Certainty and Covid

Covid has presented a challenge to our culture's wrestling with the whole notion of truth. The post modern idea of relative truth does not work with something like Covid. We are not able to allow everyone to have their own truth (about how it spreads, how dangerous it is, the effectiveness of masks and vaccines, the best way to protect against it, etc.) because one person's view of the truth about Covid does not only impact them, but others as well.

We are not able to just live and let live, agree to disagree, when some people believe that masking, distancing, and vaccines are necessary to stop the spread of a dangerous pandemic while others believe that they are not necessary and are harmful in other ways. The relative view of truth only works if the truth does not really matter.

So with Covid, there has been a quest for certainty because the truth would determine how society faced the pandemic. But this quest for certainty did not lead to a healthy pursuit of truth. Instead, it has produced a pursuit driven more by confirmation bias than honest investigation. On both sides, stories are told and believed simply because they support the perspectives people already have and want to believe and promote. Ironically, the truth has been sacrificed in a quest for certainty about what is true.

Even among the scientific community, where the objective pursuit of observable truth is supposed to be sacrosanct, there is evidence of efforts to silence certain scientifically legitimate perspectives, observations, and questions on entirely subjective grounds because they did not support the desirable hypothesis. An appeal to "trust the science" is now met with skepticism because it is viewed as propaganda rather than scientific truth.

I am someone who greatly values truth and understanding and I do want to be certain of what is true. But in the quest to understand the truth about Covid, I have found that those who are the most certain of their understanding, on both sides, are invariably those who ignore facts that challenge their perspectives and regularly promote "facts" that are simply not true when exposed to honest investigation. Those who are the most certain are actually the least reliable sources for truth.

Is this primarily attributed to politics? Politics has certainly influenced the engagement with Covid. However, it may be that a quest for certainty is always in danger of this mishandling of truth when the truth is more complicated and complex than we are able to grasp. The more complex the truth, the more it will frustrate our desire for certainty. And this leads to what I really want to blog about….. how does the quest for certainty relate to Christian truth? In a reaction against the wishy washiness of post modern truth and its influence on liberal theology, is a quest for certainty entirely healthy for the Church? Or do we see some of the problems that we have seen with Covid?