What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitute “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the god, and we are observers of the game… if we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world.
There are generally three ways to tell whether the rules which we “guess” at are right if we cannot analyze the game very well:
- check how our rules work under simple situations (have very few parts) where we can predict exactly what will happen;
- check rules in terms of less specific rules derived from them, that is when we have a rule that works well in an overall way, then when we cannot follow the details and sometime we may discover a new rule;
- by rough approximation, we can often understand the nature, more or less, without being able to see what every little piece is doing, in terms of our understanding of the game