How do you find out if something is true? Once you start doubting, just like you're supposed to doubt - everything is possibly wrong - start out understanding religion by saying "everything is possibly wrong, let us see". As soon as you do that you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from.
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing - I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about such as whether it means anything to ask "why are we here?" But I don't have to know an answer - I don't feel frightened by not knowing things - by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as i can tell possibly -- it doesn't frighten me.
Quotes excerpted from the NOVA video, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
I was listening to The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (which is beautifully read by Dan Cashman, and in which the above was included) and was stunned to hear Feynman crystalize, using very few words, my own religious philosophy.
The timing was excellent, because I was still smarting from Yann Martel's assertion in The Life of Pi:
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
What?
I refuse Martel's base presumption that questions of faith must, or even can be answered, and his logical extraction that agnostics live with doubt because they fear to answer. The above quote from Feynman is the best possible answer I can think of to this presumption.
Posted by Ken Allen at February 23, 2005 10:52 AM