Meet an atheist ... who believes in God

[struggle4progress]

17. Those who convince themselves, that they have obtained a consistent

and accurate view of the world, seem often to become terrifying ideologues: there remains for them nothing to challenge their confidence in their views; they cannot be dissuaded of any error -- for Behold! It all fits together perfectly! How could it be wrong?

The reality, of course, is that no one has the time to check it all

We all construct our understandings of the world as patchworks of little local charts, which we hope fit together but which (in fact) do so only approximately

The experts in physics, for example, seem to think relativity theory inconsistent with quantum mechanics. One does not abandon either relativity theory or quantum mechanics as a result of the conflict, nor does one adopt the view that one must be true and the other false: instead, one recognizes that the theories arose to solve different sorts of problems and that both are successful in their original domains; and then one hopes people to try to improve such situations, though no one will work on such a reconciliation without believing it to be possible. There is no reason to think the end of such works is within our sight: many late Victorian physicists, some great geniuses of their time, of course, thought all physics had been done, but they were soon shown wrong, which should be a lesson to us, as we (who stand today so proudly on their achievements) are really no smarter than they were

The English law came to terms with the problem of consistency in a purely practical way: rather than searching for long syllogistic chains leading to the desired conclusions, the courts demanded that arguments remain closely tethered to decisions for related cases and so stay on-point.

This emphasizes the local character of the reasoning: it is somewhat parallel to the view (say) of physicists that a calculation, no matter how beautiful or brilliant it might be, should be filed in the wastebasket if it fails to predict experimental results correctly

And for similar reasons, physicists do not currently seek to predict astronomical phenomena by observing zebra entrails: their theories have prescribed domains, beyond which one expects their usefulness to cease -- a good theory is about something, and if it pretends to be about everything then it is most likely about nothing at all

In any case, as a matter of pure logic, consistency appears now to be beyond us, except in the very simplest matters. There are limits on how powerful a theory can be, before proof of its consistency cannot be obtained except by appealing to a more powerful theory -- which might seem merely a species of begging the question

Why then should I have contempt for someone who says, In these situations I use this scheme, and in those situations I use that scheme -- even if we both know the schemes are incompatible? Should I have contempt for a physicist (say) who today does a quantum mechanical calculation to solve one problem and who tomorrow does a relativistic calculation to solve a different problem? It may be the best one can do under the circumstances