Skip to main content

When Doubt has Done its Best

I have forgotten the beginning of the quote
that has to do with the complexities of Medieval thought,
except that it ends:

". . . except a lynx, which is said to be able, in the thickest darkness,
to see things that exist nowhere".

I am not sure how it happened, but somehow,
in the face of what human reason can discover,
and what it cannot accept, many religions have taken refuge in blind faith.
You know the routine: "I cannot rationally demonstrate it,
but I believe in god, and angels, and life after death, and miracles,
and creationism, and a hundred other things that, even in the thickest darkness, exist nowhere." The essence of rational thought, and scientific thought, is not faith, but doubt.

If someone says the moon is made of green cheese,
reason asks what might falsify that claim.
That is to say, let doubt test the thesis.
There is a method to that madness, because what is left
after every reasonable doubt has done its work
is a pretty sturdy claim to something.

Truth, to science, is not an absolute claim to anything.
It is a confidence that something is stout enough to be assumed.
The doubting never stops, of course, because who wants to deny
 that we might have been wrong, or that something better
is beginning to emerge? Scientific truth is always just the best we know,
until something even better becomes clear.
We get there, not by believing, but by doubting.

There are claims that are so goofy that not even a good,
sturdy doubt seems to get at them.
If you claim that you have an invisible, non-material,
little green leprechaun sitting on your shoulder
who whispers amusing comments to you, keeping you in good humor,
I, at least, cannot think of a good way to disprove it.
But it doesn't matter whether you believe it or not.
 Nothing is changed. OK! You smile a lot, amused
at what is going on around you! A leprechaun!

So much of what people claim to believe by pure faith
 is something like a leprechaun. You can't prove it,
and neither can it be disproved. It sits on their shoulders
in the thickest darkness, invisible even to a lynx.

Oddly, it is the relative certainties of science that provide
the most enduring comfort to the mind, because ideas
that have been subjected to our most insightful doubts emerge tested.
We can fairly depend on the survivors of the gauntlet of doubt.

Evolution is a sturdy theory, sturdy enough to be called "a fact",
not because it is absolute truth, but because it has withstood 150 years
of the most intense scrutiny. Doubt has done its best.

Confidence is not gained by blind faith. Blind faith is afraid of doubt.
Blind faith has to be blind to intelligent scrutiny.
Blind faith is simply a passionate affirmation:
"Leave me alone! I believe it! I want to believe it!"

Compare that with what remains after you have asked yourself
whether something could possibly be true;
after you have exercised every reasonable doubt.

It is what remains when doubt has done its best
 that provides reasonable peace of mind.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more