Skepticism

Skepticism

The Apostle Thomas earned the moniker "Doubting Thomas" because he voiced a need for proof regarding the Resurrection. In matters of Theology and Religion, doubt would not often be considered a good thing. However, the bible also contains a quote about  the "way, the truth, and the life" in such a way as to equate these three as components of Jesus. I can only speculate about what they way and the life might have meant. I am no theologian. It seems plausible that the way might mean the circumstances as laid out before you at your birth. Life might then be taken as a record of how you performed during your time on earth. That middle part, however, seems less foggy to me. Truth.

Truth as known by an Omniscient Being would be one thing. Being more limited in our capacities and understanding that various tricks of the mind and senses plague our organic brains, truth must have a meaning more approachable to us if the word is to have any meaning at all. We have people who study the concept of truth in detail and it can get complicated the more closely you peer. These people are called Epistemologists. The body of such men studying the concept of truth and  knowledge vastly exceed my humble merits. Let us, however, consider truth to be "that which we are justified in belief."

In order to even approach truth we must consider the evidence before us. We must surrender to that evidence and try to listen to what it is telling us apart from what we wish to see or have previously believed true. (Humbleness, I recall hearing that mentioned in the bible, too.)  As human beings, frail and imperfect, we are subject to logical fallacies, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance. We need a tool of some kind in order to test and confirm our ideas. Science would be a means of doing so, the Scientific Method a tool for doing so, and self-skepticism a mandatory element of such a search for truths we are justified in believing.

Perhaps the Apostle Thomas was too much maligned.

In my observations of the world, I have observed that all of creation is a complicated place. The closer one peers, the more mysteries to discover. It is, perhaps, as if the Universe were a created thing designed to engage the frail human mind and inspire it to seek after truth and knowledge. If so, Kudos to the Creator.

The sun and the moon, for example, capture attention of even the simplest and least civilized man. One is a light to illuminate the day, the other a light for the night. Even though we are told this in the bible, one cannot long look up at the night sky without  noticing oddities. The moon changes shape with the waxing and waning phases. A marker for time! The sun also rise and sets at different places. The seasons change and seem to follow the movement of the sun. With a little time, we can learn how many new moons comes between seasons and prepare for the next planting or harvest time. Unfortunately, a lunar calendar falls slowly out of sync with the seasons because the cycles of the moon and the turning of the seasons don't match up.  Ah, there are those stars! I can notice groups of stars and use them to track the seasons. Wait! Why do those stars move differently from the others? We'll call the wandering stars planets. Why do they move in those crazy loopy orbits? Ah, the earth and all the planets must orbit the sun!

It is almost as if someone is dropping bread crumbs for us to follow. As if there is a Creator and this entity wants us to be drawn to study his creation. Without skepticism and the reliance upon evidence,  we can become self-deluded. We might, for example, declare some people to be witches and do the most horrible of things to them. We need our doubt. We need our skepticism. We need to question what we are told so we can check and we can see if what we are told stands to reason.

Conspiracy Theorists start, of course, with what they might call skepticism. However, in their hands it looks more like motivated reasoning whereby all 'evidence' is filtered out or distorted unless it backs up the pre-existing agenda. A little skepticism is a good start, but you have to dismiss your skepticism if the evidence shows otherwise. That is to say, it is important to be skeptical of your own beliefs and to thereby test or validate those beliefs before getting too far ahead of yourself.

I appreciate a healthy degree of skepticism and this leads me on some of my wanderings across the depth of human understanding. I ran across a blog called "Doubtful" which seemed promising. Some of the children that I am blessed to know call me their uncle despite any affinity through kinship. One of these children had taken to watching ghost hunting shows on television and seemed to believe in ghost hunters and that these shows had "proved it." I tried to walk him through a bit of skepticism, but in reading Sharon's blog, I discover she has devoted a far greater amount of time to this endeavor and seems particularly shrewd. I think a homeschool education curriculum might do well to assign reading from his blog as homework.

I found value also in this page: What is "Scientifical?" This seems to be clearly useful to me in building a discussion about skeptical thinking with relation to science. At the least, it seems like a solid starting point for a lesson. For example, it would be possible to play a video of a commercial and ask questions regarding the techniques of that commercial. Arming your children with this tool to pick apart attempts by advertiser to deceive or mislead... this can be a worthy accomplishment. Providing this type of a lesson would provide your homeschool child with a tool not commonly given to them from a standard public education.

Finding this, retained my interest and I continued looking and uncovered another page entitled, Sham Inquiry Behold! Another link, more resources and more of the things that I seem to feel need to be said.

"Genuine science is self-correcting, requiring new input, peer review and open criticism as part of the necessary process. Science requires skepticism and considers this quality necessary for science to progress in a positive direction. If any theory, revolutionary or conventional, has sufficient evidence, it will be considered. If it is show to be valid, it will eventually be accepted as knowledge. If the scientific methodology is not followed, or just selectively followed, it can’t be called science." ~~ Doubtful Blog: Immutable

Sharon shares many articles well written in her attempts to help people inculcate a balanced and healthy dose of skepticism. By reading the list of articles to be found at the bottom of the Sham Inquiry page, you can develop in your homeschool child a practical dose of experience in seeing through misleading, deceptive, or self-delusional beliefs they are almost certain to encounter in their adult lives. In particular, with this aim in mind, one might engage in further reading at the "Doubtful News" in the form of their Media Guide to Skepticism.



Links:
http://skepticsonthe.net/
http://www.statedclearly.com/ (Videos)