To what extent is certainty attainable?  

In order to answer this question, we need to understand, what certainty is, and while this might seem like a trivial task, the definitions different people give for certainty often vary greatly. The reason behind this is that certainty can be easily confused with accuracy, but these are in fact distinct concepts. Certainty can never be objective. Instead, it reflects to what extent a person believes a fact or concept.

As my first object, I have chosen the Bible, because it represents religion. While the Bible in particular is a symbol of Christianity, there are thousands of other religions in the world, and each one of them has its followers, who have a degree of certainty in their religion. While individual people can be absolutely certain in a religion, there can never be one, that humanity as a whole is certain about, because a religion is a belief and can’t be scientifically proven, meaning there can never be a universal explanation that will satisfy everyone. This principle doesn’t only apply to religion.

For the second object, I chose a Greek robe to represent social sciences. Certainty can’t be achieved in any social sciences, simply because there will always be different opinions on a matter, and without a universal proof, humanity as a whole can’t be absolutely certain in something. But what about sciences? Doesn’t the fact, that science is objective, imply, that we can be certain in it?

My third object of choice is a physics textbook, because I think it reflects how even the certainty of natural sciences isn’t attainable. Since the dawn of physics thousands of years ago, countless theories have been proposed, but most of them were proven wrong withing the first few years after publication. If a theory lived longer than that, it was still most likely disproven by new information. A great example of this is quantum mechanics, which has revolutionized physics, discrediting a large part of it.

In conclusion, I believe, that while the certainty of a concept for a single person is quite easily achieved, the certainty of a fact for humanity is impossible to attain, due to the nature of the process of cognition. The more of the universe we discover, the more we understand how wrong about it we are.