Skeptics and Believers Are Lying to Themselves the Same Way

There’s a scene late in the movie Disclosure Day where a former novitiate named Jane corners her old mentor, a nun named Sister Maura, with a question dressed up as a statement. Genesis, she says, tells us humanity is God’s supreme creation. Sister Maura doesn’t argue. She corrects the wording instead. Genesis says we are God’s supreme creation on Earth, she answers, and the conversation moves on as if something has been settled.

Nothing has been settled. Genesis doesn’t say either of those things.

Go back to the actual text, Genesis 1:26-28, and what’s there is plainer and stranger than either woman’s version. God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” using a plural nobody can fully account for. Scholars have spent centuries arguing over that “us,” a trinity, a divine council, a king’s royal we, because the text itself never says. Then comes the actual instruction. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, have dominion over it. That’s a charge to manage one planet. It isn’t a claim that the planet is the only one with someone managing it. Jane’s “supreme creation” isn’t in there at all. Sister Maura’s “on Earth” is closer, built from a real verse about filling and ruling this world, but it still reads exclusivity into a command that only ever specifies scope.

That’s not a story about a movie. That’s a story about what people do with old words when new questions get too close.

I saw this most clearly while researching Heretics of the Harvest Moon, working through European witch trial records that span four centuries. The believers in that history wrote manuals. The Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487, laid out exactly how to recognize a witch and exactly what counted as proof. King James VI wrote his own version, Daemonologie, a king setting down doctrine on how the invisible world worked. These weren’t observations. They were conclusions, written first, with the interrogations designed afterward to confirm them. A woman’s silence under torture was guilt. Her confession was guilt. There was no answer that led anywhere except where the manual had already decided to go.

The skeptics came later, and not all of them did much better. Twentieth-century historians had their own version of certainty. Three centuries of trials, they decided, came down to one mechanism: economic strain, or mass hysteria, or a delusion that spread through illiterate villages until reason finally showed up to clean it out. That account flattens the past just as much as the witch-hunting manuals did, trading one tidy answer for another. The accused and the accusers both become case studies in a syndrome, not people. They were individuals making decisions inside a worldview that made sense to them at the time. Tens of thousands of trial records don’t reduce to one tidy diagnosis any more than they reduce to one tidy demonology.

Watch long enough and you start to notice the tell. It’s not what people believe. It’s how fast they stop listening once a detail threatens the frame they walked in with.

I believe in something larger than us. I’ve never pretended otherwise. But I’ve stopped being sure what shape that something takes, and I think that uncertainty is the actual honest position, not a fallback from one. Every major religion claims to have the supreme being correctly identified, correctly named, correctly described down to gender and temperament and preference. They can’t all be right. They might all be partially right, gesturing at the same thing from different angles. The way three people describe an elephant in the dark each insist on the part their hands happened to land on.

Maybe what we’re calling God has no physical form at all. Maybe, if we ever do get something like a Disclosure Day, what shows up doesn’t look like a deity or a deception but something closer to a neighbor. None of that threatens the actual claim Genesis makes, which is only that we carry something of the maker in us. It threatens the version of the claim that got built on top of the text by people who needed a fence around the mystery.

That need for a fence is the thing both camps share, and it’s worth sitting with instead of explaining away. Certainty is comfortable. A finished argument doesn’t keep you up at night. The skeptic who has already decided every report is noise gets to stop wrestling with the cases that don’t have a tidy explanation. The believer who has already decided the text says what they need it to say gets to stop wrestling with something harder. Much of scripture was written by people working with incomplete information, ancient cosmology, and language built for an audience that had never conceived of another inhabited world.

Wrestling is uncomfortable. It’s also the only honest response to something this large.

Sister Maura’s line in that film isn’t really a correction. It’s a smaller certainty replacing a bigger one, offered with the same confidence, sourced the same way, which is to say not sourced at all. And I don’t think that’s a flaw unique to a screenwriter reaching for a tidy exchange. I think it’s what most of us do, on both sides of belief, when a question gets too big to hold without an answer attached.

What would it look like to just hold it? To say the universe is enormous, and the evidence for the unexplained keeps accumulating in ways that resist easy dismissal. To say the texts we’ve inherited were never built to answer questions this specific. To say I don’t know what’s out there, or exactly what shape it takes. But I’m not willing to shrink the question down to something small enough to argue about at a dinner table.

That’s not agnosticism dressed up as humility. It’s closer to respect. Respect for how little any of us actually know, and how much of what passes for knowing, on either side, is just discomfort wearing a confident voice.

The skeptic closes the file. The believer closes their book. While both walk away from the same unanswered question, just go through opposite doors. Nobody wrote a manual for staying uncertain. Maybe that’s the book we actually need.