Montaigne admits that when he was younger, he had disdain for people who believed in folktales, myths and monsters. But as he aged, he had less sympathy for his old beliefs, not because he was convinced that these magical creatures existed, but because he lost faith in his ability to fully understand the world.

His Pyrrhonism is often misunderstood as a critique of human knowledge, but it’s really about the limitations of individual knowledge. He’s not trying to take down science, rather he’s making a point that most of us, regardless of our relative enlightenment, are still highly in the dark about most matters of existence. And this came several centuries before quantum mechanics.

It’s likely that our existence is far stranger than we can comprehend and exists on multiple dimensions we cannot — and likely will never — access. Montaigne, at least partly, assigns the incomprehensible nature of existence to the ways of God. But this too, in my estimation, leads to a great number of false assumptions.

The monotheistic God of the Bible gives human beings dominion over all other animals, basically freeing us to do with them as we wish. This God also claims that human beings were created in God’s image, so if there are other intelligent beings in the universe that don’t look like us, apparently they aren’t God’s creatures. The early Christians also put our planet in the center of the universe and had it all revolve around us.

In truth, our most widely accepted monotheism — a tradition embraced by Judaism, Christianity and Islam — attempts to make the world far more comprehensible than we now see. If there is in fact a God — and I have no way of knowing one way or another — I think it’s likely that this God is far beyond our understanding or comprehension and that the religions texts created to describe the Deity are little more than folk tales.

But even science-based atheism has picked up a strange patina in recent years. People who freely critique organized religions and their explanations of the world are, in increasing numbers, embracing “simulation theory” and this idea that we live inside a digital simulation of a universe.

I don’t want to get into the philosophical (and mathematical) rationales for this theory, I just want to point out that the same people who make fun of the idea of an all knowing God creating the world in seven days think have no problem embracing the thought that we might be little more than some teenanger’s SimEarth game running on a computer.

How is this not another form of Creationism? Either you believe that the universe was created from a series of random natural occurrences or you don’t. All of which is just contributing to a greater sense of incomprehensibility in our present age. No one has a theory about anything that makes sense anymore.

It’s also true of our current political economic theories, where capitalism is no longer what we’ve critiqued over the past 200 years, and the socialism being embraced by others couldn’t possibly be adopted within our Constitutional republic — but we debate as if these impossibilities were the basis of our reality.

All of which just supports Montaigne’s main point, that the more our society becomes knowledgable about the particulars of existence, the less we actually understand our place in it. It might help us all get along within this chaotic world if everyone was a little more humble about their core beliefs and had an appreciation for how they could be wrong.

Given the likelihood that all of us are wrong about some major things we hold dear, what possible excuse do we have to resort to anger and violence over it all?