What do skeptics believe in?
When my fellow skeptics or I interact with believers in weird things, we are almost always asked the question: “Well if you do not believe in the occult, urban legends, pseudoscience, or conspiracy theories, what do you believe in?” For some reason, people assume our answer will be: “Nothing. I do not appreciate anything or believe that there is anything interesting left to say about life.” Since this stereotype is as popular as it is inaccurate, I decided to outline my own response in this post. If you are a skeptic and also have a blog, I recommend you take the time out of your day to sketch out your own response.
I believe in the negative value of philosophy.
Philosophy provides us with wisdom which stems from the realization of how worthless many popular beliefs and activities are. This realization is the consequent of philosophy’s insistence that we ought to think deeply about topics like jurisprudence, epistemology, and morality. Since contemporary pop culture is built on quick and lazy reasoning (that is, when it is built on reasoning at all), philosophical thinking quickly undermines its answers to the “big questions.”
With some very basic Socratic Reasoning, philosophy exposes how insignificant reality TV shows, celebrity gossip, pop politics, sports, and the New Age movement really are. Once this nonsense is cleared away, we can prioritize those things that are left and live more meaningful lives. This refocusing is the main reason why I make an effort to read a book a week and to spend more meaningful time (such as going to a museum or learning about classical music) with my daughter.
This “negative” value of philosophy becomes even more important in the United States (and the world for that matter) as its population becomes increasingly nonreligious. As philosopher Richard Taylor outlined this need in his textbook, Metaphysics:
When religion can make no headway, in the mind of the skeptic, ideology came sometimes offer some sort of satisfaction to much the same need. Thus many persons spend their lives in a sandcastle, a daydream, in which every answer to every metaphysical question decorates its many mansions. The whole thing is the creation of their brains, or even worse, of their needs—it is an empty dream, for nothing has been created except illusions (Taylor, 5).
These beliefs which are replacing traditional values and belief systems, such as the ones I previously highlighted, are shown to be incredibly shallow and a waste of time after they are examined with even mild philosophical scrutiny. If it does nothing else, this one task would make studying the Socratic method and other forms of philosophical logic worthwhile.
I believe that the cosmos is wonderful without making stuff up about it.
Since I was a child, stars and planets have filled my imagination. I had posters of the planets all over my walls and read encyclopedias to learn everything I could about space. The beauty and size of the cosmos blew my young mind and induced a feeling of great awe. Since this time, I have never had these feelings replicated by anything else.
Despite what many mystery mongers think, understanding the science which underlies the workings of the universe does not undermine my cosmic awe. On the contrary! Science lead me to the profound truth that we are all connected “to each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.”
This shows that one does not need to turn to astrology or our tarot cards to feel the majesty of the universe. In fact, celestial courts are quite tame in comparison to the true wonders of space. The beauty and power of pulsars and quasars is wilder than anything dreamed up by an ancient soothsayer. Like other space geeks, I’m rocked to my very core by the images and data retrieved by the Hubble telescope. Its images put any man made piece of art to shame.
I believe if this sort of information was available in the past, almost all great works of art would be popularizations of science. Can you imagine a universe where Leonardo Da Vinci would have seen these pictures? I think he would have given up his other works and spent the rest of his days working on telescopes, painting palace ceilings with black holes and galaxies, and running the first ever Florence Astronomical Society.
I believe that critical thinking can be learned.
When I was a teenager, I believed in all sorts of weird things. This stemmed from me never going past surface level depth in traditional religion. Like many other Americans, I was never taught the Bible or theology in depth and was close to being religiously illiterate. In 8th grade, I began exploring the marketplace of ideas. For a while, I was what could have been described as a New Ager. I routinely visited pagan chat rooms and read material on occult.
As I grew older, my education began to get in the way of my belief in weird things. In particularly, reading Michael Shermer. By 2008, I could no longer separate the way I thought in Oceanography and Symbolic Logic class from my everyday thinking. Critical thinking had infected my mental faculties, which induced my first real intellectual crisis. This soon changed as I started to explore skepticism through the internet. I came to love the works of James Randi and other skeptics.
The way they used logic and scientific thinking to explain psychics, UFO’s, and Bigfoot struck me as a potent way of viewing the world. By applying these logical and scientific rules of thumb, I started to notice the nonsense on tv almost immediately. Things like political and pseudo-scientific scams became transparent and I no longer fell under their sway. I officially began to forsake comforting fantasy for clear thinking and reality.
Despite the alarming beliefs of most Americans, I believe that critical thinking can be taught. I and the countless other members of the skeptic movement are proof. Clear thinking gave me and other skeptics a greater appreciation of reality and enhanced the quality of our lives. As Carl Sagan once said, “it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
