David McElroy

It’s not that unusual to see bicycles along U.S. 11 in the suburb where I live, but something caught my eye about this one. It was around noon Monday. Lunch traffic was heavy, so I passed him slowly enough to get a good look.

It was an old man on a beat-up bicycle. On the back, there was a hand-lettered sign that said, “Hungry — please help.”

I’ve seen desperate people and panhandlers many times, but something about him — or maybe just the mood I was in — made me wonder about him. How did he come to be an old man who’s desperate enough to ride around and beg?

It’s easy to look at such people and assume they’ve made bad choices. I mean, we’re not in their position, so we’ve obviously made the right choices and they haven’t. Right? Was it alcohol? Was he lazy? Did he have something unexpected happen to him? What was his story?

I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I felt a tremendous sense of empathy for him. I wondered how life could have taken the turns that led to where he is today.

So I decided to find out.

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Did you see this picture last week? I saw it posted by a number of Democrats on Facebook in order to make fun of those stupid Tea Party types who hate Barack Obama. Here’s an example of one of the many sites that posted the picture after it went viral. Here’s what the caption told us about the picture:

Student’s sign mocking Obama provides compelling argument for education reform. Well, at least a dorm room at the University of Alabama has found its constipated-looking, grammatically challenged sorority girl. This passionately misspelled indictment of the commander-in-chief, which appears to have been scrawled on a discarded pizza box (the official protest medium of college students) makes a pretty effective case for Mitt Romney, but an even better case against Romney’s plan to slash the education budget. Come on, America. This girl is one more cut language arts program away from having the linguistic skills of a Chick-Fil-A cow.

There’s only one problem. None of this was true. A reporter for The Birmingham News saw the graphic and wanted to track down this alleged University of Alabama student. She’s not an Alabama conservative for Mitt Romney. She’s a Massachusetts liberal for Obama. Her name is Kim Stafford, and she grew up in Boston. She goes to a liberal arts college in Massachusetts, not to my alma mater.

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When I was much younger and even more foolish than I am today, I had trouble saying three simple words: “I don’t know.” Instead, I had a view about everything. And I was right about everything, of course. I was certain of it.

As the years have gone by, I find that I’m certain of fewer and fewer things. I find that there are a few root-level “first things” that I’m sure of, but there aren’t many things outside of those few principles that I can say I know with certainty.

The list of things I proclaim as “truth” shrinks all the time. I have more questions and fewer answers, partly because I’ve seen myself be wrong so many times and partly because I see that the world is far more complex than I realized even a few years ago.

So the idea of asserting so many opinions as absolute fact seems strange to me now. It feels jarring. I wonder if the certainty I expressed about so many things when I was younger was as annoying to others then as it is to me when I see it in others today.

I find that both science and Christian faith offer insights and truths to me about certain things, but scientists go wrong when they go beyond what they reasonably know to assert things they don’t know — and Christians go wrong when they claim certainty about things where Jesus and scripture are silent.

Why do people assert things as fact when they’re not in the position to know those things? I think it’s because they’re afraid of uncertainty. They don’t mean to “fill in the blanks” when they don’t know things, but they do, because they’re terrified of not knowing. Christian singer Pat Terry addressed this tendency in a song called “Nothing I Say.” He wrote:

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