Voltaire once said:
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.I found a great video of Richard Feynman talking about living with uncertainty:
For those of you who can't watch video or have slow connections, here's the transcript:
Richard Feynman: You see, one thing, is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing then to have answers which 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 we're here?" and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and then if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a strange universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.I'm tempted to go a step beyond Feynman here and say that not only is it possible, or okay, to live with doubt and uncertainty, but that it is a given. The only question is whether or not we place those doubts and uncertainties below a thin layer of a faith claim. When people say, "I know God exists and created the universe," they know no such thing. They believe it and have faith in it, but they don't have warrant to have "justified true belief," which is the definition of knowledge. And so no religion gives knowledge, they simply give a measure of certitude, proportional to how much a person decides they'll put "faith", or unjustified belief, in something.
