“I began to understand why the Sufis are always attacking ‘opinions.’ Everybody nowadays thinks they must have an ‘opinion’ on everything, whether they know anything about it or not. Unfortunately, few people know the difference between an opinion and a proof. Worse yet, most have no knowledge at all about the difference in degree between a merely legal proof, a logical or verbal proof, a proof in the soft sciences like psychology, and a proof in the hard physical-mathematical sciences. They are full of opinions, but they have little ability to distinguish the relative degree of proof upholding all these various opinions.
“We say ‘seeing is believing,’ but actually, as Santayana pointed out, we are all much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can’t believe.”
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, Vol. One.
