How Much Skepticism?
The label of skepticism receives an undeserved amount of contempt from society at large. It would not be outrageous to postulate that public opinion of skepticism has declined in mainstream media in recent decades, a change correlated with an embrace of less organised and more “new age” deliriums such as astrology, homeopathy and almost anything with the words “natural” and/or “organic” in front of it. Organised religion frequently condemns skepticism as dangerous and faith-wavering. Considering how easily a less biased sense of skepticism can reveal their hollow claims, it’s unsurprising that the surviving religions condemn it. It’s not difficult to imagine the very short lifespan of any religion simultaneously teaching that a) an ambivalent sky-wizard gave birth to and executed himself before rising from the dead and being sucked back into the clouds, and b) it’s important to question any strange claims or stories you’re told.
Note that I am discussing the approach of skepticism here, named after the Skeptikoi school of philosophy, and not reason at large, which is better defined as a method of making a sustainable conclusion from available evidence and premises. Skepticism, as I’ve alluded to, is the school of thought that emphasises the importance of suspending immediate judgement – in lay terms, “don’t believe everything you’re told”. The Bible makes a good villain out of “Doubting Thomas”, one of Jesus’s apostles who (oddly enough) did not believe that Jesus had risen from the grave after being told as much. After seeing Jesus in the flesh, and being offered the opportunity to touch what one imagines were ghastly palm wounds, he finally came around. Jesus himself condemned Thomas’s doubt, saying “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29). The flaws in this “argument” against Thomas’s skepticism are ludicrous. Would Jesus prefer that Thomas believe absolutely anything that anyone cared to tell him? Or perhaps just stories relating to Jesus? What if a lunatic had burst into Thomas’s home, claiming to have seen Jesus come flying in through his window and instructing him to sacrifice one thousand sheep before sunset? Should Thomas check to see if there was any evidence that this had happened, such as a broken window, or head straight for the fields with sword in hand? Let’s face it – as far as absurdities go, Jesus and his sky-bound OT counterpart have done worse.
Yes, I understand that Thomas heard of the resurrection not from a sole lunatic but from many people, including his fellow apostles. Do we conclude from this that any claim can be immediately taken as true if enough people believe it? Or maybe just on the word of a few people considered to be trustworthy? This is the core problem of faith, which in theory is essentially opposite of skepticism. In practice, however, it turns out that people claiming to possess the virtue of faith are merely selective skeptics. The rest of this article will explore exactly how selective skepticism manifests itself, why it is fallacious and dangerous, and finally if it is possible to be “overskeptical”.
I don’t believe I have ever encountered, or even heard of, someone who is not skeptical of anything. Such a ridiculously gullible person would be utterly destitute at best, and dead at worst. They would be scared of every monster they’d ever heard of, believe everything they heard or read, and be internally tormented at which religion to adhere to amidst conflicting claims of truthfulness. They would be a bizarre psychological case study. To confirm that you are not this individual, imagine one Saturday morning that you hear a knock on the door. You answer it, and find a well-dressed middle-aged man wearing glasses and holding a coil of thick rope. He says to you, “Good morning. I have just received a telepathic message from Jovus, an all-powerful spacefaring cobra who resides within the clouds of Jupiter. He has given clear instructions that we are to hang ourselves using this sacred Jovian rope with utmost haste, allowing us to join him in Jovian paradise before the Earth is eaten by the evil boa constrictor Pliphius next Tuesday.”
If you did not immediately respond “Just let me say goodbye to my dog” before showing him the most convenient makeshift gallows, congratulations. You have just exhibited skepticism. You would hopefully also exhibit some level of fear before calling the police.
I could highlight endless occasions in just the past week when you would have been skeptical of something. Didn’t follow the links to “GetFreeMoney.Com” or “HowToGoBackInTime.Com” from your email inbox? You’re skeptical of them. Doubting the claims of that touching message from a dying cancer patient in Albania requesting a loan of $100,000 for life-saving surgery? You’re skeptical. Wondering if that 7-day crash diet you saw on morning TV talk shows really works? You’re a little skeptical. The only question is, where do you draw the line? What would it take for you to just immediately believe something you were told or something you saw, like asking someone the time on the train station? The answer is complicated, but a few factors can be examined.
As I’ve already mentioned, both quantity and quality of information sources can influence how skeptical we are. Quantity could refer to how many people told you, or how unanimous acceptance of the claim seems to be. Quality would then be how well we know the person (do they have a reputation for lies or rumour-spreading, or any qualifications on the subject?) or a TV/online source’s history – essentially, how accurate that source’s claims have proved in the past. Quality is generally a more reliable way of deciding how much skepticism to apply to a claim than quantity. To go back to the inbox example, we can usually tell when an email is spam from past experience (a measure of quality), but the knowledge that everyone gets those emails all the time doesn’t improve their chances of passing our “skepticism threshold”. On the flipside, single copies of important emails might get lost amongst the spam. This is not an argument for opening every single link in every email so as to not miss the real ones. Rather, it is an argument that the spam mails are a frustrating problem for the online community.
This is not to rule out quantity completely as a legitimate reason to bypass intense skepticism. If a large quantity of people describe the same (not unreasonably improbable) event to us, and the only qualitative factor we know about them is that none of them know each other, then that would be an indicator that the event really happened. Note the “not unreasonably improbable” tag – if the event is sufficiently extraordinary, then quantity alone should not be considered grounds to immediately believe, and the possibility that these people really do know each other or are all mistaken becomes more likely than the possibility that this extraordinary event happened as described.
Proponents of organised religion appeal to both of these factors . Apologists have turned to both the large numbers of religious followers (quantity) and the supposed evidence of the truth of their holy books (quality) as reasons to bypass skepticism and jump immediately to unwavering, unquestioned faith. However, neither of these factors carry anything close to the strength that would be required for us to stop being skeptical and start believing. Imagine if only one person in the world believed the Bible to be true as written. Yes, those with extremely low thresholds of skepticism would slowly gravitate towards them, but for the most part the extraordinary events described in the book would be met with as much incredulity as L. Ron Hubbard’s claim that humans were incubated in volcanoes by aliens. Now, imagine one hundred people believed in the Bible’s word. Still skeptical? How about a thousand? A million? What about the dubious billion-person figure purported by the Roman Catholic Church? Even the latter should be met with extreme skepticism, as we are being asked to accept (in addition to many other extraordinary claims) that the described deity’s followers make up less than a sixth of Earth’s population, and great variation exists even among them. For quantity to influence our level of skepticism, we would expect something like %80 of humans to believe the exact same thing, because only then does the possibility of these claims being true begin to draw closer to the far more likely possibility that these numbers are due to an active quashing of skepticism and a good system of propagation through generations – two things we certainly observe in the Catholic Church.
The “quality” purpoted by apologists and evangelists is also less than ordinary, let alone extraordinary. Why should we not be skeptical of an old man reading alleged truths from a book that hasn’t been updated in centures? Has this man demonstrated any other amazing insights? Unless evidence comes to light that this man also picked the right religion in a few alternate realities, there cannot be any real grounds on which to let these extraordinary stories through our skepticism shields. The scenario is no different from the spam in the inbox, except that in the case of religion, the idea that there might be one real religion being wrongly filtered out by skepticism only tells us that it’s not trying very hard to convince us.
Aside from the reliability of sources, the next obvious place to look for hints at how strongly to employ skepticism is the information itself. I’ve already mentioned several times the notion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this rule of thumb is a good one when considering information. For most people, be they astrologists or theists or Scientologists, this rule is granted generous exceptions, hence the phenomenon of selective skepticism. An astrologist may be skeptical of accounts such as a worldwide flood or the state of Nirvana, yet they go on to claim with ridiculously inadequate evidence and barren sources that the movements of the entire observable universe are linked to daily events such as getting a new job or breaking up with a partner. A theist might doubt crystal healing or accounts of alien abductions, yet accept without question that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago and that a deity created the first woman out of the first man’s rib. And a Scientologist…well, I’ve already mentioned the volcano incubation. From the point of view of someone with a healthy skepticism threshold, these claims differ in absurdity only in the fact that at least Scientology does not blatantly violate the physical laws of the universe. That same person would be immensely skeptical of all of them without knowing anything about the sources of information, and some rudimentary research into those sources would definitely not improve their chances of being accepted as true.
It’s easy to turn a blind eye to specific things, especially if they were forced on you as truth when you were too young to develop a sense of skepticism. Other things become accepted as true because they play down their absurd origins, like the “new age” movement of pseudoscience and other strange beliefs with no good reason for getting into our minds. Words like “naturalistic” are frequently abused. The near-fanatical modern environmental movement fosters a “skeptical failure” in the acceptance of grossly exaggerated statistics and claims. But for any of these people, any of them at all, to openly criticise skepticism as a whole should be recognised for what it is – complete hypocrisy.
This leaves just one query: though I’ve established when it’s wrong to be insufficiently skeptical, I’ve not really mentioned the issue of being overly so. Obviously, meticulously examining the evidence for every high-possibility claim would waste time and energy. As I mentioned earlier, if you’re on the train station and ask someone for the time, unless the response is terribly incongruent with the sun’s position in the sky, acting on the assumption that they were mistaken or lying will hinder you more often than it helps the one time they were actually twenty minutes behind. Likewise, receiving an excited phone call from your partner telling you that your daughter just took her first steps should not precede a full-scale investigation into evidence that said stepping actually occured. A quick thought, or even an unconscious consideration, about the likelihood of the claim’s truth in regard to the quality of its source will tell you that it is perfectly believable. In general, it’s much, much harder to be “over-skeptical” than under-skeptical, and that’s because skepticism is something we learn as we grow.
In the future, I hope to see less hypocritical condemnation of skepticism, and over time, a higher threshold for accepting claims – because frankly, the world is filled to the brim with information, and most of it is utter garbage.
Leaves in the Wind
All the colors’ philosophies seem to dwell on creating the perfect world, at least the perfect world as they see it. The irony is that the perfect world is already here. Just take a moment to step back and look at nature. It is horribly complex yet surprisingly simple. It is harsh yet gentle. It’s functional yet beautiful. Nature is an odd mix of opposites living in harmony. And it sits right here under our noses.
To what end should the leaves on the branches of a tree attempt to change the tree itself? How can an engine tinkered with throughout a century of human industry possibly subvert a global, and perhaps even cosmic, engine perfected over billions of years? For how long can we blunder along, thinking ourselves the ultimate pinnacle and purpose of this cosmic engine, advancing in technology at a vastly accelerated rate while not understanding the weapons we wield, before a machine misfires and the leaves fall scorched to the ground?
Those are the questions Green puts forward. If you have no idea who or what Green is, I advise you strongly to read my article ‘The Stirring Shadow‘ and the series’ second part, ‘Damn the Consequences‘ to discover my thoughts on applying the philosophy of colors of Magic: the Gathering to the real world. As for here, I won’t waste any time before diving into the forest of the universe.
Green, essentially, can be best summed up by its unique viewpoint on change: while the other four colors are busying themselves trying to change the world, Green sees no need. Every organism, every drop of water, every planet – everything carries a purpose refined over billions of years since the beginning of the universe. We are all pieces in a cosmic puzzle – and the mere fact that we evolved self-awareness mere millenia ago does not give us free reign to change this ancient universe as we see fit. Every step towards a rigid, artificially-changed world is a step away from the rhythmic balance that our species was born into. We are gifted, yes, but our intelligence also blinds us to the fact that we are still only marginally different from the other animals we live alongside, and makes us too sure of ourselves. Were we to obliterate ourselves in nuclear war next week, we would be replaced by nature without a moment’s pause, and the universe at large would feel not a ripple. But at the same time, nature has given us a place here and now, and we should not waste time and energy on making bigger televisions and faster cars when we should be improving ourselves as individuals and, more importantly, as a whole.
No piece of the puzzle can amount to much by itself on the scale of the universe. Aside from water, plants are our single most vital resource, and other animals follow just behind it. However, each piece does have a role – a way to best fit into the puzzle – with which we are born, and rather than struggling to make our individual roles more important than others’, we should each discover the role we were destined for, and make as great a contribution as we can to our community, our species, our planet, our universe. After embracing this philosophy, says Green, and learning the patience to find our place, we would quickly realise that we had been wandering blind in an already perfect world driven by an ancient engine able to resolve every problem that has ever existed.
It is easy to become very emotional when describing a green outlook – moreso than Red, I find, the other color focused on emotion. Note that “emotional” does not mean crying, as contemporary casual usage of the term would imply, but simply feeling what one is writing, and that in itself is green more than anything itself. Green holds the view that we have evolved feelings for a reason, and we should follow them rather than question why millions of years of natural selection would grant them to us today. Green is also the color that we are made to feel guilty for lacking – growing environmental, social and technological concerns in modern society are Green-driven – but at the same time, that fact that one can be made to feel guilty about such issues implies a green conscience under the surface. No color can remind us of our miniscule place in the universe like Green can, and it is this aspect of Green that I appreciate most.
On the flipside, it is easy to misconstrue Green’s inherent spirituality into something like organised religion, which I would identify as the result of a crossover between Green and White. Eastern religions are extremely Green (as are the Jedi of Star Wars), and these religions I have little conflict with. However, extreme personifications of “nature” as a human-like entity or “god” have deviated into the Abrahamic western religions doing so much widespread and personal harm. These organisations have lost sight of Green’s true philosophy, if they ever had it in the past, and I will focus more on them in my White article. As for Green, I interpret it as containing no claims of supernatural forces as depicted in western culture, but rather possessing a reverence for nature, far closer to Buddhism and elements of Hinduism. Influences of these holistic cultures have drifted into the west in recent times, but sadly the length of time the west has been separated from Green results in few people actually achieving close to a full understanding of practices such as meditation. A stronger failure to understand Green can be seen in the mysticism of “new age” spirituality, which essentially consists of genuine, Green-seeking people being exploited by conspicuously Green-lacking con artists such as psychics and astrologists.
While Eastern religions do have practices and beliefs that would be immediately cast off as “pseudoscience” by a staunch supporter of Blue, it is important to realise that there is little comparison with Western equivalents like astrology. Green practices do not originate from a bottom-up study of the brain, like blue practices, but have evolved over thousands of years – practices like meditation still exist simply because they achieve a purpose that Green considers important. Just as “amoral” is a word applied to but not recognised by Black, “primitive” is a concept applied to rather than by Green, usually to imply some lack of advanced cognitive processes. The Australian Aborigines lived in balance with the rest of their world, observing the natural cycles and passing down traditions that proved effective over tens of thousands of years. The blue/black among us may look back at their existence with condescension, but perhaps the Aborigines would have in turn looked upon them with disbelief, and wondering how long before their separation from their world and their own destinies caused their end.
On that note, I now move on to the incongruence of Green and Black, the first example of an enemy-aligned color pair I have considered. To be enemy colors is not to say that the two are the antitheses of one another, for each color actually has two enemies, and all enemies still share some unique similarities. In this case of Green and Black, they reach common ground on perhaps one point: the world is harsh. Beyond that, however, the colors’ philosophies differ as one would expect. Green views the harshness of the world simply as a result of failing to “bend against the wind”, as the proverb goes. If one understands their place in the world, the idea of it being harsh quickly fades into the realisation that we are all just different molecular forms of the same basic elements, and these forms are constantly shifting, devouring and spawning one another in endless cycles. Black, on the other hand, accepts the harshness of the world as a fundamental fact, and believes that it serves to illuminate who has the ability and willingness to survive, and who does not – as different a take on evolution from Green as one can get. Black views the development of consciousness as a potent opportunity for domination, and sees the world as a pool of limited resources rather than Green’s idea of an intricate puzzle-piece engine. Black would never oppose technological advancement or change of any kind, if it served to further one’s own ability to survive, and is the very opposite of the worldwide interdependence emphasised by Green. Black also subverts cycles at its leisure if it means even the slightest profit for itself – bringing about premature death being a significant example.
Red is an allied color to both Green and Black, meaning it shares numerous philosophy characteristics with each. In the case of Red and Green, both are wild and instinctual, and emphasise feelings over thoughts, instincts over innovations. As animals, we evolved instincts and emotions far before we developed self-awareness, and for that reason it makes more sense to follow their lead rather than overthinking things and stepping beyond our boundaries as creatures of natures. Red and Green both recognise that the world is chaotic, beyond our control, and that we possess a bond from just being, rather than thinking. No two colors are exactly the same, however, and Red and Green have their share of differences – Red is closer to Black in its value of the self over all else, as opposed to Green’s dynamic, interdependent, fluidly structured ecosystems. One can also imagine the differences between Red and the green example I gave of Eastern religions, which very often emphasise that obeying every emotional impulse that comes into your head and giving in to base desires is detrimental to self development. Green’s cosmic engine could not function if every piece did whatever it wanted, and at the same time, Red’s very individualistic pieces do not want to be told how to function, but will leap from role to role as they please.
Green is often a misunderstood color, and to me that is a shame. Scientific pursuits and cold objective thought have taught us to ignore instincts and instead employ different techniques to fit into a world very alien from the one that green philosophies envision, and in terms of efficiency, these dismissals are validated – there are so many subversions of green beliefs around, especially in western culture, that it would be a waste of time and energy for Blue to dig up the few genuinely green practices. When it comes down to it, I carry the belief that beneath even the most analytical viewpoint lies a hint of Green and a seed of a belief that were everyone Green, the world would be a lot simpler and happier. In the next instalment, which I have long been looking forward to talking about, I’ll be looking at what our society is rather than what it might hope to be. Join me then as I delve into the human need for structure, for pride, and for doing what is right.
In the meantime, take a moment or two to consider that maybe everything you own is more than anything you need.
