“Integrity and honesty, not objectivity and certainty, are the highest virtues to which the theological enterprise can aspire. From this perspective, all human claims to possess objectivity, certainty, or infallibility are revealed as nothing but the weak and pitiable pleas of frantically insecure people who seek to live in an illusion because reality has proved to be too difficult.”

— John Shelby Spong

Source: Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (1994), p. 99

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John Shelby Spong 12

American bishop 1931

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 111

“One should not be deceived by philosophical works that pretend to be mathematical, but are merely dubious and murky metaphysics. Just because a philosopher can recite the words lemma, theorem and corollary doesn't mean that his work has the certainty of mathematics. That certainty does not derive from big words, or even from the method used by geometers, but rather from the utter simplicity of the objects considered by mathematics.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

“Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Source: The Journals of Ayn Rand

“The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.”

Brock Chisholm (1896–1971) Doctor and soldier

Brock Chisholm (1946) The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress. p. 5

“Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 2 : Science and Hope, p. 28

“There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

As translated at Gallery of Russian Thinkers … selected by Dmitry Olshansky (2005) http://www.isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/nikolay_berdyaev.html
Dream and Reality (1949)
Context: There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object.