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The Importance of Being Uncertain

May 11, 2006
by Howard Hendrix

In complex and uncertain times, it’s a very human impulse to want to take refuge in what appears certain, simple, and true. That impulse is also profoundly dangerous, however, because it can be so misleading.

Having found my certain simple truth, I may be tempted to think that my piece of the truth – my faith, my method, my ideology, my way of living – is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Believing that may in turn lead me to deny that others also possess pieces of the truth, different from but perhaps just as valid as my own. Once I’ve denied them that essential possibility, it’s really only a hop, skip, and a jump to intolerance, bigotry, hatred, self-righteous murder, and too much of the history of the century just past.

I find myself rejecting more and more the arrogance of certainty. When I see, on the message board outside a big- box, conservative church, the words "Tolerance is the virtue of those who lack conviction," I shake my head. When I see, on a secular activist-left website, the words, "Don’t give me your tolerance – nothing less than total justice will do," I am saddened. When I see a man on a street corner waving a sign that says "Truth Not Tolerance" – with no other context of what he might be protesting for or against – I heave a heavy sigh.

The temperature at the far poles of belief seems to be the inhuman cold of zero-tolerance, a phrase too common in our everyday language. Yet, if I am earnest in my hatred of tolerance, then I must also, necessarily, be tolerant of hatred – at least in myself. Hatred of tolerance and tolerance of hatred dovetail far too easily together, and both have become pervasive pollutants in the very air of our culture.

Out of that polluted air comes much of the supposed conflict between science and religion. Too many who see the world only through stained glass windows view science as a joke without a punchline, claiming to provisionally explain what it cannot ultimately understand. Too many who view the world only through telescope and microscope see religion as a punchline without a joke, claiming to ultimately understand what it cannot even provisionally explain.

Yet neither science nor religion are, ultimately, about certainty. If it were certainly proved that God does not exist, there would be no need for religion; likewise, however, if it were certainly proved that God does exist, there would be no need for religion, either – no need for faith. The truths of religious faith grow from the soil of uncertainty. As the father of the demon-possessed boy in the ninth chapter of Mark says, "I do believe; Lord, help my unbelief."

The truths of science too are rooted in uncertainty. In the 1930s, physicist Werner Heisenberg determined that, for a particle like an electron, say, it’s impossible for a human observer like you or me to know both its position and its momentum – if I know where it stands, I can’t know how it’s going, and vice versa. For the most fundamental atomic particles, Heisenberg concluded that uncertainty is the truth. Einstein’s relativity, too, tells me that what I see depends on where I’m standing – my frame of reference. And Gödel’s incompleteness theorem makes clear that no formal system of human thought, my own included, can ever capture the whole truth.

As physicist Stephen Hawking has noted, progress in science consists in replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong. That likely applies to the work of Einstein, Gödel, and Heisenberg too, but that’s not a bad thing. The point is to always search for better approximations to truth, while accepting that the whole truth will always elude that search.

I believe it is from the humble willingness to entertain uncertainty – to recognize that perhaps my truth isn’t the whole or only truth – that tolerance ultimately springs, and with it the deepest respect for truth itself. From the willingness to entertain the possibility that other people’s ideas and lives might be just as valuable as my own arises the respect I must feel for my fellow human beings, if I feel any real respect for myself. This is not moral relativism or ethical equivocation but the principle embodied in doing and not doing "unto others" – the Golden Rule, found in all the world’s major religions.

As a science fiction writer, what truths I can tell I usually must tell not only slant (as Emily Dickinson says) but forward slant. That activity necessarily involves me with uncertainty, and also with mystery, both of which I have come to treasure. The sense of wonder at the universe and our place in it is at the root of science, of religion, and of so much else that makes us human.

Also, perhaps, wonder at more than one universe. The many-world physicists present us with a plenitude of universes which together make up something like a vast, labyrinthine palace. Each room in that palace is a universe, finite and consistent in itself, yet radically incomplete, as it always leads onto other rooms. The palace as a whole is essentially infinite and complete, yet radically inconsistent in the differences between each of its innumerable rooms.

Or, as Jesus says, "In my father’s house there are many mansions."

All I know with certainty about the future is that someday I will die. Until then, I believe I’d rather go on living in uncertainty, than being dead certain.