Escaping Certainty
How I learned to love truth on its own terms
I sat under the fluorescent lights of the gymnasium wearing my chapel day uniform as Coach G., an energetic cannonball of a man, delivered the day’s sermon. He was asking a perennial question in evangelical teaching: do you know where you’ll go when you die?
“Do you know that you know that you know?” he pleaded, pounding his fist into his palm with each repetition of “know” to drive the question deeper into our souls.
His question provoked strong, conflicted feelings in me. I was attracted to his conviction that truth was real and vital. If there really is a creator, if souls are really immortal, if there’s a way to be saved and a way to be damned, these truths would be the most important facts of our lives.
At the same time, I was repelled by Coach’s insistence that certainty is the hallmark of salvation. Certainty requires that truth is transparent, unambiguous, and, of course, that I know what it is. It’s not just saying, “I believe.” It’s saying, “I’m right.”
How could I know that I know that I know what will happen after I die when I didn’t even know that I know that I know what I want for lunch?
I’d already begun to develop a sensitivity to certainty-as-a-virtue in response to the conservative evangelical culture I was brought up in. In my world, kids debated each other in apologetics class about obscure theological issues that have remained unsettled for millennia. Pastors held “ask me anything” sessions where they fielded obscure doctrinal questions and explained to their congregants why their denomination (one of hundreds) had the right point of view.
There was a lot of emphasis on finding the one right way to think, and that one right way was a “narrow road.”
On the conservative side of “conservative evangelical” culture, talk show hosts lamented the loss of absolute truth in our postmodern, pluralist society. They explained that the concept of truth itself was being intentionally dismantled by people who resented the limitations that truth imposed on their self-gratifying nature. If we didn’t defend the truth with vigor equal to their attack, they warned, everything good in our society would crumble.
Where Coach G called for absolute certainty in salvation, they extended the call to encapsulate every corner of life: sexuality, child-rearing, science, history, media consumption and of course, how we should vote. Typically, such pundits would give authority to their life prescriptions by asserting that they are “Biblical.” This matrix of religion, politics, belief and certainty formed a complex web that, depending on your point of view, could be regarded as a safety net, a trap, or perhaps a bit of both.
As a high school kid I was curious, even a little contrarian, but not yet cynical. I sincerely, deeply wanted to know the truth. And I thought that the questions being debated by those around me were important. It was good that we were thinking about eternity, meaning, ethics, free will and public policy. (We were also thinking about plenty of stupid stuff, but having some big ideas in the mix wasn’t bad.)
But couldn’t we step back and acknowledge the big, doofy elephant in the room? We placed so much emphasis on being right, yet even within our own echo chamber we still disagreed on so much. I considered the fact that reasonable, smart, well-intentioned people have been trying to figure out the right answer, the right interpretation, and the best way to live since time began—and we hadn’t reached consensus on much.
Yet, we still were all so certain about our beliefs. So I concluded that it must be extremely common to be both certain and wrong.
This is where certainty-as-a-virtue began to fall apart for me. If I value the truth above all else—much more than I value my own feeling of being right—then I should delay certainty for as long as I can. Certainty closes the door to further thinking. It turns a living point of view into a dead formula. If I keep the door open, then at least if I am wrong, I am more likely to be corrected.
And there was another problem with a culture of certainty. By holding it up as a moral virtue, that culture implicitly shamed (and still does shame) those who were doubting. It critiques not only the perspective, but also the person who has failed to “hold to what is true” by admitting their questions. Doubt was often treated as a problem to be fixed, not as a natural process, an expression of genuine engagement, or a simple consequence of being mortal.
As someone familiar with doubt, I had a hard time believing that doubt was inherently a moral issue. After all, even if I wanted to be certain that what I believe is right, authentic certainty is more of an involuntary reaction than a choice. Asking someone to be certain of a point that they have legitimate doubt about is like asking them to laugh at a joke they don’t think is funny. We can signal the right beliefs or give a courtesy laugh, but it’s all hollow.
During that era I remember walking with a friend through his neighborhood and pointing out that if we really believe that everyone who isn’t a Christian is going to burn for all eternity when they die, we wouldn’t be casually strolling past the houses that flanked us. We’d be knocking on doors and desperately witnessing to everyone. Why weren’t we?
If we saw someone’s house was on fire, would we just walk past it? No, of course not. The gap between our beliefs and actions was glaring.
“Maybe we just don’t really believe it,” I ventured. Not that we didn’t say we believed it. Or even think that we believed it. But there must be some sense in which I could “have a belief” that I might defend in a debate and yet my lived experience was unaffected by that belief. It was all in my head, not in my bones.
I decided—not all at once, but through a lot of wrestling and fear—that I wanted to learn to pursue truth on its own terms. Not a book about truth. Not an idea that sounds true. But the thing itself. And I began to see that all this hand wringing about truth wasn’t really about the kind of truth I was wanting. It was mostly about propositional truth, the stances we take on issues. The stuff we debate.
The kind of truth I began to ache for may best be described as reality. The fundamental way things are. I used to write songs, and one from that period captures this distinction:
Do not tell me who you are
With charts and graphs
I will never get to you
Walking on maps
This shift from seeking certainty in propositional truth to curiosity about a more essential kind of truth turned out to be one of the most helpful, freeing shifts in my life. But it also put me on road full of new challenges and pitfalls.
Years after Coach’s message, I was a college kid living in an “intentional Christian community.” It was a whirlwind of new experiences, including exposure to more diverse ways of engaging with truth and certainty. I learned about orthopraxy as the counterpart to orthodoxy; truth could take the form of action. Many in the community were charismatics who emphasized emotions, supernatural power, and faith over propositional truth. I began to learn about and occasionally experience Christian expressions of mysticism. Truth could be directly experienced, I learned, yet never fully articulated.
My worldview stretched and widened, but at the height of my openness, the community dissolved. In the absence of a new internal structure to hold my identity together, I found myself suddenly plunged into a deep fog. What had been real? What had I learned? And had I really gone to a place called the Glory Barn? Those electric days of exploration quickly felt like a distant, muddled dream.
“If I keep believing, it will never be in the same way as before,” I told God.
I was finally willing—perhaps forced—to open up the big questions to God, or the universe, or whatever. Of course, I wasn’t hoping to come out of this questioning in a radically different place. Nobody likes that kind of change, myself included. But I acknowledged that if I began my search with limits on my conclusions, it would be a sham. I had no appetite for shams.
A worldview built on certainty is inflexible, like a hard, untempered blade. It can be razor sharp under perfect circumstances, but as soon as it encounters a hard challenge, it shatters.
“I just can’t believe that a loving God would send a kind Buddhist to hell.” Boom, shattered.
“I can’t believe in a young Earth / inerrancy / biblical literalism anymore.” Bye-bye Bible.
“My pastor was caught in a scandal.”
“I’ve never seen a miracle.”
“The world is too awful.”
“God commanded genocide.”
“What about the crusades?”
Peace out.
I’ve seen this happen. You’ve seen this happen. And we’ve both probably seen it characterized as a moral failure when someone’s dogmatic belief system falls apart. Shame helps to create the problem and shame deepens the damage it does.
My own examples have been rooted largely in matters of religion and politics. But these patterns, though perhaps more clear in a fundamentalist worldview, are present in any worldview, belief, or dogma. Rigid is fragile.
My plunge into questioning was, fittingly, unstructured. I dabbled in nihilism. I spent a few months letting myself feel what it would be like to exist in a universe without a god. (Candidly, it felt like existential dread). I drifted through the ebb and flow of agnosticism, deism, and theism. As I was exploring questions of metaphysics and faith, I was also naturally exploring all the smaller questions that depend on them. Some ideas softened, while others found deeper grounding.
To my surprise, my anxiety about this whole endeavor began to be replaced by an enjoyment of exploration itself. I didn’t land on being an atheist, but I discovered atheist thinkers who I really admired and even felt kinship with. My interests in eastern thought and practice, now unburdened by guilt or fear, became a source of inspiration and pleasure. I was already a science lover, but diving deeper into cosmic questions through that lens was exciting, if at times confusing.
Months went by, and while my belief system had shifted from a labeled catalogue of charts and graphs to a psychedelic swirl of irreducible complexity, I felt more and more that God was waiting for me wherever I looked. I saw flashes of a creator in the Big Bang. I discovered that meditation and contemplation were not only acceptable to God, but deeply ingrained in the formerly forbidden archives of Christendom I’d never dared explore. The Bible became more mysterious, more problematic, and more alive.
The biggest miracle: I began to embrace mystery. Not only to get comfortable with it, but to see enrichment in it. To see beauty in both knowing and not knowing. In both answering and asking questions. In asking questions without expecting an answer in return. In getting answers to questions I wasn’t asking. Slowly, very slowly, my pursuit of truth widened, stretched, and even began to form some new patterns I could identify and rely on. Something with structure like a worldview, but soft, living, and interconnected. Something more reflective of a real person.
My point is not that Coach G’s beliefs were wrong. Or that conservatives are wrong, or evangelicals are wrong. There are lots of voices that can scratch that itch for you, but I think dwelling on a reactive perspective becomes its own mental trap. I also don’t think that the kind of dogma that surrounded me is unique to those particular religious, political, or social perspectives. They’re just what I can write about from first hand experience.
What has been freeing for me is the discovery that I don’t have to play the binary game of either adhering to dogmatic certainty or abandoning belief altogether. There is a path from the safety of a rigid belief system through the wilderness of exploration to a renewed way of engaging with reality.
If you are afraid of your own thoughts and the consequences of those thoughts; if you feel weary of trying to solve the unsolvable; if some part of this resonated with a part of your soul you have kept hidden, pardon the cliché but you are not alone.
You may have spent years burying or ignoring your questions because you have been told that questioning is a moral failure. But you cannot authentically pursue the truth by lying to yourself. Honoring truth means seeing yourself as you are, questions and all.
You may believe that questioning a belief is a bridge to nowhere—that you’ll be left adrift in a featureless ocean of uncertainty. But truth exists beyond the boundaries of our individual fears. It beckons us to risk, step out, and even experience feeling lost as we’re humbled by the expanse of reality.
You may be burdened by the responsibility of holding the truth together for yourself and others. But the truth never did and never will need you in order to exist. Truth holds us together, not the other way around.
You may feel that if you pull on one yarn of your belief system, the whole thing may unravel. If you feel that way, I’d like to suggest that you get on with it and pull. If you’re patient, open and willing to practice humility, you’ll learn to knit something new in due time.
The thoughts that live in our heads do not define who we are. We’re people, not bumper stickers. You don’t need to have all the answers. I might even argue that you need to not have all the answers. Answers are endings. We need beginnings and middles, too.
The path from chasing certainty to embracing curiosity, mystery, and the endless road to understanding is an unsettling one, but one worth walking. Especially, I think, if we can learn to walk it together.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” - St. Paul