Conclusion: Living in a World of Uncertainty
Conclusion: Living in a
World of Uncertainty
Who can we trust? What can we trust? These are among the most difficult and cognitively demanding tasks that we face in everyday life. We look for individuals who are smart, honest and dependable – just as we seek beliefs that are trustworthy and enable us to flourish. My argument in this book is that belief is natural, reasonable and has the potential for good. To deny it is simply to diminish us as human beings.
For some epistemic Puritans, we ought only to believe what we can prove. Logic and mathematics thus provide us with the norms that we should apply to everything in life. I share their admiration for these glittering peaks of human knowledge production. Yet these are singularities, areas of knowledge in which a degree of certainty is possible which distinguishes them from other domains of human understanding, rather than being representative of them.
We seem to be hard-wired to seek certainty, and so find uncertainty worrying and stressful. Perhaps this helps us understand why many people impose rational and moral certainties, or find themselves drawn to populist orators offering a return to absolutist ideologies or a bygone, yet wistfully remembered, social order with familiar and known values. Yet we should challenge our natural craving for certainty in all areas of our lives. It is a delusion.
The ideas I explore in this book are not new; in fact, they have a distinguished history in the long tradition of scientific and philosophical reflection and religious faith, which are deeply attuned to the problem of uncertainty, both as a cognitive and existential concern. Consider, for example, the personal credo of the Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli:
I believe in justice. I believe that the Earth is round. I believe that my name is Carlo and that my father’s name was Franco. I believe that life is worth living. My beliefs are rooted in me. They define me. I hold them dear and I strenuously defend them against any challenge.
But I am not certain about them.
For Rovelli, we live in ‘a vast intermediate space’ located between ‘full ignorance and total certainty’. That’s an imaginatively helpful way of describing the realm of belief or faith, which locates itself firmly within this domain of uncertainty – a domain within which human thought, action and life must and can take place. It is within this space that we frame our ideas of meaning, value and justice – all of which are critical to human distinctiveness on the one hand, and to meaningful human existence on the other. Like Odysseus, we have to learn to find a navigable channel between the Scylla of ‘full ignorance’ and the Charybdis of ‘total certainty’.
Certainty is simply not an option for any nuanced understanding of the meaning of life, why we are here, or the nature of the good. These questions matter – but we can’t answer them with the certainty we mistakenly believe is our intellectual birthright. This does not condemn us to total ignorance; it simply opens our eyes to the complexity and ambiguity of many aspects of our world, and prompts us to question the assumption that we can expect certainty in relation to life’s big questions. We have to learn to walk the poorly signposted and unpoliced line between certainty and doubt as we try to make sense of the chaos.
In a 1770 letter to Frederick II of Prussia, Voltaire complained that only charlatans offered certainty. ‘While doubt is not a particularly pleasant state, certainty is a ridiculous state.’ Some would suggest that the Enlightenment is to blame for these unrealistic expectations for human knowledge, which suggested that a universal human reason could eliminate uncertainties and ambiguities. I think the problem lies much deeper than this – in human nature itself. The human craving for certainty is rooted deep within us. While we cannot eliminate it, we can at least challenge it, and try to rise above it. We have to learn to live with it and resist the temptation to overstate the capacity of human reason.
Does this realism about reality prevent us trying to find a set of habitable beliefs, capable of sustaining meaningful life? No. But it allows us to understand why there have been so many false dawns, promising direct access to certainties that turned out to be contested opinions, imposed dogmas, or cultural fads. We seem to be drawn to people who exude certainty, perhaps assuming their attitude reflects a vastly superior grasp of reality than the rest of us.
Maybe that’s why Forrest Gump gained such a following as he ran across the United States. People felt he had a personal authenticity, a certainty of purpose that they could share by running alongside him – before, of course, he declared he was tired and going home, leaving his frustrated followers to reluctantly figure things out for themselves.
In this book, I have argued for a retrieval of the more modest category of belief, which squares up to this disturbing human tendency to construct certainties when the evidence does not permit it. I have told you something about what I believe to illustrate some of the points that I have been making, but my own beliefs are of little relevance to this discussion.
My position is this: believing is not only intellectually defensible but existentially necessary. It is time to move on from movements and individuals who offer facile solutions in the face of life’s endless ambiguities. We have to live with a degree of uncertainty about our lives, while realising that this does not need to overwhelm us with the feeling of confusion and disconnectedness that caused the poet John Donne such distress in 1611: ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.’
Embracing Uncertainty in the
Face of Spurious Certainties
In his 2003 book A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, John Allen Paulos channels the first century philosopher Pliny the Elder in setting out a guiding principle he had learned to trust in life: ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.’ This powerful one-liner may sound bleak; yet its austerity simply reflects the reality of the human situation, and echoes the suppressed wisdom of the past, in which this insight was regularly acknowledged and lived out.
Provisional certainties often turn out to be the prevailing view of an age, before being discarded or surgically modified by its successors. We can’t be sure about what the future holds, and whether it will discredit what some currently regard as secure knowledge – including many current scientific theories. As Carlo Rovelli observed, ‘we have no other tool to guide us than our limited and always insufficient intelligence, no other reliable adviser than uncertainty.’ For Rovelli, we are constantly tempted to eagerly embrace ‘shiny new ideologies’, each proclaiming its triumph over failed alternatives. Yet we live in an age of multiple temporary certainties, unsure what will come next, or how the future will judge what we consider to be secure. Our judgements are obstinately tainted and limited by our historical location.
A more literary exploration of this theme is found in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–34). This masterpiece of poetic philosophy acknowledges and affirms the human need to believe as we try to make sense of a seemingly chaotic and meaningless world, yet which seems to hint at a deeper orderliness. We might well wonder, Pope comments, why we are ‘form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?’ We have to realise that we are ‘darkly wise’, in that we can only know incomplete truths, being able to grasp and understand only a small part of our universe.
Human beings, Pope declared, are ‘born but to die, and reas’ning but to err’, trapped in an unsettling world of belief, when some would rather inhabit a secure realm of proved certainties. For Pope, humanity longs to find beliefs that can be trusted, despite evidential uncertainty and the limits of human reasoning. We are unable to see the big picture, but can only discern some of its parts: ‘’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.’ We have to face up to the problem that the big questions in life cannot be answered with certainty.
Pope’s analysis was prophetic. To understand the importance of beliefs in human life, we must confront our limitations and weaknesses. We aren’t rational calculating machines who know and act perfectly and infallibly; we are limited by our natural cognitive endowments which appear to have emerged to enable us to survive, rather than achieve total coherent insight. The Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey’s influential discussion of the relationship between truth and probability echoes Pope’s language and his concerns. We too easily construct a philosophical ideal of certainty in the belief that it ‘is more suited to God than to men’, and is unrealistic for human application.
For Ramsey, to act only on the basis of certainties ‘is too high a standard to expect of mortal men, and we must agree that some degree of doubt or even of error may be humanly speaking justified.’ Rather than crying for the moon, we have to be realistic about the limits of human beings and pragmatic about the forms of knowledge that we can achieve – and be willing to live accordingly. Beliefs offer us a map by which we might steer as we navigate an ocean of uncertainties.
Perhaps in an ideal world it might be possible to assemble convincing proofs for our fundamental beliefs, so that these convictions could be as certain as the proven truths of mathematics and logic. But we don’t live in that kind of world. We have to get used to the limits of human reasoning, and face up to the kind of world we inhabit and the kind of creatures we really are.
The academic philosophical literature, despite its ‘forests of depressingly oblique, hyper-technical and often deeply boring discussions’, at least helps us to develop a sense of realism about the dilemma that we face – namely, that neither our need to know nor our desire to be sure secures our ability to know with certainty. There is a tension between our expectations and their outcomes. We don’t have access to methods and criteria that command universal rational assent and deliver secure and certain outcomes. There is no single method for gaining personal knowledge; beliefs can arise and be assessed in many ways.
Perhaps that’s why many now speak of the permissibility of beliefs, reassuring us that it’s OK to believe. As the psychologist William James pointed out, the reality of life is that we often need to give answers to our deepest existential questions which go beyond the evidence and what reason can deliver. That’s why we keep on speaking about believing, and resist the fatal trap of fabricating certainties to make sense of our unrealistic expectations.
We need to be realistic about what we can hope for, while searching for an existentially habitable space of relative stability amid a troubled ocean of uncertainty. Rovelli’s ‘vast intermediate space’ of ambiguity and uncertainty is not an unknown territory or an unexplored ocean; it has been recognised and inhabited by philosophers, theologians, artists and writers since the classical period, who have found ways of flourishing in its half-lights and coping with its ambiguities – and in doing so, demonstrated the ability of human beings to deal with a complex world. We can learn from them, and put their wisdom to good use today.
Most of us know the experience of a seemingly irrepressible drive to make sense of ourselves which can send us on ‘dangerous voyages of exploration’ (Bernard Lonergan). The human mind roams the intellectual landscape in search of stable and meaningful beliefs, which might offer what the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce termed ‘an ideal of life’ or a ‘thoroughly satisfactory explanation’ of things that matter to us.
My argument throughout this work is that the big questions of life – such as the meaning of life, or the nature of the good – lie beyond rational or scientific proof. Like Isaiah Berlin, I am suspicious of those who claim to possess ‘incorrigible knowledge about issues of fact or principle in any sphere of human behaviour’. I’m willing to accept my limitations – indeed, the limitations of the human race – when it comes to these questions. Like Alexander Pope, I have reluctantly come to accept the limited degrees of certainty that are associated with these ‘ultimate questions’ – not because I am weak minded, but because the evidence clearly points to this conclusion. Believing is a human stance to be embraced, not a liability that is to be eradicated. ‘Faith’ is the name we give to this commitment to living in line with what we believe to be true.
This does not, as I have emphasised throughout, permit us to ‘believe anything we like’. We all need to give good reasons for what we believe, accepting responsibility for our beliefs, while realising that neither proof nor certainty are possible in dealing with ‘ultimate questions’. We have to accept that others will disagree with us on these grand questions, not because they are stupid or evil, but because the questions simply cannot be answered with the precision and certainty that many would hope for.
Believing and Human Nature
Human beings are believing and meaning-seeking animals, with an imprinted instinct to make sense of what we experience. We can no more eliminate our propensity to believe than our tendency to be tribal – despite the difficulties this creates, not least the risk of genocide (think of Rwanda in 1994, which pitted Tutsi against Hutu), or the serious communal tensions that can arise between people groups in multicultural western cities. We have to work with human nature as it actually is, and confront the fact that ‘tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition and that no group – not even one’s own – is immune’. Evolutionary pressures have ‘sculpted human minds to be tribal’, leading to the potential for social antagonism and violence. The New Atheism suggested that religion is the cause of toxic social division; a more reliable view is that our instinct for tribalism often seizes on religion for its own ends.
Like just about everything that human beings turn their hands to, this enterprise of believing can go wrong. As we have seen, beliefs can lead to discrimination, violence and prejudice. This, however, points to the need to be critical and reflective about those beliefs, and how they are enacted and embodied. We can’t change who we are – but we can try to live ethically and peacefully. Paradoxically, it is the belief that we should live in these ways that allows us to subdue and redirect our more fundamental human instincts – a point emphasised by Thomas H. Huxley in his famous 1893 lecture ‘Evolution and Ethics’. For Huxley, ethical values – which human beings create – can help suppress our more fundamental primitive tendency towards violence, rooted in a distant past.
The solution to toxic beliefs is not a crude abolition of the category of ‘believing’, but the search for better forms of believing that foster good lives, individually and communally. Much research has been carried out on the way in which belief systems are correlated with flourishing and resilience, at both the individual and communal level. This research often focuses on how beliefs help individuals cope with ageing, trauma and uncertainty; in recent times, its scope has been expanded to include indigenous communities, exploring how their beliefs and practices enable them to survive, particularly in the face of colonialism and the erosion of their traditional cultures.
A recurrent theme to emerge from this research is that existentially disengaged beliefs do not seem to encourage human flourishing or create resilience. We care about beliefs that make a difference to us. I was fascinated by the 2006 debate which led to Pluto being reclassified as a ‘dwarf planet’ by the International Astronomical Union. But did it impact on me in any meaningful way? No. It was interesting in a detached sort of way. I also believe that the atomic weight of the chemical element chlorine is 35.453 – not because I’ve checked this out myself, having outsourced this matter to the scientific community at large. But if it turned out it was 35.467, I would shrug my shoulders. It would be interesting, but not personally relevant to me, even though it might be important to theoretical chemistry. Yet other beliefs make a profound difference to how we understand ourselves, and feel about our lives.
Human flourishing seems to rest on three broad pillars: truth, purpose and meaning. To flourish is to live according to realities that are not of our own fabrication or invention; to live a life that is significant and leads to the advancement of what is good and just; and to know that we matter in life. ‘Flourishing’ includes good mental and physical health, but is also linked with happiness, life satisfaction, meaning, purpose, character, virtue and close social relationships. People flourish when they believe and feel they are part of something greater, as when individuals and communities locate themselves within ‘Big Pictures’.
Flourishing in an Uncertain World
The poet John Keats coined the term ‘negative capability’ to refer to a willingness to accept and embrace ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. While some might hastily draw firm conclusions about the significance of an idea or event, Keats encouraged remaining in a state of openness, continuing to probe and reflect on a complex reality to gain a more comprehensive understanding of it. Keats grasped the importance of a respectful contemplative musing on an object – such as a Grecian urn – without feeling compelled to arrive at a definitive and conclusive interpretation of its meaning or prematurely shutting down the process of reflection. He was willing to inhabit a realm of uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, affirming and experiencing the complexity and depth of the world rather than trying to subjugate it with the precision of logical analysis.
This book leaves readers in a similar position. My concern has been to describe the epistemic dilemma in which we find ourselves, and to caution against prematurely dismissing some of the most significant beliefs that have shaped human culture and civilization throughout history. We can prove shallow truths, but not the profound existential, moral and spiritual beliefs that bestow dignity and significance upon human life. Some individuals may find this profoundly uncomfortable and may wish to eliminate the category of belief, or convert their own beliefs into certainties. Yet for reasons that we have explored in this book, I do not consider this to be a defensible position.
Recognising that we live in a world of uncertainties, mysteries and doubts may be unsettling; however, this is surely preferable to constructing a world of imagined self-evident truths in response to our aversion to uncertainty. Though we live in a world that is existentially ambivalent and morally uninformative, beliefs make this is a profoundly habitable place by allowing us to see it (and ourselves) in a new way. Beliefs involve us, giving us the capacity to discern or create human meaning, purpose and significance, and live this out in community with others.
So why believe? Because we’re human. Because it’s normal. Because it’s realistic. Belief is as natural to human beings as it is necessary for their wellbeing. We have to deal with humanity as it is, as ‘moral believing animals’, shaped in ways we do not fully understand by our evolutionary past and cultural present, rather than as the universalised logical or rational calculating machines envisaged by the Age of Reason, which held what turned out to be a forlorn hope of clear and certain answers to our deepest questions.
This kind of algorithmic reasoning may work well in the domain of logic. Yet human existence demands engagement with aspects of life characterised by ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity – such as medical diagnosis and forensic examination. Questions of meaning and moral value lie even further beyond the scope of mechanical reasoning, not least on account of their deeply subjective significance. Information, as Susan Sontag points out, is ‘always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary’. In both clinics and courts of law, human judgement is of critical importance in creating trustworthy syntheses of the partial and fragmentary – a judgement that rests on wisdom, in the form of long experience and reflection in coping with such complex questions. The process of reflection is an art, and its outcomes are beliefs.
In his Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman develops one of the most creative – though oblique – critiques of mechanical models of human reasoning. Pullman introduces us to the ‘alethiometer,’ a complex rational calculating machine, ‘very like a clock, or a compass’, which delivers secure readings of reality once the symbols of its three wheels are correctly set to frame the question being asked.
Yet the alethiometer can only be read correctly by a small group of people who have developed the art of doing so – including the central character of the trilogy, Lyra Silvertongue, who is initially able to use the device intuitively. Puzzled by the device’s behaviour, Lyra asks Farder Coram whether it is functioning properly. ‘It’s working all right, Lyra. What we don’t know is whether we’re reading it right. That’s a subtle art.’ Answering life’s great questions is indeed an art, a skill that has to be acquired, transcending mechanistic and algorithmic ways of thinking or understandings of human rationality, and alert to the importance of interpretation and the inevitability of ambiguity.
How might we find such habitable beliefs? Bernard Lonergan’s ‘dangerous voyage of exploration’ and Carlo Rovelli’s ‘vast intermediate space’ of ambiguity and uncertainty help us imagine a voyage of exploration for an existentially habitable island in a vast ocean of possibilities – a place of safety in which we can hope to flourish and become the people we are meant to be. Such islands already exist, and we do not need to invent them. Some of them have been known and found to be habitable for thousands of years. Our task is to locate them, check them out, and work out whether we can make them our home. Others have found them before us, often leaving us accounts of how this happened and assessments of the difference that this made to the quality of their lives.
And so, like the seafaring Polynesian navigators of old, we develop wayfaring skills and search strategies which allow us to locate even the most remote islands of beliefs that might allow us to flourish and live a good life of joy and wonder. I began my explorations by navigating my way to Marxism, and spent some time exploring its landscape and figuring out whether I could thrive there. Disillusioned, I began to island-hop, eventually alighting on Christianity, which proved much more resilient and engaging. It provided me with a stable refuge to weather life’s challenges and a secure base from which I could comprehend and participate in our complex world. I’m still there, happily settled.
In the end, we are all believers, whether we like it or not, in that our lives and knowledge are grounded and shaped by assumptions and beliefs that lie beyond comprehensive empirical verification or rational proof. This is not a new idea; it has deep roots in ancient philosophy, and is now widely discussed in more pragmatic traditions of philosophy, building on Charles S. Peirce’s recognition of the fallibility of knowledge and William James’s reconstruction of belief in a world of uncertainty. Yet perhaps its moment has now come, as disillusionment with the alleged certainties and simplicities of the recent past gives way to a longing to reconstruct, move forward, and find beliefs that are stable, significant and supportive of a good life. Living in this vast space of ambiguity and uncertainty is an art, a skill that we have to learn. Happily, it can be done.