Skepticism

"Say it ain’t so!"

I’m a skeptic, and that includes being skeptical about skeptics---but skepticism gets a bad rap. Many people equate skepticism with atheism and they are not the same. True skepticism is less about being a 'doubter' and more about using reason and critical thinking in an attempt to arrive at truth, wherever it leads. Atheism is disbelief or a lack of belief in God or gods which, for the present at least, can be neither proven nor disproven. Like theism and other 'isms' it is a position based on faith whether its adherents like the definition or not.

Bear with me a minute, so you’ll know where I’m coming from. I grew up at a time in America when belief in God was an accepted given and deeply ingrained in the public sphere. We had Christmas and Easter activities and plays in public schools along with morning Bible reading and prayer until my sophomore year in high school when the Supreme Court put an end to it. Mom took me to Sunday school and church until at age eleven I witnessed an ugly display of racism by my Sunday school teacher outside of the church environment. Granted, this was Florida, 1958. He didn’t know that I saw him, but I refused to go back and, since my parents were not racists, they did not insist. So I came of age with a nominal belief in God, but I had not yet become a Christian.

At age twenty, while in the army, I was going to church with a Christian girl to spend time with her and, more or less, to stay on her good side. I wasn’t looking for God. After a few weeks of doing that, God called me. It wasn’t a gentle invitation; it was a powerful direct order. I was an American soldier. I knew what a direct order meant. So on that Sunday morning in Baltimore, Maryland I became a Christian---an ignorant baby Christian.

And then my life just sort of went to hell. I’ll spare you the details but, since I felt that God had let me down, I went looking into New Age occultism for answers. I left the army, met and married another Christian girl who wanted nothing to do with my occultism, dragged her out of her church, had two kids and had another on the way. At that point my wife declared that, since she had personally dedicated our children to God, she was going to start taking them to church and I could either go along or stay home. I figured that she and the kids could go, while I would go a couple of times just to stay on her good side and then say that it wasn’t for me. That was my game plan. So we went, and the totally unexpected happened. It was like God rushed up and threw his arms around me. I turned my back on the New Age, threw out all of my occult books and material, and never looked back. About a year later God called me into a ministry of the written word. With three kids under the age of four with a stay-at-home mom, I had no way to go to seminary so I brought the seminary to me, piece by piece, with hundreds of books worth thousands of dollars over forty plus years---not only commentaries, histories, theologies and other subjects from a Christian academic perspective, but science (my favorite subject in school).

And I remain a skeptic. Unlike many of my fellow Christians, I am not afraid to stare science, philosophy, other belief systems including atheism, scientism and you name it in the face. I told God long ago that if I found anything that could knock him off the throne, then off the throne he would go. His response was, "Go for it." I went for it, I’m still going, and God’s still there.

Skepticism and faith are at the heart of science---I’m not duping. The unrelenting search for truth no matter where it leads, including the willingness to modify or even toss out old theories and misunderstandings, coupled with the faith that the truth is out there and can be found. Likewise, skepticism and faith are at the heart of Christian doctrine in its true form. Many scientists, although in the minority, are also Christians.

Some atheists have taken the position that one cannot hold science and Christianity within the same mind without the result being cognitive dissonance, the short explanation according to Wiki being "the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values." Bullshit. Properly understood, there is no conflict. God stoops to address a very primitive culture in language that it can understand. Science compares the present with the past and sees itself riding the crest of the wave into an ever expanding future of knowledge and technology. True that, but there are some in the field who think that science has nearly "arrived" when it has only just begun ("Are we there yet?"). But in fact, our science is an infant and all that it has discovered thus far are its fingers and toes. Doubt that? By its own admission, science declares that a nanosecond ago in the span of cosmic time our humanoid ancestors were climbing down from the trees and now we have just about 'got it'. Right. To assume that we stand at the pinnacle of scientific knowledge, well, compared to 1100, 1750, 1930, perhaps we do; but what about 2075, 3131, 10,001? Let’s not be naïve. Let’s encounter another civilization a mere million year blink in advance of our own and see how much we really know.

The late scientist and popular explainer of science, Carl Sagan, advised us to be open-minded, but "not so open-minded that our brains fall out". The other side of the coin is to not be so close-minded that nothing can penetrate.

Sagan called science a "candle in the dark" and, used intelligently, it is. But there are those who hold the candle at arm’s length, peer into the darkness beyond the little circle of light and confidently declare what is, and what is not, out there. Why is that not surprising? Man, the smart-ass, snug and smug in his own wisdom, usually thinks that he knows more than he actually does. Albert Einstein was not so bold. He once asked his physics students how much of reality that they thought the human race collectively possessed. They put their heads together and, to their credit, came up with a little less than two percent. The great physicist said that he would accept that as an answer but thought that the figure was too high. Sagan asked in his Demon-Haunted World, pgs. 322-23, "What’s wrong with admitting that we don’t know something? Is our self-esteem so fragile?"

On the other hand, there are Christians who, by their own misunderstanding of the Bible and of what God is and has been about in his dealings with the creatures on this planet, cling to the simplified explanations given by God to a primitive people like a pit bull clings to a bone (spoiler alert---interference here is not for the faint of heart).

Here’s a truth statement that you can take to the bank: "What is, is. What isn’t, isn’t--- whether we know it or not; whether we understand it or not; whether we believe it or not; whether we like it or not. What is, is; what isn’t, isn’t." Switch out "was, wasn’t" for "is, isn’t", same difference.

Want to hear another one? Let me tell you another one. "There is no such thing as the supernatural." If something, including an ultimate creator God, does not conform to reality-as-it-is (not as we think it is, or want it to be), then it is not natural, nor is it supernatural---it is nonsense. We may not 'get it' because our collective human minds and our primitive science and technology are not yet capable of getting us there, but, trust me guys, the truth is out there.

My high school journalism teacher made us memorize this old, well known poem by Rudyard Kipling and to keep it up front while chasing a news story. Thank you, Miss B, wherever you are.

"I keep six honest serving-men,

(They taught me all I knew)

Their names are What and Why and When,

and How and Where and Who.

Here are a few "quotes from my notes":

"A point of view is open to discussion on the basis of evidence. Bias, on the other hand, is a prejudice that filters out everything that doesn’t fit a preformed conception." Jeffrey Burton Russell, Exposing Myths About Christianity, Pg. 17.

"… physicalists shift from science to metaphysics when they assert that only what science can investigate is real. This is a simple declaration of a philosophical worldview, not a scientific proposition." Jeffrey Burton Russell, Exposing Myths About Christianity, Pg.132.

"The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas." Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, pg. 429.

"… at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterproductive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed out from deep nonsense. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together, keeps the field on track." Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, pg. 304.

"We cannot put our minds in a lockbox." Sez Hoo??

"We may be entitled to our own opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts. Believing a statement is one thing; that statement being true is another.", Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics, pg.124.

"The great tragedy of science---the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Thomas Henry Huxley

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away." Philip K. Dick, quoted by Jim Baggott, Farewell To Reality, pg.6.

"…although everyone has access to the same evidence, the presuppositions implicit in a person’s philosophy determine the perspective from which he or she views the data, leading to different conclusions about which explanation best fits the evidence." Gerald Rau, Mapping the Origins Debate, pg.20.

"The most sophisticated deception of all is self-deception." Thomas Georges, Digital Soul, Pg. 90.

"I wish there were a genuinely skeptical community. I’m afraid that just about every skeptic I’ve ever met is a pseudo skeptic. A real skeptic says, ‘I don’t know about parapsychology and PSI, and the explanations we have so far don’t satisfy me. I want to look at the data!’ But the skeptics I’ve encountered claim to know already that there’s nothing to it, and then they break all the rules of scientific procedure to go about their debunking. Skepticism, as it is generally practiced, is neither legitimate science nor legitimate skepticism." Charles Tart quoted in Closer to Truth: Challenging Current Belief, Pg.73, Robert L. Kuhn, editor.

"Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea." William James quoted in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, pg. 331, edited by Paul Kurtz.

"Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once confidently asserted." William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch, pg.316.

"It is an outworn myth, moreover, to represent science as a presuppositionless description of reality." Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, Vol.1, pg.255."

“Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.”  C.S. Lewis God in the dock, quoted by Colin Brown in the introduction to Christianity and Western Thought, pg.9. .

"Facts must control dogmas, and not dogmas facts." Phillip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume 7, preface.

"It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."  Thomas Paine.