It’s not practical, or indeed even possible, for an individual to accurately declare “how things are”. The nature of Nature is just too immense. So if I am to attempt a disciplined life, I must arrive at some reasonable compromise between my best assessment of “how things are” in greater reality, and “what works” in the pursuit of my desired outcome.

So if, in the construction of a worldview, we think we have really captured “how things are”, we are flirting with self-deception. But if, in an effort to avoid that deception, we abandon the chore of refining our worldview altogether, we are flirting with irresponsibility. So we are left with the unenviable task of setting some artificial, if not perhaps totally arbitrary, constraints on our “practical reality”.

This is in no way any kind of license to overthrow or ignore aspects of “objective reality” that have proven to withstand the scrutiny of long-form science. To the contrary, these hard-won nuggets of gold should comprise the skeletal tissue of any reliable worldview. But realistically, these bones will always be a minority of the overall volume of “reality” in which our lives must play out. The unknowns will always outweigh the knowns, but we are called to live a full life, not merely a frame of a life, so a certain amount of judicious creativity may be unavoidable.

For purposes of filling in the gaps, the most useful operating system will not only resist the temptation to weave the soft tissue from comfort-oriented raw materials, but will also volunteer for the creative constraints which, under experimentation, prove to generate the desired result.

Rejection of irrational or destructive self-denial need not assume an all-or-nothing attitude toward self-regulation in general. If I assume that, in every location as yet uninhabited by science, I am God, then I am clearly setting myself up for some rude awakenings. But at least equally unfortunate would be to assume that, therefore, I am no part of God, and then not even try.

A healthy worldview construction plan needs the deepest practical familiarity with well-established scientific thinking (at least where it bears on the outcome of living one’s life) without fanciful embellishment, but not without science-informed conjectural projections into the unclaimed territory.

Realistic (likely to produce desired results) projection respects the laws of limitation, just as the known material world does. The job of guessing these limits accurately is more of an art than a science, but an indispensable art, and arguably, the greater part of assembling a useful map.