HOW you find out matters!

What would you do if you found out that…

• the Christian God really exists…
• the universe is really a simulation…
• there really is a Santa Claus…
• Trump is the smartest President to date…
• your best friend is an alien from outer space…

Questions in this form pop up on Quora every day. But what most of the people posing the questions fail to specify is how we’re supposed to find out these remarkable facts. It’s as if we’re meant to imagine them arising unbidden in our consciousness, clothed in impenetrable veracity.

But that’s not how real facts work. Genuine information comes from gathering evidence; and in the case of most of the questions of this type that appear on Quora, the only possible answer is: ‘it depends on how I find it out’.

Your reaction to finding out that the Christian god exists, for instance, is going to be very different if you ‘find out’ about him in any of these ways:

• God appears to you in private in your bedroom, does a few conjuring tricks, and disappears.
• God appears on the Oprah Winfrey show and demonstrates his power by extinguishing a galaxy.
• God writes his name across the sky in letters of fire thirty kilometers high.
• God gathers up all the non-believers on the plains of Megiddo and announces they’re bound for Hell.

So in this case—as in most of the others that come up on Quora—it’s simply meaningless to ask ‘What if you found out X?’ without specifying exactly how you find it out.