Certainty
Certainty is the state of being free from doubt or having no questions about something.
The realm of certainty is the realm of scientific method, evidence and proof.
Certainty can refer to a state of mind, such as having a strong belief or confidence in something, or to a scenario that is very likely to happen or is impossible to doubt.
We need to sit with uncertainty, not run from it. Acknowledging with confidence and courage that lack of knowledge is what drives our curiosity, uncovering new understanding. Our craving for certainty often makes us ignore what is important, those small doubts that whisper: maybe we can’t cut costs further, perhaps the drugs don’t work, is the building safe? If, by letting go of our craving for certainty, we retrieve a sense of our capacity to make something – of ourselves, of each other, of the world – we can discover the benefits of doubt.
Margaret Heffernan, Embrace the unknown: the benefits of learning to live with uncertainty, on The Guardian website
Knowing and not knowing
Between full ignorance and total certainty is a vast intermediate space where we conduct our lives.
Carlo Rovelli, Italian theoretical physicist
Being able to not know, for the poet John Keats (and the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who quoted him), means being “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. It gives rise to a state of mind in which your thoughts can wander and wonder, you can be curious, have feelings, and out of those feelings can grow thoughts, and you can dream and test out ideas and explore.
Moya Sarner, Want to know everything? Perhaps it’s best if you don’t on The Guardian website
Faith
Faith is a state of being in which you are able to proceed without evidence, without empirical proof, without certainty.
It is impossible to prove that the existence of the generative impulse I call intent, because it does not inhabit the realm in which proof operates. It non-exists in primal world, the non-realm of nonexistence.
If intent (or whatever name you prefer) is real, then surely there would be some kind of device that indicates its presence?
There is such a device. It is the human. We are the intent-ometer.
Faith, of the kind described in the quotes below, is the overriding prerequisite for transcending the mundane and creating that which enriches the world.
Faith is a much-abused term, often derided in modern secular circles as the blind obedience to some arbitrary authority. But it has a wiser and more useful meaning: faith as a critical but curious mind’s readiness to adopt a reality model (even if provisionally) for which there is less than absolute, empirical proof. I propose that this kind of faith is the necessary adaptation by any rational mind to the challenges of life in the real world in which reality presents us with far too much, far too quickly. Events, personalities and relationships that carry embedded meaning and value are not the sorts of existents that can pass any rigid absolute-empirical-proof test.
All trust relationships contain a measure of faith. So when the term faith is used in this essay [The Dialogic Imperative, no longer available], it refers to reasonable faith, as in the faith that is necessary for a reasonable mind to operate in the real world. Faith in this sense requires courage. Reasonable faith is heuristic in the sense that it is only by means of growing trust that we can open ourselves to the full range of knowledge that the universe presents to us.
There is a faith path from Isaac Newton through Baruch Spinoza to Albert Einstein that has propelled the scientific enterprise: Each of these great minds was moved by the faith-based conviction that the universe has been endowed with an elegant underlying deign, so miraculously intelligible to human intelligence that scientists are justified in doggedly pursuing its secrets.
Jay B. Gaskill, The Dialogic Imperative
Faith represents an existential commitment of the heart, a way of life, a set of behaviors and emotional responses woven into every hour of everyday life — expressed through constant choices both when alone and in social situations.
Peter A. Georgescu, Faith isn’t irrational, but beliefs may be, on Huffington Post | Peter A. Georgescu is Chairman Emeritus of advertising agency network Young & Rubicam, Inc.
Everything is faith, including faith in science. The extent that science can reduce the world into objective certainties is absurdly limited, and most of human life and experience will always remain faith-based.
Benedict Waterson, commenting on the UnHerd article Shroud of Turin shows that science only enhances mystery, by Esme Partridge
More quotes
The reason every wisdom tradition, from Taoism to modern neuroscience, identifies uncertainty tolerance as the fundamental skill is that uncertainty is the essential nature of existence itself—it’s the gap between cause and effect where all possibility lives.
When the Buddha spoke of impermanence as the source of suffering, when quantum physics revealed the probabilistic nature of reality, when entrepreneurs discover that markets are fundamentally unpredictable, they’re all pointing to the same truth: control is an illusion, and the attempt to grasp certainty in an uncertain universe creates the very suffering we’re trying to avoid.
The religious mind calls this faith, the entrepreneurial mind calls it courage, the neuroscientific mind calls it prefrontal cortex regulation of the amygdala-but they’re all describing the capacity to function powerfully while acknowledging you don’t know and can’t control what happens next.
Every breakthrough in human history happened because someone moved forward without knowing the outcome, while everyone else waited for certainty that never came.
This isn’t about conquering fear; it’s about recognizing that uncertainty is reality’s baseline state, and your resistance to it-not the uncertainty itself—is what creates paralysis.
Developing this capacity requires understanding that you can’t think your way into comfort with uncertainty; you must feel your way through it.
The practice is deceptively simple: notice when you’re avoiding small uncertainties-compulsively checking your phone, over- preparing for minor conversations, seeking reassurance-and instead pause to feel the discomfort in your body without trying to resolve it.
Start with manageable doses: have a conversation where you don’t plan what you’ll say next, start a project before you feel ready, take a different route without checking the map first.
Each time you function successfully despite feeling uncertain, you’re building empirical evidence against your brain’s catastrophic predictions.
This is what ancient Stoics meant by voluntary discomfort, what exposure therapy leverages, what entrepreneurs call “getting comfortable being uncomfortable”-the deliberate, repeated experience of feeling anxious while nothing terrible happens, gradually teaching your nervous system that uncertainty is not danger.
The transformation occurs through accumulation: after hundreds of repetitions of “I felt uncertain, I continued anyway, I survived and often thrived,” your brain reclassifies uncertainty from “existential threat” to “normal operating condition.”
Source unknown
If there were already a logical answer, we would have already found it.
Now this isn’t the Middle Ages.
There isn’t a shortage of people who are desperately trying to look logical to each other.
You can call them McKinsey.
You can call them your board of directors.
You can call them a finance department.
You can call them your procurement department.
Rational people are all over the sodding place, and they control everything.
Therefore if a problem is persistent it’s fairly likely, I would suggest, that the reason for the persistence of that problem is that it’s logicproof.
There may be a solution to it, but conventional linear rationality isn’t going to find it.
Rory Sutherland, Vice-chairman, Ogilvy | View source
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External sources
The certainty of ignorance by Koen Smets on Substack
The certainty of uncertainty by Max St John
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