Clement of Alexandria, a Father of the early Church, in hi Exhortations to the Greeks (written around the year 190) di: missed pagan beliefs in words that might today seem a little ironic
Far indeed are we from allowing grown men to listen to such tales. Even to our own children, when they are crying their heart out, as the saying goes, we are not in the habit of telling fabulous stories to soothe them.
In our time we have less severe standards. We tell children aboi Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy for reasons w think emotionally sound, but then disabuse them of these mytt before they’re grown. Why retract? Because their well-being as adults depends on them knowing the world as it really is. We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Claus.
On doctrinaire religions, ‘Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts’, wrote the philosopher David Hume,
the doubts which they entertain on such subjects. They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and the most positive bigotry.
This infidelity has profound moral consequences, as the American revolutionary Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the, chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
T.H. Huxley’s formulation was
The foundation of morality is to … give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
Clement, Hume, Paine and Huxley were all talking about religion. But much of what they wrote has more general applications – for example to the pervasive background importunings of our commercial civilization: there is a class of aspirin commercials in which actors pretending to be doctors reveal the competing product to have only so much of the painkilling ingredient that doctors recommend most – they don’t tell you what the mysterious ingredient is. Whereas their product has a dramatically larger amount (1.2 to 2 times more per tablet). So buy their product. But why not just take two of the competing tablets? Or consider the analgesic that works better than the ‘regular-strength’ product of the competition. Why not then take the ‘extra-strength’ competitive product? And of course they do not tell us of the more than a thousand deaths each year in the United States from the use of aspirin, or the apparent 5,000 annual cases of kidney failure from the use of acetaminophen, of which the best-selling brand is Tylenol. (This, however, may represent a case of correlation without causation.) Or who cares which breakfast cereal has more vitamins when we can take a vitamin pill with breakfast? Likewise, why should it matter whether an antacid contains calcium if the calcium is for nutrition and irrelevant for gastritis? Commercial culture is full of similar misdirections and evasions at the expense of the consumer. You’re not supposed to ask. Don’t think. Buy.
Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity. Today there are even commercials in which real scientists, some of considerable distinction, shill for corporations. They teach that scientists too will lie for money. As Tom Paine warned, inuring us to lies lays the groundwork for many other evils.
I have in front of me as I write the programme of one of the annual Whole Life Expos, New Age expositions held in San Francisco. Typically, tens of thousands of people attend. Highly questionable experts tout highly questionable products. Here are some of the presentations: ‘How Trapped Blood Proteins Produce Pain and Suffering’. ‘Crystals, Are They Talismans or Stones?’ (I have an opinion myself.) It continues: ‘As a crystal focuses sound and light waves for radio and television’ – this is a vapid misunderstanding of how radio and television work – ‘so may it amplify spiritual vibrations for the attuned human’. Or here’s one: ‘Return of the Goddess, a Presentational Ritual’. Another: ‘Synchronicity, the Recognition Experience’. That one is given by ‘Brother Charles’. Or, on the next page, ‘You, Saint-Germain, and Healing Through the Violet Flame’. It goes on and on, with plenty of ads about ‘opportunities’ – running the short gamut from the dubious to the spurious – that are available at the Whole Life Expo.
Distraught cancer victims make pilgrimages to the Philippines, where ‘psychic surgeons’, having palmed bits of chicken liver or goat heart, pretend to reach into the patient’s innards and withdraw the diseased tissue, which is then triumphantly displayed. Leaders of western democracies regularly consult astrologers and mystics before making decisions of state. Under public pressure for results, police with an unsolved murder or a missing body on their hands consult ESP ‘experts’ (who never guess better than expected by common sense, but the police, the ESPers say, keep calling). A clairvoyance gap with adversary nations is announced, and the Central Intelligence Agency, under Congressional prodding, spends tax money to find out whether submarines in the ocean depths can be located by thinking hard at them. A ‘psychic’, using pendulums over maps and dowsing rods in airplanes, purports to find new mineral deposits; an Australian mining company pays him top dollars up front, none of it returnable in the event of failure, and a share in the exploitation of ores in the event of success. Nothing is discovered. Statues of Jesus or murals of Mary are spotted with moisture, and thousands of kind-hearted people convince themselves that they have witnessed a miracle.
These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion – wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that’s what P.T. Barnum meant when he said, “There’s a sucker born every minute’. But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic, however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney.
In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, ‘facts’. We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts. In the course of their training, scientists are equipped with a baloney detection kit. The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re s< inclined, if you don't want to buy baloney even when it' reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken there's a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method. What's in the kit? Tools for sceptical thinking. What sceptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct and to understand, a reasoned argument and, especially impor tant, to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. Thi question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out o a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from thi premises or starting point and whether that premise is true. Among the tools: • Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation o the ‘facts’. • Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledge able proponents of all points of view. • Arguments from authority carry little weight – ‘authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in thi future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there ar no authorities; at most, there are experts. • Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to b explained, think of all the different ways in which it could b explained. Then think of tests by which you might systemati cally disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, th hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selectioi among ‘multiple working hypotheses’, has a much bette chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run wit! The first idea that caught your fancy.* [* This is a problem that affects jury trials. Retrospective studies show that som jurors make up their minds very early – perhaps during opening arguments and then retain the evidence that seems to support their initial impressions an reject the contrary evidence. The method of alternative working hypotheses not running in their heads.] • Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’ yours. It’s only a way-station in the pursuit of knowledge. Asi yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don't, others will.