I was explicitly asked to write this essay by a couple of friends, after trying to explain to them what a third party's reaction had been during a mutual discussion between the four of us. However, dearly beloved, it's universal enough that I hope it makes sense to your life as well.
All of us, at some point in our lives, make a sort of epistemological leap, after which we say "these are the tools by which I measure reality, and any other set of tools will result in a false answer."
Some of us can trace this event back to a traumatic event, after which we found ourselves forced to evaluate the entirety of ourselves and our world. Others experience an ecstatic conversion, religious or otherwise. Most people, I imagine, come about this process in a relatively haphazard way, adopting some ideas from their parents, some from charismatic teachers, from books, from moments of epiphany, from times of deep reflection. There is no particular reason to say that any one of these three ways of forming our toolbox is any better or worse than any other.
It is all well and good to declare that science has the right of it, that our knowledge is empirically verifiable in ways that other systems are not. But even as a dyed in the wool skeptic, I am cognizant that I have only a limited intelligence with the smallest ability to grasp at the edges of the greater whole. There is no metric by which we may evaluate the beliefs of others when those beliefs rest upon a different foundation. Certainly the world could be flat, and all evidence you or I produce to the contrary, either a measurement, or a logical argument, could be discounted as a fragment of a grand conspiracy to hide the truth, etc. We call the process of the creation of such excuses "special pleading" because there is a way to explain away everything to the contrary. But to the person who believes the world is flat, these explanations are simply part and parcel with with their rubric of belief. Whatever toolbox they have has lead them to evaluate the world in this manner. There is no way to persuade them that the world is a globe, resting in time-space, orbiting the sun, without convincing them that there is something wrong with their toolbox.
What this means, in my view, is that nothing we know, or have come to believe in, is without suspect. The trite way of phrasing this is "the unexamined life is not worth living." I want to reorganize this platitude.
If there is something you have decided is true, if it cannot hold up to sustained and extreme criticism, it is time to reevaluate it.
It's a bit less catchy, I know.
There is nothing to say that any one truth you hold is more correct than any other, simply because you doubt it, or are more sensitive to it being questioned. You could engage in a life long pursuit to daily rewrite your fundamental tools, in a kind of hyper-Cartesianism. This seems impractical. You might go through your entire life without having to fight for the things you believe. It can be remarkable how often the odd conclusions we come to as children can go decades without being questioned (there was a hilarious episode of This American Life which covered exactly this). Conversely, when you examine your truth carefully, you may continue to find it whole and unchanged by questions, or new information.
Neither I am I proposing a kind of ontological relativism. We do not have to dismiss the objectivity of our universe entirely. This is instead a sort of inherent humility, as safeguard against hubris. Everyone feels that he or she has the right of it, that if only others could see our point of view, they would know better.
What we need to recognize, is that our choices when we choose our tools are primarily emotional. People choose to believe in God because doing so is more comfortable for them, I choose to not believe in God because for me a reality without one is far preferable. (There is no real way to measure the correctness of either conclusion. If there were some sort of supernatural reality, it would by definition be unmensurable, and as everyone knows, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is a leap of faith to decide one way or the other, or even to maintain the apparent middle road of agnosticism.)
Pay attention to that discomfort when you are challenged, and be careful of it when you see it in others. If you find yourself fighting back with ad hominem attacks against the person who disagrees with you, or defending your position as either "sensible," "righteous," or "optimistic," you have run up against a link to your fundamental tool box, a choice you made, often long ago. Take a step back from your argument, even from the position you are advocating. Why do you believe this? Why does the other person believe what they believe? You cannot force the other person to change their mind, if what they are basing their ideas on includes conflicting tools in their toolbox.
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