Are there things we shouldn't know?

Al Mohler on the morality of knowledge:

The threat of nuclear weapons in North Korean is deeply troubling. The very idea that the Hermit Kingdom could be armed with nuclear weapons is enough to send the rest of the world into a state of international anxiety. The political and military dimensions of the Korean quandary are complex and unclear.

Nevertheless, one central moral dimension is clear enough -- the morality of knowledge. As one observer remarked, the North Koreans may dismantle their nuclear weapons, but they will never forget how they made them. They now possess that crucial knowledge, and it will not be forgotten.

The morality of knowledge is a foreign concept to many Americans, and to many Christians as well. The very fact that there might be forbidden knowledge runs counter to the spirit of the age, and to the modern instinct for unrestricted knowledge.

Of course, the idea of forbidden knowledge is an essential part of the biblical story. The occasion of the Fall was a desire to eat from a tree of forbidden knowledge -- the knowledge of good and evil. Once Adam and Eve ate of that tree, they knew . . . and so do we.

In this fallen world, the morality of knowledge is never a simple issue. The knowledge of nuclear physics produced both the Bomb and life-saving medical advances. Apparently, we cannot have one without the other. The same is true with most technologies and realms of knowledge. We can use the knowledge to hurt or to heal, and the knowledge to do one carries the knowledge to do the other.

We should be humbled by this realization -- and by the acknowledgement that we are morally responsible for what we do with what we know.