Questioning Everything

Questioning Everything

I am a natural-born skeptic.  My deep-seated instinct is to challenge and question just about everything that anyone says.  Just how deep-seated is this tendency?  Well, I can remember a little “game” I used to play with my mother when I was very young – oh, say five years old.  At least for me it was a fun game – probably less so for my mother.  My mother believed deeply in the wisdom of Thumper’s mother:  “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” (This is probably why I have always been a quiet person.)  So anyway, she would often make innocuous, positive statements, which seemed to me to be eminently challengeable.  A common exchange between us went like this:

My mother (to me):  Isn’t it a gorgeous day today?  Look at the beautiful blue sky! (we lived in San Diego so this was a common occurrence)

            Me:  (to the sky) Sky…are you beautiful?  (to my mother)  No – so see?

Fortunately, my mother loved me enough to prevent her from throttling me every time I had my little fun.  Also, fortunately, I have learned over the years that if I want to have any friends at all I need to restrain that urge to challenge and question everything that people say no matter how innocuous.  But the urge has not gone away.  In general, I am still a compulsive questioner:  Is that proposition (on any given subject) true?  Is it plausible?  What is the evidence in favor of it?  What is the evidence against it?  Which of alternative propositions is the more plausible?  Does a given opinion fit with everything else I know (or think I know) about the world?  Is there a third scenario that should be considered?  Is there any real proof?

Yet in spite of my ingrown skepticism and contrarianism, I still somehow ended up a believer in God.  Are religious belief and skepticism compatible? 

Actually, let me restate my prior assertion:  I am a believer in God at least in part because of my ingrown skepticism.  I am not a natural believer, nor was I raised as one.  But I am naturally curious, and I am also by nature self-analytical.  I have always been aware that other people seem to see the world differently from me.  So one of the main drivers of my curiosity is the question, What am I missing?  What is it that others see (e.g., believers) that I don’t?  Is my view of the world correct or is there something I can learn from them?  If so, how can I learn to see what they see?

I won’t go here into the story of my religious conversion (but I may in a later blog).  My main point here is to stress that intellectual curiosity and rigorous analysis are not antithetical to belief in God and religion.  Skepticism and religious belief are by no means incompatible.  But it depends on how we define the word “skeptic.”

What exactly is skepticism?  What is a skeptic? 

Nowadays we commonly equate the term skeptic with “non-believer” – i.e., someone who rejects belief in everything that smacks of the supernatural, including God.  We almost equate skepticism with atheism.  But this is not the original meaning, nor the most accurate. 

The term skeptic (or sceptic, if you’re a Brit), comes from the ancient philosophical school known as skepticism.  The original meaning of the Greek verb skeptomai was to observe or look about oneself carefully, but later, when applied to activity of the mind, it meant to examine or consider.  Thus, skeptikos meant thoughtful or reflective, and a “skeptic” was simply an inquirer or investigator.  The term, however, came to be associated with the intellectual position of questioning or doubting all truth claims.  Skeptics clashed in particular with the Stoics, who had very detailed set of firm dogmas regarding the nature of reality.

Contrary to the common belief that Skeptics dogmatically denied all possibility of knowledge (which is a self-contradictory claim), for the most part they simply held that dogmatic certainty should be avoided.  Later Skeptics looked back to Socrates as the original model of questioning and doubting the statements of others, but the actual founder of the tradition was Pyrrho, who was a contemporary of Alexander the Great.  The only ancient skeptic whose writings are well preserved is Sextus Empiricus, who lived around AD 200.   Skepticism as a modern philosophy began with the rediscovery and translation of Sextus’ writings in the 15^th century.  Some of the most famous modern skeptical philosophers were Montaigne, Hume, and Wittgenstein.  Montaigne and Hume, in particular, overwhelmingly influenced modern thought, the rise of science, and the modern tendency to question and doubt everything – particularly religious beliefs.

The Oxford English dictionary defines a skeptic thus:

One who doubts the validity of what claims to be knowledge in some particular department of inquiry; one who maintains a doubting attitude with reference to some particular question or statement.

Skepticism is a useful tool to help us avoid being deceived by all the ridiculous stuff out in the world today – financial frauds, nonsensical claims of all types, whether about politics, religion, or the latest commercial product.  But it should not become so ingrained a habit in us that we come to insist that there is no truth to be found anywhere.  In other words, we should indeed question everything, including our own questioning.  Skepticism should not be a goal in itself.  We should be skeptical even about our own skepticism.  Sigmund Freud once said, “If one regards oneself as a skeptic, it is a good plan to have occasional doubts about one’s skepticism.” 

The modern-day Skeptics Society (see here) is “a nonprofit 501(c)(3) scientific and educational organization whose mission is to engage leading experts in investigating the paranormal, fringe science, pseudoscience, and extraordinary claims of all kinds, promote critical thinking, and serve as an educational tool for those seeking a sound scientific viewpoint.”

Michael Shermer, the Skeptics Society’s executive director and the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, says here: “Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.”  In response to critics who suppose that he does not “believe anything,” he states that he believes many things – so long as there is sufficient evidence to show that it is true.  Skeptics, he says, are not closed-minded, and not cynics.  “We are curious but cautious,”  he says.  Skepticism, he says, is about keeping an open mind.  It is about finding “the essential balance between orthodoxy and heresy, between a total commitment to the status quo and the blind pursuit of new ideas, between being open-minded enough to accept radical new ideas and so open-minded that your brains fall out. Skepticism is about finding that balance.”

All of this sounds quite admirable, eminently reasonable.  Who can object to keeping an open mind?  But if we look a little more carefully it soon becomes clear that the only type of “compelling evidence” they will accept is testing according to the “scientific method,” which “involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena.”  Shermer later says:

“Skepticism is the rigorous application of science and reason to test the validity of any and all claims.”

I have no quibbles with any of this except the idea that the only explanations that one should accept are “naturalistic” ones.  If you are referring to claims about UFOs or the Loch Ness monster or the Yeti, that’s fine.   But if you also exclude all religious claims on the grounds that they cannot be proven scientifically, then we have a problem.

Such an approach by definition excludes all possibility of a reality that transcends, or that is beyond the physical world we are all familiar with.  An intellectual position that requires scientific proof before accepting any contention is not itself a scientific position but a philosophical one.  It is called naturalism or materialism.  It is the same as saying that all reality is reducible to pure material substances. 

Rupert Sheldrake is a very accomplished biologist who nonetheless is very publicly committed to the view that science should not limit itself to the study of the material world.  In Science Set Free: Ten Paths to New Discovery (see here )he argues powerfully that science is limiting its own progress (and that of human civilization) by ignoring the clear evidence that there are realities beyond the physical world.  Admittedly, the objective evidence for these other realities is still limited, in part because scientists as a whole refuse to take them seriously.  After all, if you begin with the assumption that the only reality that exists is the material world, you will naturally see no value in pursuing evidence of non-material realities.  In other words, if you don’t look for God, you will never find Him.

Sheldrake considers a number of different indicators that suggest there is something to human beings besides mere atoms and chemicals.  Materialists typically argue, for example, that all human consciousness is reducible to physics and chemistry.  In other words, we are little more than machines, and the idea that we have a mind or soul or spirit that is separable from or independent of our physical bodies is merely an illusion somehow manufactured by our brains.  Humans (and all living things), in this view, are just complex conglomerations of atoms, and all of our thoughts, beliefs, and aspirations can be entirely explained by chemical reactions in our brains. 

If this is so, Sheldrake asks, why is the so-called “placebo effect” so real?  A placebo, of course, is an inert substance administered to a certain percentage of the subjects in clinical trials of new drugs, as a control, in order to better be able to contrast the effect of the drug being tested.  A new drug can be licensed and marketed only if it works better than the placebo.  What is striking is that placebos actually do work!  Even though they do not contain any drug or active substance, patients who receive the placebo often show a significant degree of improvement in their condition.  Why is this?   If it were simply a matter of the chemical effect of the drug on the chemistry of the patient, an inert pill should have no effect at all.  Yet it is clear that the patients experience some positive effect merely as a result of their hope and expectation that the medicine will work.  (This assumes that the study is blind – i.e., that the subjects do not know whether they are receiving the actual drug or a placebo.) 

The placebo effect is well documented and is frequently utilized by physicians.  (See The Placebo Effect and Health: Combining Science and Compassionate Care by W. Grant Thompson here.)  The whole bedside manner of a doctor (the reassuring manner, the framed degrees on the wall, the white coat) is designed to give the patient confidence in the ability of the doctor to heal him.  There are even accounts of patients who benefitted from sham surgeries –the surgical equivalent of placebo pills.  One patient, for example, who could barely walk before his arthroscopic knee surgery, was completely free of pain in his knee several years afterwards.  Yet he ultimately learned that he had never received any surgery at all!  He had been in the control group and had his knee cut open but then sewed up without any actual treatment.

The fact that the placebo effect exists at all suggests that our physical state – health vs. sickness – is not just a matter of physics and chemistry.  Our  health depends in part on our hopes, expectations, and beliefs, and in some way that is scarcely understood, our minds can affect our physical bodies to a surprising degree.

I believe deeply in the importance and significance of intellectual research, including scientific research.  I believe that by careful study we can come to understand many things about the world we live in, and we ought not to neglect our ability to understand and even improve the world.  Nor should we discount the discoveries of science merely because it is less than perfect.  But I also believe that there is much more to reality than what we can appreciate through our five senses.  I am convinced, both by study and by personal experience, that there is a transcendent reality – essentially another dimension or dimensions – existing alongside of the natural world of common experience.

And I am certainly far from alone in this belief.  In my next blog I will discuss some of the fascinating views of eminent scientists with regard to religion.  Did you know, for example, that nearly all the leading physicists who pioneered quantum mechanics were believers in mysticism?  Or did you happen to know that one of the most eminent geneticists in the world today is a devout evangelical Christian?   Stay tuned.