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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Spirituality Without Illusions?

A Critical Review of Thomas Metzinger's Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction: Can Spirituality Survive Intellectual Honesty?

Thomas Metzinger's Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty (2014) addresses a question that deserves considerably more attention than it usually receives in contemporary discussions of spirituality: Can we preserve the valuable aspects of spiritual practice without accepting the metaphysical beliefs, supernatural explanations, and comforting illusions traditionally associated with religion?

Metzinger, a German philosopher of mind known for his work on consciousness and the self, approaches this problem from an uncompromisingly naturalistic perspective. The scientific image of humanity is changing. Neuroscience increasingly connects conscious experience to brain processes, evolutionary psychology investigates the origins of religious belief, and cognitive science challenges our intuitive understanding of the self. Meanwhile, humanity confronts global problems, including climate change, that reveal a troubling discrepancy between what we know and what we collectively manage to do.

For Metzinger, these developments create a moral as well as an intellectual challenge. We must learn to understand ourselves without retreating into reassuring fantasies. Yet he does not conclude that spirituality should simply disappear. Instead, he proposes a secularized spirituality founded on experiential self-knowledge, mental autonomy, ethical integrity, and an uncompromising commitment to truth.

His central thesis is that spirituality and science, properly understood, share a fundamental normative ideal: the desire for knowledge rather than mere belief, combined with an absolute commitment to truthfulness toward oneself.

This is an attractive project, particularly for anyone who values meditation and contemplative experience but rejects supernatural explanations of reality. Nevertheless, Metzinger's argument contains several tensions. His definition of spirituality is selective, his contrast between religion and spirituality is excessively categorical, and his account of contemplative knowledge remains less developed than his critique of metaphysical claims. Most importantly, he sometimes moves too quickly from the psychological benefits of a practice to its epistemic value, and from the biological explanation of a belief to the question of whether that belief is true.

The essay is therefore strongest as a manifesto for intellectual integrity and weakest when it attempts to establish a general theory of spirituality.

1. The Naturalistic Challenge

Metzinger begins with two developments that, although distinct, may reinforce one another. The first is the emergence of a naturalistic understanding of human consciousness. The second is the growing recognition that human beings may be psychologically ill-equipped to respond rationally to the long-term consequences of their own actions.

Evolution has not necessarily equipped us to seek truth under all circumstances. Our cognitive architecture developed through natural selection, which favors reproductive success rather than abstract epistemic accuracy as an ultimate goal. We may therefore possess mental mechanisms that produce useful illusions, selective attention, motivated reasoning, and self-deception.

Religious beliefs, in Metzinger's account, can function as adaptive responses to existential anxiety, particularly the fear of death. They may provide emotional security, strengthen group cohesion, stabilize self-esteem, and reinforce existing social hierarchies. What is psychologically useful for individuals or groups, however, need not be objectively true or socially beneficial in the long run.

This is an important corrective to the assumption that deeply meaningful experiences must reveal something fundamental about the structure of reality. A belief can be emotionally powerful, culturally widespread, and personally transformative without being factually accurate.

Metzinger also recognizes a disturbing possibility: we can understand the consequences of our actions while remaining unable to change our behavior accordingly. Humanity's difficulty in responding to climate change illustrates this discrepancy between intellectual understanding and effective collective action.

The resulting challenge is not simply to acquire more information. It is to develop greater psychological autonomy: the ability to recognize how our emotions, identities, and unconscious motives influence what we are prepared to believe.

Here Metzinger identifies a genuinely important problem. Rationality is not merely a matter of possessing correct propositions. It also depends on our ability to recognize the psychological pressures that encourage us to reject inconvenient evidence.

However, his naturalistic framework does not by itself establish that religion is predominantly an adaptive illusion, or that religious belief is necessarily less rational than nonreligious belief. Evolutionary explanations of belief formation are relevant, but they must be supported by specific empirical arguments. The fact that a belief serves a psychological or social function does not establish that it is false.

This distinction becomes especially important when Metzinger develops his critique of religion.

2. Spirituality Against Religion: A Questionable Dichotomy

Metzinger's first major thesis is deliberately provocative: the opposite of religion is not science, but spirituality.

He distinguishes religion, understood as a system of dogmatic beliefs maintained despite insufficient or contrary evidence, from spirituality, understood as an experiential practice directed toward self-knowledge. Religion allegedly seeks emotional reassurance and preserves the conventional self-model; spirituality attempts to dissolve that model and increase mental autonomy.

The distinction captures something real. Many contemporary practitioners of meditation do not believe that their practice requires a creator God, an immortal soul, supernatural energies, or a revealed metaphysical doctrine. They may be interested instead in attention, emotional regulation, compassion, and a less rigid identification with their own thoughts.

Metzinger is also right to distinguish spiritual practice from the unquestioning acceptance of spiritual authorities. Meditation does not automatically validate the cosmology of the tradition in which it originated. A Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, or New Age interpretation of an experience remains open to critical examination.

Nevertheless, Metzinger's opposition between religion and spirituality is too clean.

Religion is not invariably fideistic, just as spirituality is not invariably rational. Religious traditions contain internal disputes, critical philosophical traditions, and forms of contemplative inquiry that cannot fairly be reduced to the deliberate cultivation of delusion. Conversely, contemporary spirituality often displays precisely the intellectual habits Metzinger condemns: selective use of evidence, immunity to criticism, exaggerated claims about consciousness, and the conversion of subjective certainty into supposed knowledge of the universe.

Metzinger acknowledges that much alternative spirituality has become intellectually dishonest. But this admission raises a more fundamental question: if spiritual practice is defined by its openness to truth and its resistance to self-deception, what distinguishes spirituality from any other disciplined form of critical self-examination?

The answer cannot simply be that spirituality is experiential. Experiences can mislead us, and intellectual inquiry also depends on experience. Nor can the answer be that spirituality transforms the self, since psychotherapy, education, and ordinary moral development can do that as well.

Metzinger's concept of spirituality is best understood as a normative ideal rather than a comprehensive description of a distinct human activity. He is telling us what a defensible spirituality ought to be, not demonstrating that spirituality as historically practiced generally possesses those characteristics.

That is a legitimate philosophical strategy, but it should be recognized as such.

3. Intellectual Honesty as a Moral Virtue

The most compelling part of the essay is Metzinger's account of intellectual honesty.

He defines it, in essence, as refusing to lie to oneself. The spontaneous appearance of a belief is not the same as consciously endorsing it, and we should develop the capacity to withhold endorsement when the evidence is insufficient. Intellectual integrity requires a willingness to revise our beliefs even when doing so threatens our emotional security, social identity, or sense of personal meaning.

Metzinger traces this ideal through John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Kingdon Clifford. Locke emphasizes the duty to use our intellectual faculties rather than believe without reason. Kant connects truthfulness with moral integrity. Nietzsche subjects the will to truth itself to relentless scrutiny. Clifford supplies a particularly demanding principle of evidential responsibility: we should not believe on insufficient evidence or carelessly disregard evidence relevant to our beliefs.

These thinkers do not offer an entirely uniform philosophy. Their accounts of truth, morality, and rationality differ substantially. Nevertheless, Metzinger draws from them a common ethical aspiration: we should take responsibility for the beliefs we adopt.

This is especially important because self-deception need not involve consciously telling ourselves something we know to be false. We can avoid certain books, discount unwelcome findings, reinterpret failures as confirmations, or apply standards of evidence selectively. We may sincerely believe that we are following the evidence while arranging our intellectual environment to protect our preferred conclusions.

Metzinger's ideal therefore extends beyond honesty in the ordinary sense. It involves active resistance to motivated reasoning.

His emphasis on meditation is interesting in this context. Meditation may cultivate awareness of thoughts, impulses, and emotional reactions without requiring us to identify with them. Such awareness could create a psychological interval between the appearance of a belief and its endorsement.

This is a plausible connection between contemplative practice and rational autonomy. Yet Metzinger occasionally presents it as more established than the argument warrants. Meditation does not automatically produce epistemic virtue. A person can become more attentive to inner experience while remaining committed to false beliefs about its meaning. Mindfulness can help reveal the processes of thought, but it does not independently determine which propositions about the world are true.

Intellectual honesty requires more than observing one's thoughts. It requires evaluating claims against evidence, distinguishing observation from interpretation, and remaining open to correction by others.

Meditation may help cultivate the psychological conditions for these activities. It cannot replace them.

4. The Ethics of Belief: Clifford's Challenge

Metzinger's use of William Kingdon Clifford's evidentialism brings the argument into sharper focus. Clifford's principle is uncompromising: believing something without sufficient evidence is ethically problematic, and neglecting relevant evidence is itself a failure of intellectual responsibility.

Metzinger extends this principle beyond ordinary factual beliefs to religion and spirituality. If someone maintains a belief in God, an immortal soul, or a supernatural reality despite the absence of adequate supporting evidence, the problem is not merely that the belief may be false. The person may also be protecting an emotionally desirable worldview at the expense of intellectual autonomy.

There is considerable force in this argument. The freedom to believe whatever makes us feel better is not the same as the freedom to inquire honestly. A belief does not become justified simply because abandoning it would be painful.

Yet Clifford's position also raises a difficult question that Metzinger does not fully resolve: what counts as sufficient evidence, and what should we believe when evidence is incomplete?

Most of our beliefs are not based on personally examined evidence. We depend on testimony, expert judgment, background assumptions, and provisional models. Even scientific conclusions vary in their degree of certainty. Intellectual honesty therefore cannot mean requiring conclusive proof before accepting any proposition.

Nor does it necessarily require suspending judgment on every question for which evidence remains incomplete. Rational belief is a matter of proportioning confidence to evidence, considering alternatives, and being prepared to revise conclusions.

Metzinger himself gestures toward this more nuanced position when he invokes Karl Popper's critical rationalism. Popper recognizes that rationalism cannot establish its own ultimate validity without encountering a problem of justification. The commitment to reason is itself a normative choice, not a theorem that reason can prove from nowhere.

This is one of the essay's most philosophically important insights. Rationality does not require a foundation of absolute certainty. It requires the willingness to expose our commitments to criticism.

However, Metzinger sometimes applies evidentialism asymmetrically. He demands intellectual rigor from religious believers but occasionally treats his own naturalistic interpretation as though its superiority were more straightforward than it is. Naturalism has substantial scientific support, but the precise relationship between brain processes and subjective experience remains philosophically contested. The absence of convincing evidence for an immortal soul is not the same as a complete solution to the mind-body problem.

A consistent evidentialism should distinguish between what is well established, what is the most reasonable current interpretation, and what remains unresolved. The naturalist must observe the same discipline demanded of the theist.

5. God, Death, and the Limits of Metaphysics

Metzinger examines three concrete issues: the existence of God, life after death, and enlightenment.

His treatment of God is broadly persuasive. He argues that no convincing philosophical proof establishes God's existence and that mystical experiences cannot, by themselves, provide empirical evidence for a supernatural being. He also emphasizes the burden of proof: the inability to disprove a proposition does not provide positive evidence for it.

His discussion of agnosticism is more debatable. Metzinger suggests that withholding judgment about God may be problematic when the concept of God is poorly defined and the available evidence does not support the claim.

But agnosticism need not imply that all possibilities are equally probable or that every hypothesis deserves equal attention. One can judge the evidence against a particular conception of God to be overwhelming while remaining uncertain about other, less clearly specified conceptions. One can also recognize that some questions are poorly formulated without concluding that every discussion of them is pointless.

The important distinction is between refusing to decide because one wishes to preserve a comforting possibility and withholding a definitive judgment because the question remains inadequately specified. These are different intellectual attitudes, and an ethic of honesty should not conflate them.

Metzinger's argument against belief in personal survival after death is stronger when understood probabilistically. Human consciousness is deeply dependent on the functioning brain. Changes to the brain alter perception, memory, personality, and awareness. The reasonable scientific expectation is therefore that personal consciousness, as we know it, will not survive the irreversible destruction of the brain.

This does not establish every metaphysical conclusion one might draw from neuroscience. Metzinger acknowledges that theories of consciousness could be mistaken and that the mind-body problem is not entirely settled. His practical conclusion is nevertheless defensible: there is no good reason to organize one's life around the promise of an afterlife for which we lack reliable evidence.

He then draws an existential conclusion that is more important than the metaphysical argument itself. If salvation is possible, it must be understood in this-worldly terms. The present moment, our capacity for compassion, and the quality of our lived experience become more important when we stop expecting a future existence to compensate for the limitations of this one.

This is a powerful form of secular humanism. It replaces deferred metaphysical rewards with the ethical possibilities of actual human life.

Still, there is no need to establish the nonexistence of every conceivable afterlife to arrive at this conclusion. The finite and vulnerable character of our present lives is already sufficient reason to take them seriously.

6. Enlightenment Under Scientific Scrutiny

Metzinger's discussion of enlightenment is arguably the most interesting part of the essay for readers interested in meditation and contemplative experience.

He rejects the assumption that all traditions describe one universal, culturally invariant state of enlightenment. Accounts of mystical experience differ, and their interpretation depends partly on the conceptual frameworks of the people who report them. Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, and other contemplative traditions do not simply provide interchangeable descriptions of one demonstrably identical state.

This is an important warning against the tendency to treat striking experiences as direct evidence for a metaphysical worldview.

A feeling of unity does not establish that the universe is literally one consciousness. The disappearance of the ordinary sense of self does not demonstrate the existence of an eternal Self. A profound sense of timelessness does not establish that one has entered a timeless dimension of reality.

The experience and its interpretation must be distinguished.

Metzinger also questions whether a genuine disappearance of the self could be remembered and reported afterward. If the conscious subject completely disappeared, who could later recall the experience?

This objection identifies a real conceptual difficulty, but it is not decisive in the form presented. Reports of ego dissolution need not imply that all consciousness vanished. They may describe the attenuation of self-referential processing, the loss of a familiar sense of ownership, or the disappearance of the ordinary subject-object structure of experience. Memory can preserve an episode without preserving every feature of the state as it was experienced.

In other words, the claim that the self disappeared can be understood phenomenologically rather than literally. A person may experience an absence of the ordinary self-model while remaining conscious and capable of forming memories.

Metzinger's own naturalistic approach should encourage this distinction. If the phenomenal self is a model generated by cognitive processes rather than an independent entity, changes in that model may produce experiences that seem like the disappearance of the self without requiring the disappearance of the organism or of consciousness itself.

His criticism is therefore strongest when directed against extravagant interpretations of enlightenment, not against the possibility of profound changes in self-experience.

A further problem concerns the knowledge supposedly acquired through meditation. Metzinger asks what, precisely, contemplative insight teaches us that cannot be expressed in language, theory, or rational argument. If practitioners make public claims about reality, they must explain what those claims mean and how they are justified.

This is an excellent demand. Appeals to ineffability cannot provide immunity from criticism. If an experience supposedly reveals a universal metaphysical truth, the claimant must explain why that interpretation is warranted rather than merely reporting that the experience felt certain or transformative.

But Metzinger risks moving too far in the opposite direction when he suggests that contemplative knowledge cannot be theoretical or propositional. Some insights gained through meditation may concern recognizable psychological facts: the transience of thoughts, the instability of self-representation, the role of attention in experience, or the ways in which emotional reactions reinforce habitual patterns.

Such insights may be experiential in origin while remaining open to linguistic description, empirical investigation, and rational evaluation.

The most defensible conclusion is not that meditation provides a mysterious form of knowledge beyond reason. It is that certain aspects of our mental lives may become easier to observe through disciplined first-person attention, while the interpretation of those observations remains subject to ordinary epistemic standards.

7. The Unresolved Problem of First-Person Knowledge

Metzinger's treatment of introspection exposes a tension at the heart of his proposal.

On the one hand, he recognizes that introspective certainty can be misleading. Human beings are capable of misinterpreting their own mental processes, and reports about consciousness may reflect assumptions that are not themselves accessible to direct awareness.

On the other hand, his secularized spirituality depends substantially on experiential self-knowledge. Meditation is supposed to reveal features of our mental lives that ordinary conceptual thought may overlook.

How, then, can we distinguish genuine insight from introspective illusion?

Metzinger points toward ethical integrity and openness to scientific investigation, but these principles do not entirely solve the problem. A meditator can be sincere and mistaken. A person can be psychologically transformed by an experience without acquiring reliable knowledge about its causes. And different practitioners can interpret similar experiences through incompatible metaphysical frameworks.

We therefore need a distinction between the occurrence of an experience, the accuracy of a description of that experience, and the truth of any broader conclusions drawn from it.

These are three different epistemic questions.

The occurrence of an experience is one thing. Whether the practitioner has accurately described its phenomenological characteristics is another. Whether the experience reveals something about the ultimate nature of reality is a further question altogether.

Metzinger is right to resist the leap from the first question to the third. But his positive account would benefit from a more systematic explanation of how disciplined introspection can be integrated with external evidence, intersubjective comparison, and scientific investigation.

Without such a framework, secular spirituality risks becoming an honorific label for experiences that practitioners already regard as profound.

8. Can Science and Spirituality Share a Common Ideal?

Metzinger's final thesis is that science and spirituality emerge from the same basic normative idea: the unconditional desire for truth and the commitment to honesty toward oneself.

In scientific inquiry, this commitment appears as the willingness to test hypotheses, abandon unsuccessful theories, and minimize unsupported assumptions. In contemplative practice, it appears as the willingness to observe mental processes without automatically identifying with them or defending the conventional self-image.

Metzinger invokes Popper to emphasize that the failure of a hypothesis can be an epistemic achievement. When our expectations fail against reality, we have an opportunity to learn something. The experience of being wrong is not necessarily a defeat; it can be the beginning of genuine knowledge.

This is an excellent point of contact between science and meditation. Both can challenge habitual patterns of thought. Both can cultivate a capacity to tolerate uncertainty. Both can weaken our attachment to preferred interpretations.

Yet the analogy has limits.

Scientific methods include procedures for testing claims against publicly accessible evidence. They rely on criticism, replication where applicable, methodological controls, and the possibility of correcting individual errors through collective inquiry. Meditation, by contrast, is a family of practices whose effects and purposes vary, and whose experiential findings do not automatically establish the truth of the theories used to interpret them.

The two activities can complement one another, but they are not interchangeable epistemic methods.

A meditator may become less defensive and more attentive without becoming a better scientist. A scientist may be scrupulously honest in research without engaging in meditation. Neither practice guarantees the virtues associated with the other.

Metzinger's proposal works best, therefore, when understood as an ethical alliance rather than a claim that science and spirituality are essentially identical.

Scientific inquiry can help correct our interpretations of contemplative experience. Contemplative practice may help some individuals recognize the emotional and attentional habits that interfere with inquiry. Their relationship is potentially fruitful precisely because each has resources the other does not possess.

9. The Danger of Turning Rationalism into a New Orthodoxy

Metzinger recognizes a danger that threatens his own project: intellectual honesty can become ideological. The commitment to reason can itself turn into a source of identity, superiority, and self-congratulation.

This warning is particularly important because the essay sometimes approaches the very attitude it condemns. Metzinger describes religious belief in sweeping terms, repeatedly associating it with delusion, emotional dependency, and intellectual dishonesty. His polemical language occasionally makes the conclusion appear to follow from the definition: religion is defined as dogmatic belief, spirituality as the pursuit of knowledge, and spirituality consequently emerges as the intellectually superior alternative.

But this classification risks becoming self-protective. If every example of intellectually honest religious inquiry is classified as spirituality rather than religion, while every example of religious dogmatism is treated as representative of religion itself, the distinction becomes difficult to challenge.

A more intellectually honest approach would examine particular claims, practices, institutions, and methods of belief formation. Some religious claims are poorly supported or demonstrably false. Some secular beliefs are equally vulnerable to motivated reasoning. Scientific institutions can also protect established interests, resist criticism, and reward conformity. These failures do not invalidate science, but they demonstrate that an institutional commitment to evidence is not identical to the personal virtue of honesty.

The same applies to secular spirituality. Practitioners can develop attachments to their experiences, teachers, identities, and communities. The belief that one has transcended the ego can itself become a source of egoic superiority.

The genuine test of intellectual integrity is therefore not whether someone calls themselves religious, spiritual, scientific, or rationalist. It is how they respond when their cherished beliefs encounter evidence against them.

Metzinger's warning against the ideological corruption of rationalism should be applied to his own rhetoric as rigorously as it is applied to religious belief.

10. From Intellectual Integrity to Ethical Action

The essay begins with a concern about humanity's inability to respond adequately to large-scale problems, especially climate change. Yet its proposed solution focuses primarily on individual mental autonomy and the cultivation of inner virtues.

This creates a gap between diagnosis and remedy.

Greater self-awareness may help individuals recognize motivated reasoning, but political and environmental failures cannot be explained exclusively by individual cognitive limitations. Institutional incentives, economic interests, power relations, coordination problems, and the structure of collective decision-making also matter.

A person may understand the scientific evidence perfectly well and still participate in systems that reward environmentally destructive behavior. A politician may accept the evidence yet face powerful electoral or economic incentives to delay action. A corporation may possess accurate knowledge of its environmental impact while operating within a competitive structure that discourages unilateral change.

In such cases, intellectual honesty is necessary but insufficient. The problem is not merely that people fail to know or acknowledge the truth. It is also that institutions may fail to translate knowledge into action.

Metzinger does recognize the social and cultural dimensions of self-deception, and he suggests that scientific and contemplative inquiry might contribute to improved standards of civilization. But the political implications of this proposal remain underdeveloped.

If the purpose of secular spirituality is to enhance mental autonomy and ethical integrity, it should ultimately be evaluated partly by its consequences for conduct. Does it improve our capacity to cooperate, correct mistakes, resist manipulation, and act responsibly under conditions of uncertainty?

The answer cannot be established simply by examining the subjective quality of an experience. It requires evidence about behavior and social outcomes.

This is where Metzinger's initial concern about humanity's collective failures should lead us beyond meditation and introspection toward institutional reform and collective responsibility.

Conclusion: A Valuable Project, Not a Completed Synthesis

Thomas Metzinger's Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty is a stimulating attempt to preserve the existential and practical value of contemplative life without accepting unsupported metaphysical beliefs. Its strongest contribution is the insistence that the pursuit of self-knowledge must remain answerable to intellectual honesty.

The essay rightly challenges the assumption that the intensity of an experience establishes the truth of its interpretation. It rejects the use of ineffability as a shield against criticism, questions the expectation of personal survival after death, and demands that claims about enlightenment be clarified rather than protected by tradition or authority.

It also offers a plausible account of how meditation might contribute to mental autonomy by helping us recognize thoughts and impulses without automatically endorsing them. In this respect, contemplative practice can complement scientific rationality, provided that neither is granted immunity from critical scrutiny.

Nevertheless, Metzinger's argument is not entirely successful. His opposition between religion and spirituality is too categorical, his dismissal of agnosticism sometimes insufficiently discriminating, and his criticism of enlightenment experiences occasionally overlooks the distinction between literal self-annihilation and the attenuation of the ordinary self-model. His account of contemplative knowledge also needs a more precise explanation of how first-person experience can be assessed without confusing psychological certainty with epistemic justification.

Finally, his emphasis on individual mental autonomy does not fully address the institutional and political conditions that prevent knowledge from being translated into effective action.

The most productive way to develop Metzinger's project is therefore to retain its central ethical principle while making its application more symmetrical and methodologically precise. Religious, spiritual, scientific, and secular convictions should all be examined according to the quality of their evidence, their openness to criticism, and their willingness to revise mistaken conclusions.

We do not need to choose between a supernatural spirituality and the elimination of contemplative practice. We can investigate consciousness as a natural phenomenon, cultivate attention and compassion, and treat extraordinary experiences as subjects for inquiry rather than revelations about ultimate reality.

But this requires abandoning one further illusion: the idea that intellectual honesty is a possession we can acquire once and for all. It is a discipline that must be repeatedly renewed, particularly when our own preferred explanations are at stake.

The deepest lesson of Metzinger's essay is consequently more modest than its proposed synthesis might suggest. We do not need to call rational inquiry spiritual in order to recognize its existential significance. Nor do we need to endow meditation with a special epistemic status to recognize its potential value.

What matters is whether our practices make us more attentive to reality, more capable of recognizing our own errors, and less inclined to substitute emotional reassurance for understanding.

A secular spirituality worthy of the name would not be a new doctrine about consciousness. It would be a continuing practice of self-examination, grounded in naturalism, informed by science, and governed by the same critical standards we apply to every other claim about the world.

That would not abolish uncertainty, guarantee enlightenment, or eliminate self-deception. It would offer something more realistic: a way of living with uncertainty without turning our need for certainty into a source of illusion.