The role and character of skepticism are incredibly misunderstood.
Every now and then I hear how skepticism is essential to science, that it is in fact the cornerstone of scientific thought. Then, on the other hand, I hear how I should be skeptical of things I hear and believe only in what I personally can attest to with my senses – from people who try to convince me that Earth is flat, and everyone who thinks otherwise is either stupid, crazy or criminal, because that’s what our senses tell us, that Earth is flat, that Sun and the stars are moving, and since we need to be skeptical of everything we can’t personally witness, what is one to do?
I encountered this uncritical praise of skepticism decades ago and my initial response was so unexpected and radical, that it probably didn’t make sense to most people then, because in the 90s the Moon landing skeptics and flat-earthers were almost nowhere to be found, and it seemed implausible that anyone in his right mind could espouse such ideas, but that exactly was my point, that skepticism isn’t about the right mind. Skepticism is a mental disease.
Skepticism is, essentially, the ability to question or dismiss something you don’t emotionally like. You don’t like heliocentrism so you are skeptical of it and you dismiss it. You don’t like the theory of evolution so you are skeptical of it and you dismiss it. It has nothing to do with science, because although it’s true that scientists can be skeptical of something and dismiss it, this is not an inherent part of scientific method. Scientific method is to test theories by experiment and change them if evidence doesn’t support them. This is not skepticism, it’s a feedback loop between theory and observation. It’s evidence-based rational thinking. Skepticism is an emotional response which takes place when your worldview is shaken and your favorite ideas are threatened. You are then defensive of your favorite ideas and skeptical of that which contradicts them. There is absolutely nothing even remotely scientific about it, because I can quote the trial of Galileo, which went something like this:
Inquisition: Sir, it came to our attention that you have been publicizing cosmological theories that contradict the holy scripture. Since you are a very famous scientist, we will now hear your explanation and, if we find it convincing, we are ready to offer a different interpretation of the parts of scripture that contradict your interpretation of the Universe.
Galileo: Thank you. Using magnifying glasses I made a telescope, which made it possible for me to observe otherwise invisible celestial bodies. This way I discovered that Jupiter has four satellites that revolve around it, which makes the geocentric theory, which states that all celestial bodies revolve around the Earth, implausible. From this I infer that the theory of Copernicus, which states that the planets actually revolve around the Sun and not the Earth, is true.
Inquisition: Your observation is very interesting, but does it really prove what you infer from it? Wouldn’t it be a more parsimonic conclusion if we said that both Jupiter and its satellites revolve around the same thing we previously assumed Jupiter to revolve around?
Galileo: You are all stupid unenlightened buffoons! (fuming)
Inquisition: Be it as it may, what we need to do is decide which theory is more consistent with available evidence. Our current Ptolemaic system is able to predict eclipses of celestial bodies with a certain degree of accuracy. Compared to that, what is the degree of accuracy of predictions made by your alternative heliocentric model?
Galileo: It is worse.
Inquisition: So what you are saying is that the system you are proposing we adopt as better has worse accuracy in predicting celestial events than the system we are currently using?
Galileo: Yes. However, the Ptolemaic system has been refined and improved for centuries, and mine is brand new, and needs much work in order to show its full potential.
Inquisition: But isn’t a better model supposed to immediately show its superiority by offering better predictions?
Galileo: Not necessarily, because we need to have faith that mathematics will be improved in the future, allowing us to refine the model and make sense of things in ways that are currently not possible.
Inquisition: So essentially you are asking that we have faith in your model, because at the moment evidence and reason argue against it?
Galileo: You are all stupid and don’t understand science! (stomps his foot helplessly)
Inquisition: We heard enough. We are going to stick with our “inferior” model which at the moment offers better accuracy in its predictions, thank you very much, and you sir are going to stop publicizing unproven theories as of now, and this is our official verdict.
I’m slightly embellishing the narrative for dramatic purposes but you get the picture. The Church actually approached the issue from the position of scientific skepticism, and Galileo needed to resort to faith. The trick is, they were both right and wrong. The Church was right not to embrace a model which was based more on sacred geometry than on mathematics and physics, and Galileo was wrong to recommend official adoption of a model that obviously wasn’t ready. The right thing to do would be to concede that Galileo’s model is a contemporary equivalent to the superstring theory: it looks like a promising direction in which to look for potential solutions, but the mathematics doesn’t yet work, the theory doesn’t predict anything well and it simply isn’t ready for mainstream. However, the main stream theory is ugly enough and bad enough for one to rightly conclude that it can’t be really true, because something as inelegant can’t be the right answer, so it’s warranted to look into alternative directions, based merely on faith and aesthetics.
Where I agree with Inquisition is that Galileo needed to be told to shut the fuck up until his theory is ready for peer review. However, they were wrong to put their confidence in the Ptolemaic system just because it worked better and agreed with their scripture. They knew something was wrong with it but they chose the easy way, and that’s the main reason behind their skepticism – not some great love for the truth, but inertia and spiritual laziness.
Galileo, however, was an arrogant, pompous fool and was more wrong than right about anything. He was actually on the bad side of science regarding the tides and the comets, for instance, and gets so much undeserved credit in the history of science only because it serves a popular myth of science vs. Church, which was hugely popularized with the invention of the printing press. He happened to be right regarding the structure of the Solar system, but only based on aesthetics and faith. He didn’t have any actual science to back it up. Why did he assume that the celestial bodies move in circles? Based on sacred geometry, because the Greeks thought that circles were the perfect shape and what else would a perfect God put in heavens? There was no theory of why the planets move at all, no theory of gravity, no theory of inertia. All they had was aesthetics and gut feelings.
But guess what? When science is actually the weakest tool that you have at your disposal and doesn’t really tell you anything, you need to use guesswork and gut feelings and aesthetics and make shit up, throw it at the wall and see what sticks. You need to watch apples fall, and ask why. You need to throw a ball in the air, observe the curve it makes, and make lots of guesswork regarding why it goes up, then slows down, and then accelerates again falling down. Then you need to say “Wow, what if a cannonball does exactly the same thing, only too fast to see? And the faster you launch it, the flatter the curve. What if you launched it fast enough that the the curvature of its descent matched the curvature of the Earth? And what if the Moon does the same thing, falling around the Earth forever, following the curvature of the Earth? And what if all the planets do the same around the Sun?”
What is absolutely guaranteed to lead you nowhere, is skepticism. With skepticism, you will simply reject everything that doesn’t support your preconceived notions and you will remain a happy douchebag, convinced that you are on the right side of science and knowledge. And the worst possible thing you can do is trust yourself and your own observations, and be skeptical of everything else, because you are most likely just not smart enough. The path to not being a stupid fool is not called skepticism, it’s called faith. You need to have faith in order to go to school and learn things. You need to have faith in order to actually bother with science. You need to have faith in order to persevere throughout your difficult times and ignorance and inability to personally test and verify things. But eventually, if you had enough faith and confidence and perseverance, you do get to be smart enough to personally verify and test things. You do get to be smart enough to be able to know, and then you no longer need faith, because now you have knowledge. Just don’t forget that knowledge didn’t get you there. You got there through faith, because you walked the path without seeing the goal, and you put your trust in the words of others and in the sign posts. If you were skeptical, you’d have failed. If you had doubts, they’d have sapped your will to persevere throughout difficulties. If you listened to the voice of reason, it would have told you to quit on the 90% of the way because you invested all that effort and you still can’t see the goal and you still can’t verify that you made the right choice to have faith.
The scientists (as in “adherents of scientism”, not “practitioners of scientific method”) usually divide the world into two parts: science and bullshit. They always did, even at the early times of science, when it didn’t really explain much of the world, and when such sentiment was mere faith. However, I see things differently. I divide the world into the part for which we have reasonably convincing explanations, the part that we know is bullshit and falsehood, and the part of which we are ignorant, of which we have no knowledge or explanations. For instance, up until recently we didn’t have any knowledge of what Pluto’s surface looks like. It was a blurry dot. Now we know it looks like this:
But it looked like this even when we didn’t know it. It looked like this even when we didn’t know Pluto existed. What does Eris look like? What do Haumea and Makemake look like? That’s the part we don’t know, and the good thing is that we know that we don’t know. What is it that we think we know, and we actually don’t? That’s the part where we would normally react with skepticism to defend what we think we know, but we should be highly skeptical of our motivations in doing so, and we should be especially skeptical of our skepticism, because it might well be the result of our ignorance reacting in self-defense.
We might look at the flat-earthers and the Moon landing conspiracy theorists and see them as pathetic figures, but I see them as something more sinister. I see them as victims of that same vile beast of skepticism that threatens to eat us all if we allow it to roam unchained. You see, skepticism is not what made Yuri Gagarin climb into that capsule on top of that rocket. Skepticism would have told him there was no reason to believe he would succeed, and, even more importantly, that he wouldn’t die. Nobody did it before and therefore there was no evidence that it could be done. But he had faith, and he had courage, and he had trust, and he had confidence.
And when I see “skeptics”, atheists, materialists and scientists of all kinds, in their arrogant mockery of faith, I want to stomp their smug faces into the ground, because if it were left to the likes of them, we’d still be living on trees and in caves. The likes of them ridiculed the first ape-man who used fire to roast his meat, they ridiculed the first ape-man who used a fire-hardened spear to hunt, they ridiculed the first woman who planted seeds into the ground to grow more instead of eating them. They are fucking idiots, and if it were left to them, only evil, ignorance and darkness would rule in this world, and all light and beauty would have been extinguished before it had a chance to show its potential.
