Not always a reason why

In mathematics as well as physics, there is not always a reason why.
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Sometimes things are true just because they are.
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Have you ever heard someone say, "Oh yes?  If it is true, then prove it!"
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Unconsciously we have learned to equate truth and provability
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Just as we have learned to value reason over intuition.
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Hilbert's Program was just one manifestation of our craving for certainty, for an indisputable source of truth outside of ourselves.
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Hilbert, a German mathematician,  proposed that we use axioms where we cannot prove something.
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And an axiom is a logical statement that is assumed to be true.
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The same impulse underlies the continuing elevation of "experts" in our society
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Which has lead us to give over of more and more of our autonomy to external authorities.
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It also underlies many religious cults
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In which certainty comes from the guru.
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This also applies to Christian fundamentalism, which looks to yet another external authority
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The Bible, for an indisputable source of truth.
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The doctrine of Biblical infallibility is the religious counterpart of the scientific ambition to axiomatize reality.
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Here is certainty!
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No longer is it necessary to look within oneself to know truth
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It is all laid out for us in black and white
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We are no longer divine creators of our world, only receivers, only consumers.
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However increasingly we can see that all hope of ever achieving such certainty is ended.
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More and more certainties are crumbling before our eyes
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Slowly the penny is dropping that the more we know the more we begin to realise that we do not know
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Of course we can, like the Christian fundamentalist, the cult follower, or the dogmatic scientist, choose to remain inside our axiom system and refuse to explore any truth that lays outside it.
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But such certitude comes at a high price: insularity, stagnation, and cut-off from new worlds of knowledge and experience.
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In fact, the crumbling of certainty is incredibly liberating.
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Its effects are similar to the effects of the failure of determinism and objectivity in the realm of physics.
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Truth, like being, ceases to be an independent quality separate from ourselves.
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Both begin to make sense only as a relationship.
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Divorced from logical certainty, divorced from proof, what can truth mean?
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The only satisfactory answer that is that truth is a state of integrity.
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When faced with two different interpretations of an experience
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Instead of gathering more and more evidence to decide which is true, the new metaphor calls us to simply choose one or the other
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Depending simply on which fits with greater integrity into all that we are 
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And, more importantly, all we strive to be.
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We create who we are through the truths we choose.