“The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind.”–Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
What is wrong with professional skeptics?
Skepticism cloaks itself in the mantle of critical thinking. But what is critical thinking? It’s the ability to see past rhetoric and judge an argument on its merits, not its bombast. Paranormal phenomena have their share of incredible claims, and it’s the job of every interested party to judge the merits of the phenomena on a case-by-case basis, not dismiss something out-of-hand for being outside of an accepted world view. The entire basis of science is to theorize, test, and verify. And then test and verify some more. And then think up a new theory. Seriously, it’s a wonder these people don’t continue to cling to the flat Earth theory.
What is wrong with professional skeptics?
Here is a whole category of people who have made careers by loudly refusing to consider any challenge to their definition of reality unless you shove obvious, undeniable proof in their faces. Anything more subtle? Evidence not conclusive? Then it’s hoax, hearsay, and hogwash. Furthermore, anyone who would believe said nonsense is a fool. By decrying the believers, they create a feast from the famine of disbelief.
What is wrong with professional skeptics?
Let me tell you.
They lack imagination. Skeptics seem to like their world small and static; change upsets them. You might hear some lip service about discoveries–”I’d love it if it turned out that the Loch Ness monster was real”–but they’ll follow that up with a hundred reasons why it could never be true. The fantastic is never real in a skeptic’s world; the sad truth is that an amazing event in Skeptic-land is the solution to a quadratic equation. Life on other worlds? Maybe, but we’ll never make contact. It’s just not possible. Hidden species of animal? Although new species of primates are discovered frequently by scientists who aren’t lacking imagination, we will never find out that a fabled creature is real. It can’t happen. At least, they doubt it.
“The final conclusion is evident; people have no immaterial soul … there is no life after death.”–Professional skeptic Gerry Woerlee
“UFOlogy is the mythology of the space age. Rather than angels … we now have … extraterrestrials. It is the product of the creative imagination.”–Professional skeptic Paul Kurtz
“There is no such thing as Bigfoot. No data other than material that’s clearly been fabricated has ever been presented.”–Professional skeptic John Crane
Really?
Do you think they can prove their claims?
Or do you suspect that if proof existed, they’d ignore it or discount it because they can’t imagine a world in which the fantastic is plausible?
They’re ignorant of evidence and often leap to conclusions. Let’s take another look at one of the quotes above:
“There is no such thing as Bigfoot. No data other than material that’s clearly been fabricated has ever been presented.”--Professional skeptic John Crane
Really, all data regarding Sasquatch is fabricated? Some of it certainly is. But leaping from “some” to “all” is a logical fallacy. It’s not an all-or-none proposition; just because there are hoaxers, we cannot conclude that all data is hoaxed.
This is the kind of simple-minded thing you hear George W. Bush say all the time: you’re either for us or against us; you’re either a Republican or you’re an Evil-doer. The truth is that reality is almost never that simplistic. There’s more gray area than black or white.
If you’re trying to shoot down an idea, this is an easy way to go. Heard there were some hoaxes? Never bothered to look beyond that? Good: all the data was hoaxed.
Do you sense a lack of objectivity here?
They misuse Occam’s Razor. They love to use this one, sometimes by name. What’s Occam’s Razor? It’s just a rule of thumb that says that the simpler answer is usually the correct one. It’s not a law. It’s just a guide, a helper.
Let’s take the concept of ancient astronauts as an example. There are people who suspect that detailed knowledge of the star system of Sirius, known by the Dogon people of Africa, can be explained by visitations long ago by beings from the Sirius system itself. The Dogon believe that. A professional skeptic might argue (using Occam’s Razor) that the simpler explanation is that the Dogon’s “knowledge” was given to them by Europeans. Forget that this doesn’t explain the facts of the case–even if that was a realistic explanation, just because it’s simpler doesn’t automatically make it true. Occam’s Razor is about predicting likelihood. It’s not a rule.
Skeptics like to conveniently forget that. They worship Occam. “These are philosophical arguments, but they also constitute the bedrock of all of science, and cannot therefore be dismissed as non-scientific,” declares professional skeptic Massimo Pigliucci. Bzzzzt! Wrong. The scientific method is the bedrock of all science. The scientific method does not include Occam’s Razor. Occam? Rule of thumb. Not always correct. Certainly not a valid debunking tool.
“… the simplest explanation–to me, anyway–for the UFO phenomenon is that every report is either a hoax or is a mistake of some sort,” says professional skeptic Alan Hale, as if it proved something. I can see why this is a temptation; by dismissing the whole thing as not simple enough for reality, you are relieved of having to look at evidence. He does admit that this is his judgement at work, not scientific reasoning. Still, he behaves as though all one needs to do is find a simple explanation for something, and the whole question is settled.
But as professional skeptic Alvaro Caso confesses, “[Using Occam's Razor this way] is at best a very peculiar metaphysical claim, and a bad one. If this is taken to be ‘an axiom of reason’ and no further justification is offered, it is indeed no better than faith, for it is certainly not self-contradictory to deny it.”
They confuse believers with phenomena. Comedians Penn (Jillette) and (Raymond) Teller pulled this one in 2006. They arranged for a fake Bigfoot video to be shot, allegedly in Sonoma County, California (and actually shot on a lot in Los Angeles). The point? If Bigfoot researchers swallowed this, it proves there is no Bigfoot.
It proves jack-squat. Few fell for the prank, but if every Squatch-o-phile in the world had expressed interest in the video, how, pray tell, does this change reality?
Belief–and believers–are not the point, and they’re not criteria you use to judge facts. You might think that Roswell expert Stanton Friedman is a lunatic, but that doesn’t automatically mean Roswell didn’t happen. The two things have nothing to do with each other. Logicians call this the Fallacy of the Straw Man: you set up a false, easy-to-beat enemy and then demonize him, all to make it appear that you’re winning an argument. In truth, you’re just conflating the unrelated.
They confuse doubt with scientific thinking. How many great scientific discoveries have been made by professional skeptics? That’s easy: few to none. Certainly Albert Einstein, one of the greats of all time, was no practicing skeptic; witness the quote at the top of this page. Einstein was all about the imagination; he used it to solve problems that evaded Isaac Newton, creating theories that would become world-famous. He did not start from doubt.
He tested his ideas, yes. That’s the scientific method: hypothesize, then test, and repeat as necessary.
As a scientist, you operate from objectivity. Doubt is not part of the scientific process; it’s merely gullability’s glum cousin. Doubting does not make you a scientist, nor does it make you objective. It does make you an unimaginative tool.
They are religious in their doubt. Michael Shermer is probably the most famous professional skeptic in the world, owing to his column in Scientific American and his own publication Skeptic Magazine. Michael used to be an ultra-religious born-again Christian. Now he’s an ultra-religious born-again Skeptic.
I’m not kidding; Shermer is religious about his skepticism. Until recently, he did not accept global warming as being caused by humans, apparently because he could not personally observe CO2 emissions screw up Earth’s atmosphere on a molecule-by-molecule basis. And now peer pressure has made him recant. Of course, he couches it as though it was a logical decision: “a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch”. What does he really mean? He got tired of defending his religious denial of the obvious. The facts of global climate change existed; Shermer was M.I.A.
Automatic disbelief is as religious as automatic faith-based belief. Skeptics ignore facts in favor of their overarching belief system: the fantastic can never be real. Some speculate that American culture encourages this kind of thinking (which explains why it seems like most skeptics are Americans). It’s a competitive society, with a centrifugal force that pushes you to extreme edges. You’re an Evolutionist or you’re a Creationist, you’re a liberal or you’re conservative, you either listen to AM radio or FM radio, you drive freeways at either 45 MPH or 95 MPH. If you don’t think that all paranormal phenomena are real, then none of it can be.
Skeptics employ another device favored by the reactionary religious: circular reasoning. Ask someone who believes in God solely on the basis of faith how they know God exists, and you’ll probably get a tautology: because God told me so.
Anthropologist Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a Bigfoot researcher, recounts how some Sasquatch skeptics use this very technique. First, they claim that all Bigfoot sightings are misidentifications of bears, or flat-out hoaxes. Then they claim that if there was any sizable population of Sasquatch in North America, people would see them, and they don’t. Huh?
They ignore real evidence and cite false “facts”. Here’s that Bigfoot quote one more time:
“There is no such thing as Bigfoot. No data other than material that’s clearly been fabricated has ever been presented.”–Professional skeptic John Crane
In order to say that, our friend John has had to 1) ignore a raft of evidence for the existence of Sasquatch that is not obviously fake, and 2) use that ignorance to make a blanket statement as “fact”. Close your eyes and tell me light doesn’t exist, Johnny. This is a favorite technique of the skeptic: don’t bother to take an honest look at what’s out there, and then cynically dismiss the entire subject.
Legitimate science is conducted by examining all evidence, not by myopic rushes to judgment.
Right about now, the professional skeptic will run for cover to the axiom they call “Sagan’s Balance”: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan, though an amazing thinker, was wrong here. Extraordinary claims merely require evidence. Good evidence has to exist before we can draw conclusions, to be sure, but certainly not extraordinary evidence. You have to wonder what the professional skeptic would say about the paradoxes of quantum physics. Here is a science in which contradictions are the norm: light is both a particle and a wave (at the same time), matter exists in more than one place at once. There is no extraordinary evidence for these extraordinary claims, only the results of mundane scientific tests. Would they apply Sagan’s Balance and throw out this branch of science? Or lie and pretend that the evidence from quantum physicists is somehow “extraordinary”? You can see quantum mechanics at work in your own home. The evidence is not extraordinary, but the thinking is.
I Am Not About to Backpedal, But:
None of this criticism of professional skeptics should mean that it’s OK to accept an idea at face value, without study, without evidence. In fact, that’s the very thing I’m criticizing the professional skeptic for doing. No, I don’t automatically believe in faeries just because someone says he saw one. No, ancient astronauts probably didn’t inhabit the Earth all through ancient history, the way Erich van Daniken envisioned them, anyway–his evidence is lousy.
What’s the difference between a critical thinker and a skeptic? An open mind. I listen to an argument before I dismiss it. I took a good look at the evidence and listened carefully to the logic, even when it comes to faeries and ancient astronauts. Curiosity is a gift, and any argument worth dismissing is worth hearing first.
That’s the difference between religious belief and science.
It’s worth pointing out that not all people who call themselves “skeptics” or “skeptical” are guilty of these errors. The word itself has come to mean “doubter”, though, so using names like “pseudo-skeptic”–as some of have tried to do–seem to fall short. A professional skeptic is someone who refuses to believe despite the evidence–however subtle it may be. I don’t care about dictionary definitions; if you consider yourself objective, perhaps you should just use that word instead.
If you’d like to read more about the deconstruction of this brand of skepticism, I’ve found Winston Wu’s piece on debunking skeptics to be fascinating and well-reasoned.
I expect that someone is going to add a comment asking how I can tear apart professional skeptics while linking to New Scientist to bolster my case. Good scientists are not professional skeptics; they are skeptical, but curious. They are imaginative but objective. They are open-minded but not gullible. Professional skeptics are faith-based believers in doubt, just as a UFO nut is a faith-based believer in aliens. Neither is objective. Neither is likely to help discover what is real.
In the end, you can stretch the truth to create belief, or you can stretch belief to discover the truth.
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September 2nd, 2007 at 8:30 am |
You’ve got a lot wrong, not the least of which is Teller doesn’t have a first name.
September 2nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm |
“You’ve got a lot wrong, not the least of which is Teller doesn’t have a first name.”
Thanks for commenting; we’d love to hear what we got wrong. Raymond Teller certainly is the name of Penn Jillette’s partner:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Raymond_Teller
http://www.magicofmagicians.com/rts/index.asp?action=page&name=15364&siteid=1416
It’s true that he says he changed it to just “Teller”, but you can bet his mother still calls him “Raymond”. So do we.
If you have any other facts you’d like to have corrected, by all means, let us know.
September 3rd, 2007 at 7:09 am |
Good, well stated post. Sums up the most frequent and infuriating scoftic traits.
I love how “Reader” made that huge blanket statement “you’ve got a lot wrong” (without elaborating of course), and then goes on to stick his head up his rear, LOL!
Cheers,
Graf
October 12th, 2007 at 10:37 pm |
Nice to see myself quoted. One small correction: I am not a proffessional skeptic, I have never been paid for that nor have made a career of it. I am indeed a skeptic, an amateur one (in the aetimological sense of the word). I can’t say what anonymous was refering to when he said you have a lot wrong. I can certainly see one BIG thing you have very wrong: skeptics do not require “obvious, undeniable proof in their faces” to change their minds, we just refuse to believe either way when there is not enough evidence either way. The reasons for this, as you probably noticed, are stated in my article you quote.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:40 am |
Thanks for visiting. The “professional” label was mainly aimed at Mr. Shermer, who truly has made a career of scoffery.
“we just refuse to believe either way when there is not enough evidence either way.”
I’m not sure that’s a real definition of skepticism, but it’s certainly a reasonable frame of mind. I myself don’t automatically believe anything just because there are claims or scant evidence. But, unlike some, remain open to possibilities and refrain from scoffing unless there’s a good reason to do so.
Sounds like you’re of the same ilk.
March 24th, 2008 at 6:38 pm |
This is a good psycho-analysis of the PSC of skepticism. PSC is a term that I coined to represent the acronym for: Psychological Source-Code. I will use your article and credit the source for one of my major psychological research-projects which of course you’re welcome to review and make any suggestions to help me improve its content before I try to get it published.
Thanks for writing this article. The main reason I was doing research on the subject of pseudo-skepticism is due to the disinformation I uncovered regarding the JREF and the time I wasted trying to learn anything useful from some of their followers (they seem to be trapped inside of a bubble-think mentality). I really did find the circular-logic of these skepticism-fanatics to be rather annoying.
October 16th, 2008 at 10:28 pm |
This is a very well-written analysis of an annoying, tiresome phenomenon.
One scientist who has eloquently discussed the fanatical nature of skepticism is psychiatrist Raymond Moody, M.D., who over a long career has written extensively on near-death experiences (NDEs) as reported to him by patients. In his book, “The Last Laugh,” Moody calls professional skeptics followers of “scientism,” as opposed to the kind of objective scientific research that approaches all phenomena with an open mind that is free of assumptions.
What’s interesting is that even though Moody is well-known for his research NDEs, he states in his book that he doesn’t necessarily believe in an afterlife, for the simple reason that we can’t definitively prove there is one. He does, however, point to the fact that out-of-body experiences occur with great frequency during NDEs, and the kind of information people acquire during these out-of-body experiences is often impossible to explain from a three-dimensional standpoint (for instance, accurately reporting what loved ones are doing and saying miles from the site of the “dead” person’s body). Therefore, he concludes that something really is going on with respect to the non-local nature of consciousness. Moody is that rare scientist who is able to acknowledge what he observes without judging it or pretending he didn’t see it, without jumping to conclusions regarding its significance.
You also didn’t mention one of the most obnoxious professional skeptics around, Richard Dawkins, the atheist’s atheist. Dawkins has many legitimate bones to pick with organized religion, but he is fanatically, almost pathologically married to his personal definition of what is possible in the material world. His run-ins with fellow biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who trained at Cambridge, England, are a good example. Sheldrake studies, among many other things, apparently psychic phenomena within the animal kingdom. A visit to Sheldrake’s fascinating website offers a description of a recent exchange between the two men. Sheldrake does very rigorous research applying exacting methodology. He sends his results to Dawkins, who is scheduled to meet with Sheldrake and discuss the research on camera. Dawkins shows up and begins to attack Sheldrake immediately, upon which Sheldrake stops the proceedings and asks if Dawkins has actually read Sheldrake’s research. Dawkins admits that no, he hasn’t read it, and that his only purpose in agreeing to meet with Sheldrake was to debunk and attack Sheldrake. Desire to learn something new? Zip. Willingness to even open the pages of a research paper that might challenge a narrow worldview? None. Open mind, objectivity, real scientific inquiry? Not a chance. Sad, sad, sad.
There must be a deep, underlying terror motivating professional skeptics to remain so rigidly defended against the investigation of ideas and evidence. It’s scientism, not science.