jettison certainty?

I should start out by remarking that I don't "get" the purpose or reasoning behind abandoning certainty in Christianity.

I like to think that the way that I see the issue of certainty is straightforward and commonsensical. I consider it uncontroversial that generally speaking certainty has many shades similar to the range of grays between blackest black and whitest white. As supporting evidence piles up, certainty increases. As contradictory evidence piles up, certainty decreases. Last winter, when I had trouble starting my car, the truth "the battery must be replaced" became increasingly more certain while other "hypothetical truths" such as "the starter is broken" or "the battery just needs a 'jump' because of the temperature" became increasingly less certain. (Actually, I didn't have much cause to complain considering the car had ran on the factory battery for years and years without problems.)

While I was rather slowly figuring out the cause and solution of my car start-up travails, I didn't feel a need to precede or footnote my changing beliefs about the topic by routine reminders: "I'm uncertain, I'm uncertain, I'm uncertain" (maybe in the tone of a sing-song religious chant). Nor did I feel a need to explicitly characterize those beliefs as provisional: "I believe the battery terminals are dirty but only for the sake of a temporary basis for action"; listeners, at least ones who don't claim to be "postmodern auto mechanics" (when the car doesn't work just change your narrative), would likely assume that I wouldn't act as if the terminals are dirty if I didn't believe that the terminals were, in fact, dirty! Nor did I react to my own uncertainty by carefully circumscribing the "nature" of my battery truths in halfhearted terms: "From my perspective the most probable cause that appeals to me and partially originates in my subjective encounter with the ambiguous kaleidoscope which is reality's unfiltered whole..."

In short, truths lie on a continuum of certainty but this shouldn't mislead us into the erroneous claim that the truths themselves are this way. That is, the mere fact that we can't ascertain and measure the certainty of all truth doesn't imply that truth doesn't really exist. When someone estimates that contradictory "truths" A and B are each 50% probable, we shouldn't take the quite ridiculous step of describing the situation as "50% of A and 50% of B are simultaneously true". In reality only one of the two can be true at once; the failure to figure it out is a failing of ours. (As an aside, people enjoy pointing at the inherent probabilities of quantum mechanics to somehow illustrate that reality is fundamentally uncertain before observation. The flaw in this argument, as could be explained by any physicist, is that this uncertainty "collapses" into a single state long before it percolates up to a scale that matters to we macroscopic beings. This is why constructing a useful, functioning quantum computer is so blasted difficult.)

I'll repeat that I just don't "get" it. Given that truths are on a continuum of certainty, what is the point of calling attention to the uncertainty as opposed to the certainty when the two are by definition directly correlated? To be 95% certain is to be 5% uncertain. To measure a population by taking a randomized sample is to admit some theoretically-calculable sampling error (which entails assuming a particular distribution for the source population...), but this doesn't prevent people from stating the findings as well as the probability of error.

My guess is that redirecting focus to the uncertainty is at bottom an emotional not an intellectual phenomenon. By replacing the Good News with the Uncertain News, Christians can attempt to avoid the impressions of arrogance, weirdness, and close-mindedness that have plagued them for centuries. In essence, jettisoning all references to certainty is an excessive overreaction to the stereotype of the Christian who never changes his or her beliefs in response to thought, questions, and experiences. It's cultural.

My cultural recommendation for combating unflattering public images of Christians isn't to play around with philosophical sleight-of-hands in regard to Truth but to live humbly, compassionately, and thoughtfully. Easier said than done, and that's for certain.