Uncertain about Certainty

How do we know what we know? What does it even mean to "know" something?

I ran across an interesting book title today that provoked curiosity...

On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert Burton MD

Amazon's product description includes this note: "In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation...an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen."

Two helpful commentaries led me to the book:
Skeptical Monkey
Science-Based Medicine

Here are two pulled quotes from those commentaries:

"...many people, especially religious fundamentalists, can’t deal with uncertainty. They demand absolute answers and cling to their certainties even in the face of contrary evidence. Why are people so different in their need for certainty? We know there is a gene associated with risk-taking and novelty-seeking. Burton makes an intriguing suggestion: could genetic differences make individuals get different degrees of pleasure out of the feeling of knowing?"

"If science and religion could both accept that all our facts are really provisional, absolutism could be dethroned and a dialog might become possible. ...I have long thought that absolutism was one of humanity’s greatest problems. There are implications for politics, religion, and every sphere of human activity."

In this find today, I am reminded of a recent debate which was referenced on this blog, where one participant declared that "certainty surely is the biggest threat to rationality, and to science."

Conciliable Use of Religion

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is endeavoring to encourage the appropriate use of religious faith to benefit mankind. In a recent address, he had some interesting things to say as he warned against extremism:

Paraphrased: Virtually every religion is tainted by extremism. Extremists are those who see their faith as a means of excluding the other person who does not share it. Religious faiths need to be protected from the influence of extremists on one hand and militant secularists, who would exclude all religious influence, on the other.

News articles here:
Catholic World News
Reuters
The Guardian

From the Guardian article:
"He said having a faith and believing it to be the truth is fine, but not when it looks down upon those of other faiths or none - where God becomes partisan and not universal and is defined by who he is against rather than the universal values we all share. Blair spoke about how religion can be a force for good and was very conscious, if left to extremists, of how it can be a force for wrong."