The problem with certainty is that it gets wet. When certainty gets wet, it gets soggy—not unlike even the most expensive of cereals.

Gripping a concrete worldview is like holding an oily, vivacious goldfish in your bare hand. Your slippery fish is going to slip out of your hand and it’s going to hit the floor. The only hope you have of preventing that travesty is to clench the fish tight enough to secure it, perhaps with both hands. Ball a fist, brace its scaly frame … and in doing so, squeeze the life out of it. Yarbles.

I’m on an analogous roll. Certainty—yes, it was certainty that we were originally discussing—is a lubricated goldfish: the soggiest cereal you ever saw. French writer Paul Valéry is attributed with some wise words: “That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.” Valéry probably made this assertion in French, but the language barrier notwithstanding, we can admire the wisdom. Certainty is certainly uncertain; Valéry was fairly certain of that.

Had Galileo conceded that he were a crackpot, he wouldn’t be regarded as a visionary today. Had Jim Varney never adopted that tan baseball cap, the world never would have known the mad genius of Ernest P. Worrell. (No, that second example has nothing to do with anything; I was itching to make a pop-culture reference. I have a veritable postmodern illness.) It’s those who go against the grain, who defy the certain, who leave their legacies dangling like day-old silly string from the annals of history. And what do we do once the contributions of these eccentrics are recognized? We apply their exploits to our base of certainty. Certainty is fickle.

Nothing should ever be etched in stone. Why does gravity work? Because of the laws of physics? Fie! Gravity works because it does. “Gravity” is a word that refers to a body of physical laws. These laws don’t govern the phenomena we call “gravity”; they explain it. What if, one morning, gravity stopped working? We’d come up with a new body of laws to explain those new physical observations. Despite our best attempts to convince ourselves otherwise, we are at the mercy of a universe we cannot fathom. All is subject to change.

Let’s not get all philosophically dense, eh? My shallow brain can’t sustain this line of thinking. Newtonian nonsense is hardly relevant to the heart of this particular Snarl. The aim here is to challenge certainty. Why adhere to any sacrosanct belief set? Huddling against certainty amounts to what religious writer Alan Watts refers to in The Wisdom of Insecurity as “courage in the dark.”

People rally around belief sets, whether they be religious, moral, or scientific; we alienate, and even persecute, naysayers. Dissension, even skepticism, is unwelcome. Where’s the harm in questioning anything? Where’s the foul in not claiming allegiance to any one belief, when all things are fallible?

Liberal-minded folk think of conservatives as curmudgeons; conservative folk view liberals as soft-bellied idealists; liberals and conservatives jointly accuse moderates of being flim-flammers. Baptists and Methodists can’t agree on the baptism issue. Satanists and fundamentalists … don’t make the best carpoolers.

These differences in ideology shouldn’t prevent people from co-existing. No one belief system is superior to another. Even facts are relative. No human construction can be free from the bias of perspective, and that includes our sacred cow science.

My favorite statistic: approximately 90% of statistics are moot. Is this statistic part of the 90 or the 10? I’m certainly not certain.

Pass over the Malt-o-meal equivalent of your favorite General Mills cereal if you like, but don’t let it slip your logic that, given five minutes in milk, it’ll be just as soupy as the knockoff. Exposure to a myriad of ideas seems a more rational approach to life than altogether embracing one belief set. As Ernest said in the seminal Ernest Goes To Camp: “One monkey don’t stop no show.”

And whatever that means, it’s a fact.

Charles Smith is relatively certain that he’s a native of Southwest Virginia and that he’s a snarly skeptic.