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Whaddya know?

Whaddya know?

Last updated on: September 7, 2026 at 4:23 pm by Fred Clark

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Whaddya know? 2026-09-07T16:23:36-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

We could jump right into this conversation between David Roberts and the political scientist Samuel Bagg about misinformation. Or we could work our way into it with something like this:

This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.

Let us therefore not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.

If this be well understood, I think that we shall remain at rest, each in the state wherein nature has placed him.

That’s Pascal in his Pensées.

Or we could start off with this, from E.B. White’s, “On Democracy“:

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet.

But we might as well start where I suspect we’ll also wind up at the end, with 1 Corinthians 13,* the treatise on epistemology that gets read at weddings:

Where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part … what is in part disappears. … These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

I’m partial to that last one because I am partial.

That’s an odd word. “Partiality” is something we imagine we should — and therefore imagine we can — avoid. We associate the word with bias, and with chosen bias, and thus with unfairness and inaccuracy and untruth.

But the word itself is not so obviously judgmental. The word itself does not accuse us of wickedness but simply recognizes our finitude.

We Christians often have a lot to say about sin and wickedness and depravity and suchlike because there’s always a lot of that going around. But sin isn’t our only problem. We’re also simply, and frustratingly, finite creatures. Our brains are amazing, but they are also limited (and conditioned, and situated, and mortal, and weird).

Human finitude is not a choice and not a moral failure. Our partialness and our partiality are simply impartial facts that precede choice or morality.

Our reluctance to accept this is sometimes expressed in moralistic terms. “Ignorance” is pejorative and condemnatory, used in a way that suggests all ignorance is willful and willing and chosen. Much of it is, but much of it is not.

The online maxim of Hanlon’s/Heinlein’s Razor is interesting in this regard. It says, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” That word “stupidity” can lead us astray because it can also be understood as a kind of deliberate obtuseness — as malice in a slightly different form.

“Stupidity” and “ignorance” tend to carry such moralistic connotations because that presumption or projection protects us from having to admit that “stupidity” and “ignorance” are unavoidable facts of the human condition that none of us is exempt from. And most of us don’t like to accept that such terms also, inevitably, apply to us all in some situations.

It may help, then, to rephrase this maxim as “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by finitude.”

In the realm of Christian theology, I might suggest putting it this way: “Never attribute to sin that which is adequately explained by finitude.” I think this helps us to perceive our human neighbors more accurately but also to regard them more graciously and more gracefully, in every sense. (Freely you have received, freely give.)

But it’s never quite so easy to distinguish between the two. And it often seems like the correct answer in the game of “Stupid or evil?” is “Both.” Maybe a more precise way of putting things would be to say, “Never attribute exclusively to sin that which is adequately explained exclusively by finitude.”

But such exclusivity may be hard to identify and even harder to find. Our finitude is something that exists on its own, but also something that exists among other things. Our finitude is not entirely insulated and isolated from our sin — the self-serving, self-justifying selfishness that tempts us and inclines us to treat people as things. Our sinfulness, likewise, is shaped by our finitude — and also can be, happily, bounded by it, limited by our limits.

Our partiality is always, itself, partial. Our malice is always at least partly a function of our ignorance and our ignorance is always at least partly a function of our malice. Terms like “confirmation bias” and “the cardinal sin of pride” are never entirely unrelated.

And but so therefore: fickle shadows and through a glass darkly and perpetually the beginning of the ninth, etc. and alas.

But that funny word “partiality” also itself suggests the (partial) solution to this human dilemma. Each of us is, inevitably, partial. But we are, and we have, different parts. We can choose to be apart, or we can choose to be a part. We can choose, in other words, to trust one another and to rely on one another and to listen to one another.**

It sounds absurd, I know. I am finite and partial and therefore I cannot trust myself. And you are finite and partial and therefore cannot be trusted either. So how could it possibly make any sense to suggest that you should trust me and I should trust you?

This is part of why, I think, faith and hope are abidingly necessary. And why nothing can be certain apart from love.

All of which seems pretty abstract and ethereal. Like, thanks, I guess, for this airy little sermon that may or may not be true about how everything we think we know about what we think we know may or may not be true, but what does any of that have to do with … you know … all this creeping fascism and mass deportation and ethnic cleansing and international villainy and the concentration of wealth and kleptocratic corruption and the extremely high stakes of the upcoming midterm elections?

That larger, urgent context has to do with this same question of whether we finite, fallible humans are capable of democracy.

That’s the big, daunting question underlying that discussion between Roberts and Baggs — a discussion I want to look at and to discuss ourselves.

Roberts gave that interview this title: “The cure for misinformation is not more information or smarter news consumers.” That gets at part of what they’re getting at, but only part. It is also a deep dive into the question of whether or not we finite humans can really be sure we know anything, and about how difficult it is to convince or to persuade one another that anything might be true.

So given that difficulty, I wanted to start with the sermon to remind us that these three things — faith, hope, and love — are possible. They are not just possibilities, but possible choices, and the possibility of choosing them suggests agency, both for ourselves and for those we seek to persuade.

The cure for misinformation is not more information, or better information, or smarter news consumers. But it may have something to do with “And yet I will show you the most excellent way.”

* 1 Corinthians 13 is canonical scripture for us Christians. (A canon being an example of a socially constructed, cooperative agreement about what is and what is not true.) It is, we say, inspired holy writ. It is revelation — what we claim in faith to be truth revealed to us directly by God.

Why should we Christians listen to 1 Corinthians 13? Because it is inspired, authoritative scripture. Because it is divine revelation. Because it is canon.

That’s what we say about Paul’s words, but it’s not at all what Paul says.

Here in 1 Corinthians 13 Paul makes no claim to the authority of divine revelation. He was certainly familiar with the idea — he was the Damascus Road guy, after all. But he does not assert that divine revelation is the basis for any of what he’s arguing here. He avoids making such a claim as the basis for certainty.

More than that, really — he seems dismissive of the notion that it could be the basis for certainty. Here’s a bit from his second letter to the folks in Corinth:

Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.

Are such “visions and revelations” real or true? “I do not know,” Paul says. Twice. God knows but we cannot. Paul knows a man (possibly he means himself) who had some mind-blowing vision and revelation that he’s unable to describe or to understand. Paul doesn’t doubt that the “man” had such an experience, but he doesn’t see how it changes anything in terms of what we know or what we can know.

All we can know for sure about such visions and revelations. Paul insists, is that if they have not love they mean nothing. Love is the measure and the only certain evaluation. We can know what love is without relying on any such visions and revelations and we can evaluate them by whether or not they accord with love. If they do, they have added nothing to what we already know and there is nothing to be gained. If they do not, then they are blaring brass and clashing cymbals — mere noise. Either way, they are nothing to brag about.

** One way to describe ignorance is the self-centered choice to know only that which you personally know from your own limited/situated/finite point of view. If we are uninterested in others, refusing to love them as we love ourselves, we cut ourselves off from knowing what they are able to know from their points of view.

What we know is always greater than what any one of us can know on our own. Knowledge is social. This is why I can say, truthfully, that “we know” how to provide indoor plumbing or that “we know” how to cure bacterial pneumonia, even though I personally and individually do not know such things. If I were left to my own devices and to “doing my own research,” I would be mourning the death of my wife in a flooded house.

The rejection of this social aspect of knowledge is a moral choice — a self-centered, prideful denial of the value and reality of other people. It results in an ignorance more dangerous and intractable than the naively innocent ignorance that is the starting point for all of us. A friend of mine once described this by saying that we humans “can choose to be synoptic or we can choose sin-optics” and that was both so insightful and such a howlingly awful preacher’s pun that I’ve remembered it ever since. Please forgive me for sharing it here.

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