Faith, doubt and certainty

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, my friend, welcome back to the podcast.

Chris Scott, it's good to be back.

Scott So I wanted to spend just a minute or two or a couple of minutes, maybe 15 or 12 or 13 or some yet undetermined but brief number of minutes to talk about... You give Scott a minute of your day and suddenly it becomes an hour. Exactly. But I wanted to talk about something that... Our guest for the show tomorrow, Sophia, who is a medical public health expert in Toronto, she and I were talking a little bit, and she reminded me... Very busy woman at the moment. Yes, very busy. She reminded me of a book that we talked about called Proper Confidence, which is written by a guy named Bishop Leslie Newbigin, and he... The subtitle of the book is, it's about like truth, doubt, and skepticism in the spiritual reality in late modernity.

Chris Right, I remember. Faith is the way to knowledge, and doubt is the way to the truth, right?

Scott Yeah, right. And certainty is the way to nihilism. And as we were talking about that book, we talked about it for a while, she's the second person I talked to that week. Another was a philosopher of science from MIT who also discovered the book through my interview podcast. And I thought, what a good kind of word for our time, because this is sort of what a lot of our conversations have been about. And it's, I think, a lot of the vibe of the Basecamp movement you've convened and are bringing about, where you basically have this kind of All we've got in a pandemic is like there's a sort of faith and trust we put in different places, right? We've got to choose. We're going to trust certain public officials. We're going to trust certain media sources. We're going to trust certain scientific outlets. And then there's also this careful interplay of doubt and skepticism and criticism of those things. And that's how, you know, first we get knowledge based by faith and trust, but then we get to the truth by critically inquiring about the things we come to know.

I think that like in a time of pandemic, that's all we've got. And I think people want certainty and people want, you know, a kind of, I think certainty always plays in anxious times. It's why sort of autocratic leaders and things like this in anxious times can be dangerous because they'll come promising certainty, right? But we don't, we're not wired to the human condition. Certainty will dash us on the rocks every single time, right? And so what we have is this careful interplay between faith and doubt, whether you're a religious person, irreligious person, you're choosing things to trust and believe in, at the same time needing to use your critical faculties to sort out what knowledge isn't really true and what knowledge is a working assumption. And that really, to me, It seems to be at the heart of making it.

Chris I was hoping you were going to keep talking and give me more time to think of something profound and insightful to say in response. Sometimes you read something and you wish that you had that clarity of insight to have written it. But I think that it was such an artful Triumvirate of insights into our relationship, our understanding of the world. All three of those statements are profound. The first, that faith is the way to knowledge. And I guess part of what that is, is about humbly recognizing that We don't build our entire personal understanding of reality from first principles, right? I mean, you think of kind of the flat earther movement. And what's interesting is it's not like I've ever done the experiment to determine for myself that the earth is round. I believe it. I think the philosophers call it a true belief. I believe it. It's also true.

Right, right. And so, but I know that I have that knowledge. I've never seen it. And there is a kind of faith, an unrecognized faith behind most of what we know. And so, you know, then, and so, okay, that's obviously true when you think about it. Yeah, most things I know. I haven't verified myself. I'm just taking it on faith. But then it does create this marvelous seeming contradiction that, well, in order to know anything better, we need to begin with doubt. Because if we assume that everything is already perfectly known, Then the project is complete. Instead, we're like, well, no, there's obviously like we live in the midst of this global pandemic. Clearly, this isn't the future we intended to arrive in. There must be so much of our understanding of the world and some of the biggest challenges in the world and the risks that we face that we are missing.

And to begin down that path, you need to start doubting. You say, okay, so what have we been missing? What have we misunderstood? What are the things that are real that we haven't been paying attention to? And so immediately we kind of form this contradiction in ourselves that most of what we know we've taken on faith, but now we've discovered that that working knowledge Isn't good enough. So we need to start going back to the things that we've taken on faith. And I guess ask is, should I investigate some of this stuff for myself and maybe see if I can come to the truth, which it seems somehow we've been missing. There's a big assumption that we've all just taken for granted. We've all been working with it. And now reality has shown that that assumption was too strong. So now I need to go back to this giant body of faith that I possess about what is and try to figure out where in that did I make the mistake that did not take the risk of a global pandemic seriously enough.

Scott And Newbigin was a fan of Kuhn's work and the structure of scientific revolutions, right? And in that book, Kuhn kind of argues what happens is you have these paradigms. And again, the paradigm is kind of taken on faith and trusted until someone has doubt and critical inquiry that... That exposes something the paradigm can't do, right? So you can't get directly from Einstein to Einstein from Newton. You have to make some leaps of faith and engage in some critical doubt. Then once you do, everything in Newton's paradigm can be explained in Einstein's and expanded. So I think this is how scientific revolutions work. This is how personal revolutions work, right? When we have a reigning paradigm that we're experiencing life through, maybe it's a tradition or some kind of philosophical perspective and a combination of all those things, and yet somewhere you realize through existential stuff, through doubt, through critical reflection, wow, there's some holes in my paradigm here.

You know, it's not worthless. It's gotten me somewhere. And yet I've got to have, it's like the doubting and the critical inquiry allows us to take the knowledge that we had We came about through faith and trust and rework it back to these sort of three statements.

Chris Faith is the way to knowledge, doubt is the way to the truth, certainty is the way to nihilism. I guess it seems to me that kind of the argument is that the first two statements sort of work together. That, you know, our faith in what is needs to have, we need to kind of hold that knowledge provisionally, right? It's kind of, it's knowledge that works. You know, I believe that Tokyo exists, it's there, nothing has ever happened in my experience that makes that a bad thing. Peace of knowledge to hold. But I guess if something happened, maybe that's a bad example, but this idea of it needs to be provisional in order for that kind of healthy relationship between just taking things on faith and being willing to challenge knowledge when what I thought I knew doesn't seem to work well enough. And I guess that's then where you get to this third statement.

That certainty is the way to nihilism is. If you're gonna be, if you're not gonna be provisional about it, if you're gonna be absolute, that no, this is what is, and nothing in my experience will ever lead me to doubt that, I guess the argument is, well, then in that case, you don't actually know anything.

Scott Yeah. And you're one of only like three people in the world. He's thinking of Descartes, right? Descartes wanted to sit in this oven. Just sit there, you know, big oven that you could sit in, you know, one of these bread ovens. Well, I think he explicitly says this. He's thinking like that, you know, Descartes thinks, I'm just going to sit by myself in this little enclosure and see what I can know, certainly. And he gets, of course, I think, therefore I am, I'm a thinking substance. And then he tries to kind of go out from that stuff to get all these indubitable... Again, I think Descartes here is the opposite of what Newbigin is commending. He's trying to eliminate the provisionality of his knowledge and thought process through coming to certain axiomatic first principles. And again, I just think that's going to either leave you with, you're going to become a nihilist because you're going to realize certainty, there is no certainty, so there's nothing, nothing is meaningful. Or again, you'll just, you'll slip into a non-provisional sort of certainty of something false. Like you'll embrace something that's provisional and treat it non-provisionally so that it can kind of keep you warm at night. And so both of those things, I think, really just crush the human endeavor and condition.

This is where real human flourishing happens. It's not through an embrace of certainty. How many working models of reality are allowed to coexist? I guess what I mean by that is, you know, I'm a political scientist, right? So you could think of

Chris In the US context, Democrats and Republicans, right? Very different working models of reality. But it's actually possible to, like, I go through life and it works for me, even though, you know, my knowledge and my doubts are very different from yours. I can think in geopolitics, you know, China is a working model and the US is a working model, perhaps. But, you know, so, but you kind of, I think this is, You know, this is the thing that is hard to come to grips with, is that, okay, if we need to have a kind of provisional hold on what we know, are we saying that it's possible to kind of figure out, you know, multiple very different pictures of, you know, what is knowledge and what is truth? Or is it sort of like there are many paths? There are many kind of working models that don't collapse?

Or is it something to say like, no, no, no, no, no. There's one real thing. The challenge is that we just can't hold it directly. And so we kind of need to approach it for many different ways. How did I know you were going to do that?

Scott Yeah, I think traditions that can't, traditions that live, I think, I'll just give a religious example, right? There are reasons people are Christians, Jews. Yeah, I just, I can expand it, but like, there are reasons why people are Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus. And that we don't have a really hard time finding people that worship Thor, except maybe in a Marvel Universe movie or something. But people aren't worshiping Zeus anymore, or Thor by and large, in a global way. Because those traditions lost their ability to evolve and understand the world. It's like religious traditions that stay thriving in the late modern world are ones that A, can evolve. They can incorporate science and new insights from science and philosophy and things like that. And also there are traditions that can engage each other, right? So that living traditions tend to be able to evolve and incorporate new ideas. And again, it's the faith down thing. And they're able to learn from one another in other traditions. And I think that's true in political philosophies, right? There are reasons why certain political movements go on in existence and some die out, right? Because they lose their ability to evolve. They lose their ability to... They're explanatory power for organizing for the good life. And so I think, again, traditions that thrive are ones that will be able to evolve, learn from others, engage others, so that everybody's looking for the whole. Because that's the only way. There's no...

There's no place to get to the whole outside of the tradition and sort of worldview and things you have. Like, there's no view from nowhere, right? Everybody's viewing from someplace. And again, healthier traditions are ones that are able to learn from others, again, doubt, reinvigorate themselves, get new lenses on the world, right? And that's where traditions become healthy and become viable and evolve and help us see the world in new ways. It's ones that can't do that. That will become cul-de-sacs eventually. It's like a stagnant swamp. There's no water moving in and out.

Chris Like an evolutionary view to knowledge and truth. And that more is being uncovered and discovered. Maybe one way to think about it is that as one approaches these giant words like knowledge and truth, What's our sort of deep bias? Are we imagining we live in a world where everybody has an opinion, or opinions exist about all knowledge and all truths. And so it's a debate about whether we've got it right, because it's all on the table. Or is the human condition more that actually, you know, what we know and what we know to be true is just a tiny subset? Thank you very much. And maybe I think that's part of the mistake, is we approach everything new with the assumption that it's already known, when sometimes we have to recognize that, well, this is totally new. And so we just have to go on a journey to discover what's...

Scott And this is what I think is at the heart of the Basecamp ethos, right? Because the Basecamp gatherings, which we've got a great one coming up this week, this does not presume that we all have to have the same presuppositions coming in. It presumes that we all are on a journey and we can learn from each other and bring our traditions and bring our lenses and our doubts and critical questions and get a bigger description of what's real together and make new maps together and find meaning together. But it's great because it doesn't require we agree on everything. In fact, The real fruitful thing to it is that we don't all agree on everything, right? That we're all coming from different journeys, different traditions, different disciplines, different parts of the world, different cultural frameworks. That's where we're going to get a bigger picture of what's true and can expand the beauty of the faith.

Chris Another way to express it is pursuit of the truth. Is life a discovery or a debate? And I think for me, Basecamp is a metaphor for the human condition. I think that life is much more like, and the human journey, where we are right now, is much more like being at Basecamp than being at the summit. I mean, the summit is something very different, very far away. We don't all quite agree that, is that the summit? And how would you get there? But... You know, a place to come together, you know, before and after journeys of discovery and share what we've discovered, you know, not in an absolutist way. Right. But our experience, we tried this path and our experience was that, is profoundly enriching for everyone at Basecamp. If you recognize that that is where we are, if you think that, no, no, no, I'm on the summit. So I know my journey is done. And the task for me now is to convince everyone else that the work to understand what is.

You just don't get it yet. And I think that's where a lot of the present-day conflict around truth and fake news and social media is. We're all debating with our certainties. We're all standing on our summits and saying, no, no, no, you don't get it. When in fact, what we've misunderstood is where we are. Okay, I get it. Certainty is the way to nihilism. I didn't quite understand that, but now I think I do. Yeah, see you at Basecamp, Scott. It'd be great to have you there. All right.