It’s not just childhood myths that aren’t true. We as adults are constantly finding out things we once believed as a society simply aren’t true. When I was growing up my mother taught me to eat the yoke of the egg because it was better for you than the white. Now we are told that the opposite. That the yoke will give you cardiac disease. That the white stuff is all good.
I heard about a professor who was teaching a graduate course in quantum physics: “Half of what I’m about to teach you is going to turn out to be bullshit,” he said, pointing to the fact that our knowledge of physics is still evolving. “The problem is we don’t know which half that is!”
In ancient Greece, Socrates was told that the Oracle of Delphi had declared him the wisest man on the planet. His reply? “It must be because I know that I know nothing.” Others who were less wise apparently believed that they knew something.
In the 1600s the father of modern philosophy, a Frenchman named Rene Descartes, locked himself in a room for twenty years and concluded there were only two things he could know for certain:
1) “I think, therefore I am.” And 2) that “God exists because I can prove it.”
Unfortunately for the rest of us, Descartes’ proof of God turned out to be bogus. This led to a philosophical nervous breakdown, with everyone wondering if there was anything we could know. That is, until Immanuel Kant came along a century later and saved the day, pointing out that there had to be certain truths in order for sentient beings to exist. Still, even if we can say for a fact that 2 + 2 must equal 4, there’s so much we don’t know – including the vast majority of what we take for “fact.”
When you look back over the centuries, there are many things which we take as gospel that are not. For the longest time, people thought the sun revolved around the earth. Now we think the people who believed this were idiots. It is humbling, is it not, to think that a hundred years from now people will think we were idiots for what we believe today? Won’t it be something if we get the opportunity after we die to look back over our lives and realize exactly how much we thought we knew, and were wrong about?
Today’s challenge: As you go through the day, think about those things we take for granted — and recognize that much of it is going to turn out to be rubbish.