Believe Differently

If you follow my blog you will know that if there is one thing that riles me more than anything else, it is absolute truth claims, especially when they are attributed to knowledge concerning God.1 Next on the list, though, are such claims that attempt to base their validity on the scientific world view.2 Interestingly, it does not tend to be scientists who adopt this narrow minded ideological perspective, often such practitioners are deeply reflective concerning their work, and are very aware of its limitations.

In this connection, a back article in the New Scientist caught my attention. In a piece entitled “Can we learn to love uncertainty David Malone writes:

Few notions have become as deeply embedded in our culture as the belief that there is a perfect certainty to be had – and the desire to have it. It has survived virtually intact the transition from religion to rationalism as the touchstone of our society. Even as science squeezed out belief in God and scriptural certainties, a perfect law-governed creation remained; it was just under new management. Science has become, in the minds of many, the new guarantor that there is certainty and that we can attain it.3

I am continually frustrated how often people prefer and defer to scientific discourse assuming that it has a god’s eye perspective on our reality enabling it to function as an arbitrator for all truth. Such a view simply makes no philosophical sense. The reality of the matter is that we live in an uncertain world and absolute truth is beyond our comprehension and we must content ourselves with this situation.

 Malone continues:

We need to reach an accommodation with uncertainty. Not only is the universe uncertain, but so too is human knowledge. Science as a process should never have fostered any illusions about this: it was always about provisional truths – and new it.

Perhaps it is time for us to finally accept that we shouldn’t believe in science because we think it’s certain, but precisely because it is not.

I agree with Malone, though I would want to stress, this is not to introduce the “god of the gaps” by the back door. I am not saying that we can only go so far but then must give up and write off any further understanding. In fact I am saying the opposite: we must keep on searching; we must keep on peeling back the different levels of reality and accept that we are on an endless journey. 

Absolute truth claims are nothing more than an idol to the “god of the gaps”. They foreclose on further debate or investigation concerning the object of enquiry. Malone writes:

Certainty is totalitarian. It forecloses further thinking. Not one of the theories devised by Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Planck is certain and perfect. Powerful and beautiful they undoubtedly are, but they are still partial and incomplete approximations of truth.

Malone suggests that:

… serious thinkers are not afraid of uncertainty. For them a theory’s uncertainty or incompleteness is not a failing but a positive and creative condition in its own right. The profound discoveries of modern mathematics and science show that life and thinking flourish only in the liminal and fertile land that lies between too much certainty and too much doubt. The art of scientific inquiry is to tack back and forth between the two.

I would suggest that this be true irrespective of the domain of enquiry. It is true of the scientific enterprise but, perhaps, more so true when God is the object/subject of our enquiry.

Malone finishes with a quote from Bertrand Russell:

Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales… To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing.

And I would suggest absolutely necessary if knowledge and reflection concerning our world, ourselves and God is to increase. In a very real sense, questions are far more exciting than answers.

1. for related links see: http://www.believedifferently.com/category/truth/ [↩]
2. for related links see : http://www.believedifferently.com/category/faith-science/ [↩]
3. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19526152.100-perspectives-are-we-still-addicted-to-certainty.html [↩]