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RightMind-LeftBrain, Objective Truth Complemented by Subjective Integrity

For those who prefer to engage with difficult questions rather than adopt easy answers

NOTES FROM THE EXAMINED LIFE | INAUGURAL ISSUE

Beliefs You Never Chose

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

— Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, 38a

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Notes from the Examined Life.

I propose we begin our acquaintance with a modest question—one sufficiently troublesome that it may save us from becoming overly pleased with ourselves.

How many of your most deeply held convictions did you actually choose?

Not merely inherit, absorb, imitate, or accept—but examine, challenge, and deliberately embrace?

We Americans are particularly fond of declaring ourselves independent thinkers. It is a noble distinction, and so widely claimed that one wonders whether independent thinking might occasionally be a collective activity.

The uncomfortable truth is that much of what we believe was established before we possessed the intellectual equipment to question it. Our families taught us what mattered. Our communities taught us what was normal. Experience taught us what to admire, what to fear, and whom to trust.

Over time, these impressions became convictions. Convictions became habits of judgment. And habits of judgment became something rather formidable: a worldview.

In Worldview: The Model Running Your Life, I explore a consequential proposition: our worldview does not merely contain what we believe. It influences what we notice, what we dismiss, which objections we take seriously, and which questions never occur to us at all.

Here lies a peculiar difficulty. The very system we employ to judge the evidence also influences what we are willing to recognize as evidence.

Or, stated less delicately, we have appointed our prejudices to the committee responsible for investigating our prejudices. They generally return a favorable report.

That is not a defect peculiar to the ignorant, the ideological, or the fellow across the street whose politics we find inexplicable. It is a human difficulty. Intelligence may improve our reasoning, but it can also make us remarkably skillful at defending conclusions we reached for reasons having little to do with reason.

As I wrote in Worldview:

“The examined life is the corrigible life: willing and able to be corrected by reality.”

During four decades in engineering, I learned to distrust the seductive proposition that a model must be correct because its internal logic is consistent or elegant. A model may be self-consistent and still misrepresent reality. The engineer’s responsibility is not simply to defend the model, but to discover where it fails—and correct it.

We call this insight.

Why should our personal convictions be exempt from the same discipline?

There is a kind of humility that does not weaken conviction but makes it worthy of respect. It acknowledges that truth does not become less true because we misunderstand it, nor does falsehood become respectable because we hold it sincerely.

Objective truth is not established by the force of our certainty. Our responsibility is to pursue it with the integrity of our inquiry.

The Christian tradition gives us a remarkably economical instruction: “Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, ESV).

Notice that we are commanded neither to believe everything nor to doubt everything. Both alternatives would spare us the demanding work of judgment. We are called instead to examine carefully, discern responsibly, and retain what withstands examination.

We call this wisdom.

And wisdom, unlike mere cleverness, possesses a useful characteristic: it need not have the last word in every conversation.

A Small Experiment for This Week

Choose one conviction you have held for many years. It may concern religion, politics, success, human nature, or even yourself.

Where did this belief originate?

What is the strongest evidence that it is true?

What evidence, if discovered, would persuade me to reconsider it?

Have I applied the same standard of evidence to this belief that I expect of convictions I oppose?

The third question is particularly revealing. If the answer is nothing, we have learned something important—not necessarily about the truth of the conviction, but about the condition of the mind defending it.

And the fourth? Well, it is often easier to discover a double standard in another man’s reasoning than to recognize its familiar face in the mirror.

I am not suggesting that we abandon conviction. Quite the contrary. Convictions that have survived honest examination may become stronger, more durable, and more deserving of our confidence.

But there is little virtue in winning an argument against the evidence, and even less in congratulating ourselves afterward.

Why This Newsletter Exists

In these letters, I hope to explore the questions that occupy the intersection of science, philosophy, Scripture, and ordinary human experience. Some will be ancient questions wearing modern clothes. Others will arise from discoveries we could scarcely have imagined a generation ago.

We will not always find easy answers. We may occasionally discover that we have been asking the wrong questions.

That, too, would be progress.

My commitment is to take difficult questions seriously, treat opposing arguments fairly, distinguish evidence from inference, and acknowledge uncertainty where the evidence requires it. I hope you will hold me to that standard.

After all, a man who proposes to examine the assumptions of others ought to be prepared to have his own examined. Fairness demands nothing less, although pride may register an objection.

Perhaps the examined life begins with a modest admission:

I may be mistaken about something I have never thought to question.

And perhaps the courage to investigate that possibility is among the greater achievements of the human mind.

A question for you: What conviction have you reconsidered during the past ten years—and what prompted the change?

I would welcome your response.

Respectfully,

E. Vince Press

Continue the conversation: Read our inaugural Blog essay, Is Your Mind Running You?