Spirals

How do we find certainty?

It seems to me that man has been turning himself in circles for thousands of years - constantly falling back onto what has been before - mutating it - tweaking it - unable to decide whether the spiral of his achievement is screwing upward or downward.
As for me, I am hopelessly lost in that convoluted uncertainty of knowledge. It seems impossible to maintain humility, openness - to stretch toward invention and simultaneously kneel before the wisdom of the past. I can react to the thought of the generation before me - embrace a certain rejected part of the past - and in doing so only add my voice to the chorus of my own generation whose thought will, in its turn be reacted against by my children or grandchildren and perhaps, in the distant future, re-embraced by my frustrated descendants. Unless I ignore all this, certainty - even about scripture itself - would seem unattainable.

But maybe we aren't meant to find it.

J. Bronowski, a renowned biologist, said "When knowledge becomes dogmatic certainty, tyrrany results." (paraphrased)

Science (which is merely Latin for knowledge), according to Bronowski, too often becomes a quest for power and control of the universe. What twentieth century physics has taught science (or ought to have taught - a great number of evolutionists and logical positivists hold their theoretical ground like the best fundamentalists) is that certainty about the universe flits further and further away the more we swipe at it with our nets. Science, then, Bronowski says (and with him many others, like Stephen Hawking), must not be a search for an immutable goal, but a self-aware, continuing exercise in wonder.

I fear that if we don't, in theology and philosophy, take this same line - however maddening I may find it to be so uncertain of my convictions - our certainty will remain a scepter by which we are all gods - striving to control not only each other and our world but God himself.