I've been having a discussion on email lately with a friend. I have the highest regard for him, and I hope he feels the same about me. We get along well in person; partly, I think, because we never talk about politics or religion.
On e-mail, however, we can't seem to agree on anything, even on what we don't agree about, or why we don't agree.
It's as though we lived in two different worlds, and in a way I suppose we do. Our world is as much a function of our worldview as it is of our experience, and my friend’s worldview and mine are separated by an enormous chasm.
I've been peering into that chasm lately, trying to discover its nature. I'm interested partly because I used to stand on the other side—not far from where my friend stands now.
The longer I stare, the deeper it becomes. It’s not just about religion, or politics, or even human nature. It’s not even primarily about values. It comes down to questions that we normal people seldom think about—questions we leave to philosophers.
A recent example is evolution. My friend maintains that it’s “just a theory”, and I really don’t know how to respond to that, because the gulf between us is not so much about evolution, or even whether it’s a theory, but about the meaning of the word theory, and the nature of knowledge.
My friend believes there are theories, which are just ideas he can choose to accept or not, and then there are facts, which are absolutely true. He thinks that schools ought to either stick to the facts or teach all the competing theories.
Given his view of knowledge, all of that is reasonable.
But I live in a different world, where most of what we know, especially about the big questions, is, and always will be, unprovable (in my friend’s absolute sense). In my world, calling evolution, or anything else, a theory doesn’t discredit it. Outside of mathematics and logic, there is nothing we know for sure—only some things we are more sure of than others.
Newton’s laws of physics passed as absolute fact for 200 years, but if they had been the final truth you wouldn’t be reading this, because your computer, and mine, wouldn’t work.
In my world, all knowledge is provisional.
Of course, ideas about knowledge is only one way in which our worlds differ. There are others.
Which is why even I am absolutely certain of one thing: this chasm, and all the issues in it, require some serious thought—some serious mulling over.
At least, that’s what I think today.
