Skepticism: The Truth Machine

“I believe what I believe and no one will ever change my mind.”

I’ve written posts like this one before, and I will write them again after this one. It seems like no one wants to listen to us when we point out the obvious: changing your mind on the basis of evidence is how science works. It’s how learning works, and it’s how truth works. So here, one more time, is a layout of the way learning works, and how changing one’s mind in the face of new evidence is a good thing.

To begin with, there exists an objective fact of nature (these debates seem to always concern things that have an objective answer, even if some of them may never be resolved, such as the existence of god). For example, regardless of what the prevailing paradigm was concerning the structure of matter, we now can say that all matter is made up of atoms, and that this was true even before we knew what atoms were. Concerning the age of the earth (or any other analogous question), there is and always has been an objective answer to the question, even before we were able to test it.

Now let’s say that two civilizations have creation stories (of course, there are literally thousands of creation stories from different civilizations throughout the history of humanity). Both of these civilizations believe that their creation story is true, when in reality the odds are stacked against them. I would say that all of these stories have a roughly equal chance of being true, so that would put any creation story at (very approximately) .01% chance of being true. These seem like pretty slim odds, right? Well, they should be adjusted even more drastically when we learn new scientific information that would rule some of them out as literal truths. For example, I once heard a creation story from a Native American tribe that says that the world is a giant turtle. We obviously know that this cannot be literally true, even if it might be true as a metaphor (I’m skeptical). Similarly, if there is a creation story that states that the world was created just a few thousand years ago, it is only fair to factor in the best available knowledge from the scientific community. We do have mountains of evidence in the forms of various dating methods (Potassium-Argon dating, stratigraphy, Carbon dating, dendrochronology, etc) that the Earth is very old (around 4.5 billion years old). Does it make sense to apply modern knowledge to some creation stories and not others? Of course not; special pleading is a logical fallacy. You can’t exempt the Bible from scientific criticism just because YOU believe it. You are no better than the above-mentioned Native Americans, and your beliefs are no more vindicated by modern science.

Skepticism is a wonderful thing. To be skeptical of science is a good thing, but one has no legitimate justification to be skeptical of science (which is in itself a skeptical institution) while refusing to be skeptical of religion. Skepticism involves weighing the claims, faults, and truths of an idea before accepting it as true. If you believe that the Bible is true, and have since you were a young child, you cannot be skeptical of the Bible unless you set aside this belief in its truth in order to subject it to skepticism and criticism. If the Bible is true, no amount of skepticism could tarnish that truth. But if the Bible is not true, or if it makes claims based on insufficient evidence, then you can walk away saying that you are now closer to the truth than you were when you followed a text based on faith alone.

I want to wrap up with an analogy. Skepticism is the machine we use to tell fact from fiction. When someone says something outlandish, we can run it through the skepticism machine, and this gives us the ability to call bullshit. Is it any surprise, then, that such an incredibly unlikely claim (.01%, remember?) claims the right to bypass the skepticism machine? Just think about it: if I wanted people to believe an unlikely story, a great way to do it would be to state that it’s true, but it must be taken on faith. That is, you have to turn off the skepticism machine that lets you know if it’s false. I like my truth machine, thank you, and I hope you grow to like yours.