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Doubt

In: English and Literature

Submitted By B01phoenixflare
Words 507
Pages 3
Manuel Suber
Ms. Hayes- AP Lang

Doubt & Certainty

I believe the dispute between certainty and doubt is controversial. Despite the clear sides that people have chosen, there are pros and cons to both. A person’s doubt can cloud their judgment. Yet it can also aid them in making the better decision, by questioning and eliminating the other options. On the other hand, a person’s certainty can blind them from seeing the truth. Never the less, both are necessary in everyday choices of life. Think of certainty and doubt as parts of an automobile. Certainty is the accelerator, and doubt is the steering wheel. You can get nowhere without driving but without steering through the obstacles in your way, you will surely crash. An excess of either is damaging to a person. It is necessary to balance certainty and doubt in order to accomplish all of one’s life goals.

Doubt is often viewed as a negative idea, but in it is beneficial. It is not completely contradictory of certainty, but more somewhere in between them. The World English Dictionary’s definition of doubt is “a lack of belief or conviction about something.” We should accept the fact that doubt is a part of us, because it is part of our nature. We are curious from birth, and to question anything and everything that we want to know more about is perfectly acceptable. I feel that it’s more how much doubt that we use, that we should start to feel worried. For example, building a house of cards. Every card we add brings the risk of collapse.

Certainty and doubt go hand in hand because too much certainty can make a person close-minded and ignorant. On the other hand, too much doubt makes a person a pessimist. Certainty and doubt coexist equally in life, for they keep us in reality. They are also a state of mind, and a form of entertainment for some people.

It is highly important for certainty and doubt to coexist and interact with each other to keep us in reality. You should be certain of your beliefs. However, an idea can be misleading because one cannot fully rely on certainty because nothing in the world is certain. Everything we know has not been proven right or wrong. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t. Therefore, we put ourselves into doubt. Without doubt, there is no such thing as certainty.

If people continue to believe anything they think are true, then they continue to live in their own world, just like children who believe they could be heroes and gain superpowers. Inventors needed to test their invention first before they could be certain that it works. By working hand in hand, certainty can also disprove our doubts to realize that some things that people never thought of could actually happen. Many people believed that no man can go to the moon, but Neil Armstrong did it. Therefore, the power of both keep us in reality because we need one to disprove the other.

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