Welcome to Douglas Wilson's The Plodcast, presented by Canon Press.

Yeah. Yes, God, God, God don't never change.

Welcome to the

the podcast this is episode 253

podcast 253 I'm Douglas Wilson I'm glad you decided to join me

I want to talk this time I'm glad you decided to join me.

I want to talk this time a little bit about what it means to prove something.

What does it mean to prove something? One of the things that philosophers do to get themselves something.

One of the things that philosophers do to get themselves tangled up is they like to talk about things

like epistemic certainty.

And they want to say that something is not proven unless we have epistemic certainty that this is the case.

And then you say, yes, this is the case, two and two make four.

And then the questions start to pile on and they say, is it, have you ever been

wrong before? Have you ever been wrong before where you thought that it was absolutely not possible to be wrong and everybody would say,

yeah, I've had some changes of heart and changes of mind that I didn't see coming and so I could be I've been wrong before and so

couldn't isn't it possible that you could be wrong about this and and so

however self-evident it may appear to be.

So that's the push for epistemic certainty.

Now I have a hard time dealing with this as anything other than a recurrence of the age-old temptation that began in

the Garden of Eden. You should be as God. I think only God has

epistemic certainty. We are creatures, we are finite, we are bounded, we are limited. That doesn't mean that we can't know things,

that simply means that we've got to look for a calculus other than sort of the absolute certainty that some people are looking for.

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