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.
