I recently had an exhausting but interesting conversation with my brother Rodney.
We discussed Fauci, the coronavirus, the courts, criminal cases, Bill Gates, vaccines, and other subjects already loaded with controversy. Rodney described situations that he believed definitively established certain facts. I kept trying to distinguish the observable facts from the conclusions and meanings we attach to them.
One example involved a recent case concerning a mother and the deaths of her children. The most basic established fact is that the children are dead. From there, an investigation must construct the larger story. Who caused their deaths? What does the evidence support? If there was a confession, is it reliable? What was the person’s intent and mental state?
These questions matter, and not every answer is equally credible. Evidence can make one conclusion overwhelmingly more reasonable than another. But the event itself, the evidence surrounding it, the conclusions drawn from that evidence, and the legal or moral meaning assigned to those conclusions are different layers of the story.
Rodney tended to see the evidence as forming a clear, black-and-white picture. I saw more uncertainty between the established facts and their interpretation.
We went around and around.
He could not convince me that his interpretation was the only reasonable one, and I could not persuade him to separate what happened from what he believed it meant.
Eventually, the conversation became circular and exhausting, so I ended it.
Yet it stayed with me because beneath our disagreement was a much more interesting question:
How much of what I call reality is fact, and how much is my interpretation of fact?
Some Facts Are Fairly Solid
I am not suggesting that facts do not exist.
From where I am standing, there is an up and a down, a left and a right. A person may be alive or dead. An event either occurred or did not. Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. These are claims supported by direct observation, physical evidence, documentation, or overwhelming historical agreement.
Evidence matters.
Some explanations are far better supported than others. A carefully investigated conclusion is not equal to a rumor simply because both are expressed by human beings.
But even when an event is established, its complete meaning rarely is.
Witnesses to the same event often remember different details. Historians can agree about what occurred while disagreeing about why it occurred, what it meant, and which consequences mattered most. A court can determine that a claim has been proven under a particular legal standard. That makes it a legal finding; it does not make the court omniscient or eliminate every possible uncertainty.
The fact may be the dot.
The interpretation is the picture we believe the dots create.
The Solo Viewpoint
Every human being experiences life from a solo perspective.
I look through my eyes, not Rodney’s. I interpret the world through my memories, fears, loyalties, education, disappointments, desires, and expectations. Even before I form a conscious opinion, my mind has already selected what to notice and placed it inside an existing framework.
I may try to be objective.
Science gives us disciplined methods for testing observations, exposing error, and reducing individual bias. Courts use evidence, procedure, and competing arguments for a similar reason. These systems can move us closer to reliable knowledge.
But the person using any system remains a viewpoint.
The map can become increasingly accurate, but it is still not the territory.
This is why I try to hold “facts” carefully—not dismissively, but humbly.
I want to ask:
- What can actually be observed or verified?
- What conclusion am I drawing from it?
- What remains unknown?
- What new evidence might change my mind?
The danger begins when interpretation quietly disguises itself as fact.
Humility Does Not Mean Nothing Is True
There is an important distinction here.
Intellectual humility does not require me to pretend that every explanation is equally likely or that nothing can really be known.
I can know some things with great confidence.
I can infer other things from strong evidence.
I can believe still other things because they seem reasonable or consistent with my experience.
And I can leave some questions unanswered because I simply do not know.
Those are not the same intellectual positions.
The mistake is not reaching conclusions. I could hardly function without them.
The mistake is forgetting what kind of conclusion I have reached.
Something I strongly suspect is not the same as something I can demonstrate. Something supported by considerable evidence is not the same as an absolute certainty. And admitting uncertainty does not require me to abandon judgment.
Perhaps wisdom includes knowing the difference.
Why Certainty Feels So Good
My conversation with Rodney also helped me see why certainty can become so important.
Life is chaotic. People are unpredictable. Institutions fail. Bodies become sick. Relationships change. Every human life ends in death, followed by a mystery none of us can conclusively describe from this side of it.
Against that uncertainty, a black-and-white world can feel safe.
The ego wants a stable map.
It wants to know who is good, who is dangerous, who is guilty, who is lying, and which authority can be trusted. Once it has assembled an explanation, defending that explanation may begin to feel like defending reality itself.
I recognize this impulse because it is not merely Rodney’s.
It is mine too.
My ego also wants to be right. It also becomes attached to stories that make my experience coherent. It can mistake confidence for accuracy and disagreement for ignorance.
The moment I imagine that I am diagnosing Rodney while he is merely being unreasonable, I may be repeating the very pattern I see in him.
That recognition brings me back to humility.
Rodney has an interpretation.
I have an interpretation of his interpretation.
Neither of us is standing outside humanity with God’s unobstructed view.
Where the Soul Enters
What I call the soul seems less threatened by uncertainty.
I cannot prove that the soul exists as a separate metaphysical reality. I do know that relating to this deeper perspective is psychologically useful to me. It creates a third position from which I can observe both the event and my ego’s immediate explanation of it.
The ego says:
This is what happened. This is what it means. Defend it.
The soul seems to ask:
What else might be true? What am I unable to see? Can I remain open without becoming gullible?
The soul does not require me to reject evidence or pretend every claim is equally plausible.
It invites me to distinguish discernment from certainty.
Perhaps the soul does not possess more facts.
Perhaps it is simply more comfortable leaving incomplete information incomplete.
It can say:
This appears likely.
The evidence currently points in this direction.
I may understand part of what happened.
I do not yet know the whole story.
That is not weakness.
It may be one of the strongest positions available to a human mind.
A Truth That Does Not Become a Prison
I no longer need my understanding to be accepted as truth in someone else’s mind.
I only need it to be honest and useful within my own—and even there, I want to leave the door unlocked.
I want to remain open to the next fact, the next experience, or the next perspective that enlarges the picture. I do not want to be so open-minded that I abandon judgment, but neither do I want to become so certain that judgment hardens into a cell.
My working truth is therefore provisional.
It is the best picture I can form from the dots I can presently see.
Tomorrow I may step farther back. New dots may appear. What looked like a face may become a crowd, and what looked like a crowd may become one small part of a much larger story.
And if there is an ultimate truth about life, God, consciousness, or who I really am, it has not been made obvious from where I stand.
I do not see a God displaying one unmistakable truth so clearly that every sincere person arrives at the same conclusion.
I do not see a universal soul forcing humanity into one ideology, religion, or prescribed way of living.
I do not see a supreme empirical ego standing above existence with complete information and the authority to declare its final meaning.
Instead, I see human beings looking through different windows, gathering fragments, comparing stories, and sometimes mistaking the view from one window for the entire world.
And I see myself among them.
Perhaps I am a kindergartner staring at college-level mathematics written across the universe—recognizing that the symbols must mean something, sensing an extraordinary intelligence or order within them, but understanding only a fraction of what I am seeing.
I can study the markings. I can form theories. I can listen to others explain what they believe the equation means. I may even discover a few answers reliable enough to help me live.
But intellectual honesty requires me to admit that I still do not know what in the hell—or heaven—is going on here.
Strangely, that admission does not leave me empty.
It leaves me curious.
It frees me to keep learning, to keep questioning, and to remain open to truths larger than the mind presently trying to contain them.
Perhaps truth sets me free not when I finally possess it, but when I stop pretending that my small piece of it is the whole.