---
title: "The religion of certainty"
url: "https://usubjects.com/article/the-religion-of-certainty-4132"
updated: "2026-10-13T16:08:04.032Z"
description: "The post argues that some self-described UFO skeptics and debunkers approach the phenomenon with excessive certainty, treating prevailing scientific consensus as definitive rather than remaining open to uncertainty. It presents this as inconsistent with the skepticism they claim to practice."
sources: ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZcB-tmvJaU"]
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# The religion of certainty

Published: 2026-10-13  
Source: [r/ufo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZcB-tmvJaU)

### Overview

A discussion between psychiatrist and author **Iain McGilchrist** and philosopher **Nigel Warburton** examined how people construct their understanding of reality—and why certainty can become an obstacle to genuine skepticism. The conversation, part of the *What Is Reality?* series at the Wonderstruck Symposium, focused on McGilchrist’s theory that the brain’s two hemispheres support different “modes of attention.” Their argument has broader relevance to debates about unexplained phenomena, including UFOs and UAP, where competing camps often claim certainty despite incomplete evidence.

McGilchrist, author of *The Master and His Emissary* and *The Matter with Things*, characterized the left hemisphere as narrow, analytical and oriented toward categorizing, controlling and “grabbing” the world. This mode of attention is valuable for technical and practical tasks, he said, but can produce an abstracted version of reality that treats complex, changing phenomena as fixed objects. By contrast, he described the right hemisphere as more attentive to context, relationships and ambiguity—qualities he considers essential to understanding a world that cannot always be reduced to neat propositions.

### The Limits of Certainty

A central theme of the conversation was McGilchrist’s claim that the right hemisphere provides a more complete or “veridical” engagement with reality. He cited neurological cases involving severe distortions of perception, arguing that damage to the right hemisphere can leave the left hemisphere operating without sufficient context. These examples, he suggested, illustrate how a strictly analytical model may mistake its own representation of the world for the world itself.

The speakers also challenged the assumption that isolated objects are more fundamental than the relationships connecting them. McGilchrist summarized this position as **“relations are prior to relata,”** meaning that things are understood through their contexts and interactions. He used philosophical puzzles such as Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise to argue that formal abstractions can conflict with ordinary lived experience. His broader proposal was a “triangulation” of reality: the external world exists independently, but how it appears is influenced by the kind of attention brought to it.

### Relevance to UFO and UAP Debate

Applied to UFO and UAP discussions, the exchange offers a critique of both uncritical belief and reflexive dismissal. Some self-described skeptics invoke scientific consensus as though it were a final verdict, rather than a provisional assessment based on currently available evidence. That approach may appear rigorous, but it can become dogmatic when it treats every anomalous report as explained before the facts have been fully examined.

At the same time, McGilchrist’s argument does not establish that extraordinary UFO claims are true. Openness to uncertainty is not evidence, and unexplained observations can result from misidentification, incomplete data or ordinary technical causes. The more cautious lesson is that **skepticism should involve disciplined inquiry rather than automatic certainty**. A credible investigation must remain willing to revise its conclusions while maintaining appropriate standards for evidence.

### A Call for “Un-Knowing”

The discussion also addressed education, science and institutional culture. McGilchrist argued that modern society often overvalues measurable data and instrumental thinking while neglecting imagination, metaphor and the humanities. He warned that scientific models become misleading when their metaphors—particularly the metaphor of the universe as a machine—are mistaken for reality itself.

Referencing William James, the speakers described belief as a process of becoming **“less often caught out by reality.”** Their conclusion was not to abandon reason, but to balance analysis with humility, context and a willingness to acknowledge what remains unknown. In that sense, the conversation’s message for the UAP debate is straightforward: certainty should be earned by evidence, not borrowed from consensus.

## Provenance

This USUBJECTS page is a summary or digest of the linked original source. Any accompanying generated visual is an illustrative reconstruction, not evidence.