“Well, how about this — that man, unlike animals, is a creature who experiences an insurmountable need for knowledge? I’ve read that somewhere.”
“So have I,” said Valentine. “But the trouble is that man, or in any case the common man, easily overcomes this need for knowledge of his. It seems to me that he doesn’t have such a need at all. There’s a need to understand, but knowledge is not required for that. The God hypothesis, for instance, gives one an unparalleled ability to understand absolutely everything, while discovering absolutely nothing… Give a person a highly simplified model of the world and interpret any event on the basis of this simplified model. Such an approach required no knowledge. A few memorized formulas plus some so-called intuition, so-called practical acumen, and so-called common sense.”
Roadside Picnic, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky