Faith and Inexplicability

It is an article of our human faith that things should have explanations. We avert our minds from the idea that there might not be such. We have found many explanations, and even a way of making the explanations cohere by tossing out any explanations that don't fit the available data.

But that's all it is — a Procrustean idea of causality. We advance an explanation, it doesn't fit, we alter it to fit. And so on. But does it explain anything if it's all a jury-rigged model of what might be?

The reason I think this way is that I've been reading Disch's novelization of that hit 60s series, The Prisoner. In a sense, we are all prisoners of a world we cannot escape, with half-remembered (true or false) memories of a world that existed before. We clamour to prove that we are not mere numbers, while acting to make ourselves more number-like. It's horrifying to watch, but we aren't watching ourselves. We can't really do that, since we are all prisoners.

The worst part is that we can't know this is true either.