(Guest opinion) David Hoffelmeyer: Seek a worldview that can make honest sense of reality

Last month I left you with honesty and curiosity.

While these are essential helps toward a life of humble truth-seeking, we can’t hang it all on these two alone. In our honest uncertainty and curiosity, we fall gently for a moment like feathers through vague clouds of agnosticism, but soon enough we reach terminal velocity, arms and lives flailing in vain when life forces its hardest questions into our faces. The ground approaches quickly. There must be something outside ourselves to hold on to, a parachute, anything — but could we know a good one when we see it? We see worldview parachutes available. Do we grab one? Or do we abandon hope that there’s anything reliable outside ourselves at all?

We’re scratching the surface of “epistemology,” a fancy word for the study of how we know thin