Truth
The Art of Being Skeptical
Abstract
The skeptic has a passion for truth, and dispenses with merely comforting beliefs, thinking that having few beliefs is preferable to believing with inadequate evidence. The skeptic hates self-deception, respects facts, and loves honesty.T M Coates
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, December 18, 2001
What is Skepticism?
Many people are fascinated by mysteries. They like who-dun-it? novels, fantasy fiction and ghosts, ghouls and aliens. The reasons why we are like this are not clear, but will have some evolutionary purpose. A basic inclination not to trust the world as it seems might keep animals on their guard and therefore make them less likely to be ambushed by a predator or fall into a hidden crevasse.
In any event, they are there and are used by charlatans and quacks of all descriptions to fool us if we are not inclined to include them in the aspects of the world to distrust. Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World, explains the importance of reason, and recognizing a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The University of Iowa Anthropology Department run a course on skeptical thinking based on principles like these. Here we abstract some of Sagan’s points and material.
In the modern world, sensible people are skeptical. When buying a used car, they will inspect it carefully, or have a mechanically inclined friend do it for them. Some skepticism is required, and you understand why when buying used cars. If you are credulous, there is a danger you will be ripped off. Everybody understands this, but the trouble is they are not skeptical in many other matters, especially when money is not directly involved.
Crystals! Are They Talismans or Stones? As a crystal focuses sound and light waves for radio and television so may it amplify spiritual vibrations for the attuned human.
Many people are not skeptical about writing like this. It seems to do no obvious harm, but the most gullible soon find themselves convinced that a crystal will be good for them and will buy one. Then they have parted with money for what is at best an ornament with no power at all. Throughout history some people have been ready to be gulled, even though Homo sapiens is supposed to be the smart species.
Why are airy-fairy claims always being made and believed? Some fraudulent claims seem to address real human needs that are not being properly met by our society. People might feel they have a reason to try out various belief systems to see if they help. But a good deal of the reason is that, even in our modern society, people are brought up to believe in mysterious forces that have never been detected by any means known to mankind. The accepted religions depend on people believing in souls and spirits, and ultimately in a specially big spirit in the sky, and his son who will stand by his chums. These ideas are still forced into children at school often with the force of law. Based on it, at a time when received religions are loosing their control on the masses, people are turning to novel cults and mysteries based on the same foundation but with pseudo-scientific or magical accoutrements.
A current fad is channeling. Like Christianity it depends on the belief in immortality—human souls do not die but live on in the spirit world forever! The idea of channeling is reincarnation—the soul can re-enter other bodies in the future—and we can make contact with those who have died. People do not like to think that they end forever at death, and some might like even less the idea that someone very dear to them has died. It is precisely for that reason that some unscrupulous people will take advantage of the bereaved. Whether spirtualists or Christians, each is no better than the other, and the Christian god even exemplified the vulnerability of widows to such exploitation in the Christian sacred writings called the gospels. Now, they take no notice and Christian priests have no scruples about accepting widows mites. When we recognize some emotional vulnerability regarding a claim, that is exactly where we have to make the firmest efforts at skeptical scrutiny. That is where we can be had.
Some so-called psychics claim that they have powers such as the power of knowing where oil is in the ground, or gold or water. Yet, these people do not get rich by being hired by oil companies or gold mine executives. They get rich by appearing on TV shows and Vaudeville shows, or writing astrology columns in newspapers, or writing tripe in books that sell by the barrow load. The books are not bought by the prospecting companies, but by those desperate to believe in the mysterious.
One channeler, more or less what used to be called a medium—the name got somewhat smeared, so the spiritualism profession was re-marketed as channeling—claims to make contact with somebody from 35,000 years ago. To have contact with such a person would be immeasurably valuable to science. Many important questions about the lives of primitive men could be answered without having to examine bones and fossils because this ancient being speaks to us in English and understands perfectly well what we are asking him in English. “Tell us the answers to all these vital questions”, we say. But does he? What we hear are banal sentiments like those the alleged UFO aliens from Beta-Regulus, or wherever, tell the those who have been “abducted” by them.
Carl Sagan used to have a list of questions ready for those who claimed to be in contact with extra-terrestrials. Sometimes they were bold enough to say he could ask anything he liked of the alien superbeing. He would say: “Please give me a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem”. He never got an answer! He had no trouble getting an answer when he asked, “What is your message to humanity?” We must be good. Spirits or aliens have in common that they can answer general questions but not specific ones. Henri Poincaré remarked:
We know how cruel the truth can be, and wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
Why are people allowed to be brought up in this credulous aura of Hellenistic superstition? The reason is that political and religious institutions know that skepticism is dangerous. If we teach everybody in high school the habit of being skeptical, they will not restrict their skepticism to spirits and mediums but will question politicians, advertising and the whole ethos of marketing, the false science put out by commercial companies, and received religions. That will not do!
That is why it is not taught in the schools. That is why the media promote gullibility more than questioning. Democracy depends on questioning, yet fewer people vote, so fewer people are interested in making politicians speak the truth. Children are not taught how to think.
What propels science is the sense of wonder. Schools do little to encourage the sense of wonder at nature in children. If science does not arouse it then it is left to pseudoscience and religion to do it. Poor popularizations of science leave a niche for pseudoscience. Properly presented, science should leave no room for pseudoscience and religion. But the bad drives out the good in science as in other fields in a scientific Gresham’s Law, even though science has the virtue of being true.
How to Be A Skeptic
Critics of science often cannot understand that any idea is not as good as another. They think ideas are picked arbitrarily out of all of those available. For them science is eclectic. They choose different ideas from the scientists, blaming scientists for being prejudiced. They accuse scientists of having closed minds! They cannot understand that scientists have considered the idea non-scientists chose on arbitrary grounds, and rejected it on the evidence.
Skepticism does not mean dismissing everything as impossible or fantastic, it means disbelieving anything until sufficient proof of it has been presented. The important things about being skeptical are therefore understanding rational argument and understanding fallacious and fraudulent argument. It is not so much about being fair—what are the criteria of fairness?—but about making rational choices. We are not trying to get a balance between being gullible and disbelieving everything. We purposely disbelieve everything until we are convinced.
Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. It is indistinguishable on this definition from belief or faith, also adopted in the absence of facts, or despite them. Judgement can only be properly based on the facts. Prejudice causes error and injustice. Judgement on the facts can still be wrong, but belief or prejudice can only be right by chance.
Gullible people cannot distinguish the useful from the worthless. All ideas are not equally valid, so making choices about what to believe is not arbitrary. Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is essential to the success of science. Scientists, if they are any good, begin by being skeptical about their own ideas and criticize them ruthlessly. What seem useful, in some context, are published and made available to other scientists to criticize. It is this open nature of science that makes it work, and stands in the way of deception.
That is not to say scientific deception cannot happen. It can and has, but usually it is soon found out. It is most likely to happen in narrow fields of enquiry when only a limited number of people are criticizing hypotheses. It can also happen on the fringes of science, when practitioners are not trained scientists or disciplines are not properly developed, and particularly when religions are at stake. The whole of ancient near eastern history is a pig’s ear because investigators believe the bible rather than objective evidence. They often prefer to destroy the evidence than counter the “Holy Word”.
Sometimes scientific revolutions happen when ideas accepted by everybody turn out to be wrong, or are superseded by ones of greater generality. Scientists are willing to change their minds and accept they were wrong. They might have to change direction, but there will be more there to be discovered. There might be personal losses in the replacement of an idea that someone helped develop. Scientists are human and change is sometimes painful, but the collective ethic is that overthrowing and replacing old ideas by something better benefits the enterprise of science, and creates opportunities for fresh research. Such a view is rare indeed in politics and religion. It might happen even in near eastern history, but not while it is confined to biblicists, and even objective scientists think the biblicists are honest seekers after truth.
Fallacies
Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, points out in Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, astrologers, psychics, and other pseudoscientists, who deal in flimsy evidence and faulty logic, can con us into all sorts of bizarre beliefs, all of which are aimed at extracting money from the gullible. The skeptic must recognize the common fallacies of logic and rhetoric used by the religious rogues of the world. Here are some warning signs we should watch out for before suspending disbelief.
Bold Statements Do Not Make Claims True. Essentially this is a form of the big lie technique of propaganda. If you have to tell a lie, then make it a big one—people are more likely to believe a big lie, on the grounds that no one dare claim such a thing if it were not true, than a small one. When pseuds want to persuade the credulous, especially when they have little supporting evidence, they will make loud and bold claims of its power and veracity. The resurrection of a dead man is the most popular and widely believed example.
Heresy Does Not Equal Correctness. Pseuds often say, when their ideas are mocked by skeptics, that all truth is ridiculed at first, but later is accepted. Unfortunately this is itself not true. Probably more discoveries emerge naturally with no or negligible ridicule, even revolutionary ones like the quantum theory, and it does not follow that whatever is ridiculous automatically becomes true at some later date. “Being laughed at does not mean you are right”. Most often, it simply means you are ridiculous!
After the Fact Reasoning and Coincidence. Two events that follow each other in sequence are not necessarily causally related—correlation does not demonstrate causation. That kind of reasoning, known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”), is little more than superstition. Unusual coincidences are impressive and are remembered, but why should anyone remember the myriads of times when coincidences do not occur when they could, if there were some mysterious causation involved. Most people make no allowance for selective memory or understand the distribution laws.
We can thank Christianity for the abolition of slavery.
Non sequitur. Latin for “It does not follow”. Applies to any fallacy in formal logic but usually used of something blatant.
Christianity is true because it is successful.
• It does not follow that what is successful is necessarily true or vice versa. Does the Christian accept that all other successful religions are true too?
Not Comparing Like with Like. Ships have an unusual probability of disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle. This is simply untrue. More ships disappear in certain parts of the Atlantic simply because it is a busy shipping lane than say in the Southern Ocean, or elsewhere. Taking the incidence of disappearances like this in this area and comparing it with other places allowing for traffic density and so on, shows that the Atlantic is safer than most places. It is busier and has more safety nets. Events must be considered against the proper background for that class of phenomena. All anecdotal evidence can only be suggestive until it is properly checked in some controlled way.
Ambiguity. Using an ambiguous word to fallaciously equate concepts.
All laws must have a lawgiver. Therefore, the Law of Gravity has a lawgiver.
• Ambiguous usage of the word “law”.
Category Mistake. Occurs by fallaciously classifying something in a category to which it does not belong.
If you are an evolutionist then you must think capitalism is morally right because, like the theory of evolution, it is based on the survival of the fittest.
• Categorises the theory of evolution as a moral theory not a natural one.
Confusion of correlation and causation.
More college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education, so education makes people gay.
False Analogy. Using a fallacious analogy.
Evolution happens by chance, but a watch could not assemble itself by chance, and an animal is more complicated than a watch.
• A self-assembling watch is a false analogy with the evolution of an organism.
Inconsistency.
The universe will continue to exist forever into the future. And the past? It must have been created sometime.
• The future is declared infinite but not the past.
Irrelevance. Using an irrelevant argument.
Atheists have always been evil people with no regard for human life, like Stalin, so atheism cannot be true.
• Whether atheists are good or not has no bearing on the truth of atheism.
Salesman’s fallacy. Assuming that a whole must have some property because its parts have it. The whole is often more than the sum of its parts.
The Reverend Green says evolutionists regard humans as simply an unfeeling concourse of atoms, so how can we have ethical or aesthetic values.
• Assumes that because individual atoms are unfeeling, a concourse of them must be.
Weasel words. Justifying some action by calling it something else. Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said:
An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public.
Failures Are Excused, So there never are any. It is the failure of something expected to occur, in science, that signals the possibility of something new. Experiments that unexpectedly fail are repeated, with the empiricists looking for flaws. If none are found, then there might be cause for a new phenomenon or hypothesis. Most failures are indeed caused by experimental flaws, and disappear when more care is taken, but pseudoscientists’ failures are rationalized. The oldest excuse of all, observed upon 2000 years ago, is that the presence of skeptics stops psychic or otherwise magical powers from working. Believers will excuse a psychic’s failures but do not consider that the successes are fraudulent.
Observational selection, or counting the hits and forgetting the misses.
The church has converted many alcoholics.
• But how many church members have become alcoholic?
Misunderstanding Statistics.
President Dwight Eisenhower was shocked to discover that half of all Americans had below average intelligence.
Statistics of small numbers.
I was only one number short in the bingo. I feel, next time I will win.
Suppressed evidence, or half-truths.
The Jewish prophets were astonishingly accurate in their prophecies.
• The date when the prophecies were made is suppressed, the books being later than they pretend.
Either-Or. This is a favourite ploy of religious charlatans. It is the fallacy of negation or false dilemma. Limiting the discussion to a number of choices when more choices are available. If one thing is not true then another must be.
Jesus was either Lord, a liar, or a lunatic. He could not be a liar or a lunatic, so he is Lord.
• Neglects that Jesus could have been honestly mistaken or misreported, honestly or otherwise. Moreover, he could have been a liar or a lunatic! Nor is it true that what cannot be disproved must be true…
Appeal to ignorance. Whatever has not been proved false must be true.
There is a residue of UFO sightings that cannot be explained, so they must be due to alien craft.
Because no one can disprove that Harvey the Rabbit is always at my left shoulder encouraging me, then it must be true. Christians think this of their buddy, Jesus. An hypothesis must assert something that can be verified. No one else can verify someone’s personal imaginary buddy. If there is insufficient evidence, the most generous that can be done is suspend judgement.
Excluded middle, or false dichotomy. Considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities.
If you are not for us, then you are against us.
Argument from adverse consequences.
A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He did not, society would be much more lawless and dangerous, perhaps even ungovernable.
Or: The defendant must be found guilty or it will encourage other men to murder their wives.
Slippery slope.
Allowing abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, will end up with the killing of a new born child.
Burden of Proof. Whoever makes an extraordinary claim has the burden of proving it. Mountains of evidence prove that dead men do not spontaneously return to life. If someone is not dead, they might appear to return to life, but that is not a resurrection. Some people believe in the resurrection of Jesus, but similar claims were made for other people that are rejected by those who think Jesus was unique on the same grounds that others will not accept the Christian miracle. All naturalistic explanations prove the miracle did not happen. Christians have failed to prove what supposedly establishes their religion. Hume says, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened… If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.
Ad Hominem. Latin for “to the man”, attacking the arguer and not the argument. Insults based on someone’s foolish arguments are not ad hominem. The insult must be meant to win the argument by discrediting the person.
Not ad hominem—The Reverend Green shows by his arguments that he does not understand evolution. He is a fool.
But ad hominem—The Reverend Green is a fool, so his objections to evolution can be ignored.
Ad Populum. What most people believe must be true.
Three quarters of Americans believe in a God, so Christianity must be right.
Appeal to Authority.
The Reverend Green is a nun and a scholar so she must be right that Jesus was resurrected.
All such appeals are poor arguments, but especially when it is simply an appeal to fame, the authority having no relevance to the subject.
If a great actor like Alec Guinness was a Catholic, it must have some merit.
Affirming the Consequent. Affirming the consequent rather than antecedent term in the first premise of a syllogism. Instead of “if p then q; p; therefore q” the fallacious argument is “if p then q; q; therefore p”.
If a person is a Christian, they must love God; Celsus loved God; therefore, Celsus was a Christian.
Begging the question. Or in Latin, petitio principii. Assuming the answer. Circular reasoning by which the conclusion is implicitly the premise. The truth of the conclusion is conditional on its own truth, begging the question of whether it is really true.
We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime.
• Assumes the death penalty stops violent crime.
Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of profit-taking by investors.
• A falling stock market means that, on balance, stocks are being sold for cash, but that does not explain why.
Or: The Bible is true. How do you know? Because it says it is the word of God.
Or: God exists because the Bible says He does, and, as the Word of God it cannot be wrong.
• Assumes that the Bible is the Word of God, which can only be true if God exists.
Special pleading. Attempting to deflect an argument by pleading some special condition.
How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Because of the subtle doctrine of free will.
• This is pleading a particular irrelevant reason for the supposedly merciful God to be unmerciful.
Or: So, God cannot exist, but if you prove that to everyone, believers will have no reason to be good. So, God must exist.
• This is pleading concern for a source of morality.
If you say that there is no afterlife, many people will be distressed that they will never see their loved ones again, so you must be wrong.
• This is a special appeal to pity.
If people want to live peaceably around here, they join the Klan.
• A special appeal to force.
Incredulity. Saying that something is untrue simply because it seems incredible. The proposition must be falsified by proving it to be impossible.
There has to be a Creator, because I cannot believe something as complex as the eye could possibly evolve without a designer.
Straw man. Caricaturing a position. Setting up a caricature of an argument to make it easier to attack, then claiming to have refuted the original argument.
The Reverend Green says scientists suppose that evolution is all a matter of chance, but chance cannot lead to human intelligence.
• The whole point of the theory is that living things adapt to their environment by natural selection, not at all a matter of chance.
Tu Quoque. Latin “You too”. Making a reciprocal accusation. But, even if true, saying “you too” does not negate the argument.
Mr Churchill! You are drunk.
As you say, Madam, and you are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober.
• Churchill concedes the point, thus losing the argument, but deflects attention with “tu quoque”.
Elements of Empirical Method
Suppose that some observations have been made that need explaining. First be sure the evidence—the observations—are acceptable. When evidence is presented in support of an argument, it must not be arbitrary, and preferably should be independently confirmed after substantive consideration by experts in all relevant fields. Data should not be discarded without good reason, such as a known malfunction of an apparatus. Anomalies should be repeatedly checked, to eliminate spurious errors.
Quantify! If the data have some numerical quantity attached to it, it will discriminate among competing hypotheses better. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Many Egyptologists declare that C-14 dating is a waste of funds because they know the dates of their finds, and those that do them discard unpublished what does not confirm their belief. No one knows how many discarded C-14 dates there are. It is unscientific and amateurish because the psudo-science of Egyptology does not want its boat rocked. The truth of biblical history depends on it.
Brainstorm the possible hypotheses that might explain, or go some way to explaining, the phenomena. Think of all the different ways in which they could be explained. Ask whether each hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are worthless beliefs. So, “it is God’s will” might serve as a hypothesis for a clergyman but it is not capable of being tested, so it is valueless as an explanation. You must be able to check out assertions. Others must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the possible hypotheses. Put to one side the hypotheses that fail the tests, together with why they were discarded, but be ready at a later date to reconsider, either if no hypothesis is successful throughout or when new evidence comes to light. A hypothesis that failed might succeed with modification or if evidence is better.
Occam’s Razor! If any come through the testing procedure, whatever seems the better on grounds of elegance will be selected as a working hypothesis to be used to suggest further work in explaining the data, and suggesting fresh data to collect. When faced with hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simplest.
A hypothesis should not be hung on to in the face of the evidence, or rejected arbitrarily. The only criterion is whether the hypothesis works in explaining the data given the known conditions and the logic of the reasoning from premise (the hypothesis) and the conditions. Every link in the chain of reasoning must be valid. Arguments from authority in science carry little weight except in the field in which the authority is expert, and even then, it has to be recognized that no authority is infallible or even free from bias.
Rely on carefully designed and controlled experiments. Contemplation can generate hypotheses and ways of testing them, but cannot decide among the rival hypotheses. In the end the tests must be done. We decide among competing hypotheses by devising tests for them, then doing the tests. The experiments decide not us. This is what distinguishes science from theology. Francis Bacon gave us the reason:
Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.
All tests should be accompanied by a blank or control experiment done in precisely the same way, but with the central ingredient under test omitted. Control experiments are essential. Drug testing for example is done against a placebo, to eliminate psychological effects. If a sugar tablet cures an ailment in 20% of cases and wonderdrug does it in only 15% then it is not effective, although the 15% figure given alone might make it seem so.
Variables must be separated. You want to study the growth of estuary shrimps, then temperature and salinity will have to be separately altered to find out how each effects growth. Nowadays, once that has been done, it might be useful to study both, changing them together in controlled ways and statistical methods used to find cross effects—how variables effect each other—but initially the varaibles must be changed independently.
There is a danger that people assessing the results will inadvertantly, or even deliberately, impose their own judgements on the data, skewing the results. Doing the experiment double-blind can avoid this. Testing a new medicine, physicians recording symptoms should not know who has had the drug and who has had the placebo. Instead those who experienced remission of symptoms can be compared with those who got the drug, each independently ascertained.
