. The disciples thought they would see their enemies defeated but instead witnessed Christ’s humiliating and torturous crucifixion.
We all of course have strongly-held convictions. And there are some beliefs I hold, that I hope really are right, rather than just my subjective opinions: the equality of every human being no matter their gender, no matter their race or religion; that human beings are capable of thinking beyond their own self-interest to the interests of all, that it’s possible to love your neighbour as yourself, that God has no favourites.
Nevertheless being wrong is part of being human. Christian author and apologist GK Chesterton put it like this: “The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is or should be, ‘I am wrong., he said, “Until a man can give that answer, his idealism is only a hobby.”
Maybe what the world needs is more “flexibility of thought”, more compromise, more of the humility required to build our common life together. Maybe being proved wrong can’t fix all our problems, but maybe it can be a start.
