What We Believe

In my post called “In Celebration of Science,” I tried to provoke a discussion on how we come to know things.  In response, a reader notes:  At least one component of deciphering the truth lies in being able to tap into the thinking of  people whose opinions you trust and have reason to trust (and also understand their inherent biases). 

It’s reminiscent of the core doctrine of existentialism, which I would summarize as follows:

We are all free to make our own choices, and, in fact, we are nothing more than the totalization of the choices we’ve made through the course of our lives.  One can say, for instance, that he’s fashioned his life around the tenets of the bible, but it is he who has made that choice, where another person may have chosen Buddhism, atheism, Scientology, stoicism, epicureanism, or whatever.  We are, in fact, condemned to be free; we cannot look elsewhere for the responsibility of our choices.

Fortunately, this situation is not as chaotic as it might appear.  Yes, there are QAnon people and flat-Earthers, but this society is a very long way from taking any of this garbage too seriously.  I’m reminded of something comedian Lewis Black said recently, “If you hear that something happened from a certain source, and then you hear that the same thing happened from a different source, and so on from a number of different sources, you can rightly infer…..IT F***ING HAPPENED!

Absolute certainty of anything (other than that we in fact do exist) is impossible, but that shouldn’t stop us from gathering what we call “knowledge” and living our lives.