What do we believe that we cannot prove?

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks for the reminder. It's been a while since I dipped into the Edge - I think the last moment was a moment when the savants were both rather strident and self-congratulatory, and I faded out. Yet coming back I was struck by their 2005 collection of thoughts. A provocative title What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
(In my epexegetical way - I'm not sure about the sub-title: I suspect that we are in an age of non-certainty, and that knowledge and wisdom are endangered in all fields - science, religion, philosophy, history...)
Anyway, back on track. The main title is a good starter. So, folks what do you believe but cannot prove ?

[Skip Zilla]

In my mind's eye, there is an important distinction to be made between 1) ready, unstudied, fictionalizing of what happens phenomenally in this life, which essentially we neither attempt to prove but accept on faith, nor more likely couldn't prove if we tried because of the complexity involved, and 2) exhaustingly deliberative, creatively experimental attempts at determining a narrative which aims at relating what's effectively at play in those complex relations of entities. Both are first and foremost "mind games" made possible by a human brain that has tripled in mass of neurons since about a half-million years ago. The human brain has developed in such a way as to allow humans to be the most mentally "fictive" of intelligent minds on the planet. This imaginative, narration-mongering capacity has been truly a double-edged sword, however, in terms of our historic achievements and debasements. My concern is that as a species our time is running out for illusory, manifest-destiny use of our fictive capacities. It seems that a conscious, difficult choice faces us as individuals and societies--whether or not we can turn from self-destructive uses of our wondrous creative capacities to providential ones.