Acting with Certainty in our Uncertainty

Kyle Cupp:  I cannot dismiss the possibility that my faith isn’t something otherwise than a response to a revealing God. It’s possible that what I call my faith experiences are the result of digestion, bodily chemistry, neurosis, the fear of death, or the desire for meaning. Because I do not know myself with certainty, I cannot know my faith with certainty. I cannot say for sure what it is.

I’m not in the least bothered by my uncertainty. It’s not as though certainty is one of the virtues, theological or otherwise.  I seem to get along, faith-wise, just fine without it.

Can you live a life of conviction, advocacy, and passion without certainty?  If I am not certain of the things my faith calls me to have faith in, can I speak regarding my faith without a sense of feeling disingenuous?  Cupp's short blog post on the matter includes this quote from Philosopher John Caputo:

The acting subject is something acted upon even in its very acting, for the acting subject is itself a function of the anonymous, presubjective forces by which it is traversed—by language, the unconscious, by the weight and momentum of its own past, of the collective past to which it belongs, by the biochemistry and neurophysiology of which it is constituted, and by numberless (because anonymous) other forces. When the subject acts, we cannot be sure what acts, i.e., what is happening, because the individual subject is an irreducible complex of other events.

In my interpretation, this is a wordy way of saying, whenever you do anything, there are an infinite number of things that have influenced you to act that way, and there is no real way of saying what it is that is doing the acting.  

However, perhaps we can agree (and maybe not) that the sum total of all the influences, be they historical, biological, etc., add up to this thing we call personhood, and therefore, while it may be impossible for us to point at the person and say you are doing this because of x,y, and x, we can say that it is you that is doing it.  Whether or not such a claim is rationally consistent with an "irreducible complex of other events" is inconsequential in my opinion.  That we act with any sense of certainty, in the face of uncertainty, means we have to act with a sense of responsibility for the I that is taking action.

-Tim