Seeking the Truth in a World of Disinformation

This blog is dedicated to the proposition that the world is a complex and confusing place, and that if we have any hope of comprehending it – and understanding our place in it – we need to use every resource at our disposal and not limit ourselves to one mode of comprehension only.  Because of the almost infinite complexity of our world, it is easy for us to misunderstand things, to be misinformed, to get things wrong.  All of us – no matter how diligent we are in seeking the truth – are bound to misunderstand and make mistakes.  One unfortunate phenomenon of our modern society that complicates this effort is the deliberate spreading of disinformation. 

Traditionally, the spreading of disinformation – deliberately false information – was mostly associated with governments.  The more common term for such deliberate falsehoods was propaganda.  Today, however, the phenomenon has taken on a new and much more pervasive guise in the private sphere, in the form of trolling.

The eminent journalist Fareed Zakaria has written [here] recently about his personal experience as a victim of trolling.   You should read the entire piece for yourself, but I will summarize what happened.  Zakaria describes how it began:

It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person brings tears of joy to my eyes.”

The article was posted [here] on a fake news site, one that publishes satire portrayed as actual news, which anyone could have easily figured out if they bothered to check the original site.  Furthermore, anyone who has watched Zakaria on his TV program (entitled “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sundays at 10am) can testify that he is perhaps the most modest, decent and thoughtful journalist around these days, and the accusations published in this article were so outrageous that any sensible person should have immediately questioned them.  Even more importantly, they were so vicious and potentially harmful to his reputation that one would assume that any decent person would have avoided spreading such rumors, at least without further and substantial verification.  That did not happen.

Instead,

Hundreds of people began linking to [the article], tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.

One wonders how many people actually believed the accusations and spread them because they thought they were valid news, and how many knew they were probably made up but retweeted them anyway, out of maliciousness, or maybe just for fun. 

There are many levels on which one can decry this phenomenon of trolling.  It is clearly an abuse of a very precious right, the freedom of speech.  Trolling is based on the anonymity of the troller, and some have called for websites to require commenters to use their real name.  [see here] 

But I am less concerned with the trollers than with those who “believed” the claims and repeated them without trying to confirm them.  Why would people not make the slightest effort to verify such outrageous accusations before spreading them?  My guess is that laziness is only one reason.  Another reason may be because they simply don’t care.  But the third and most significant reason is because people today are only too ready to believe any accusation, no matter how ridiculous, about someone whose political views they disagree with. 

By far the greatest part of the problem is peoples’ willingness to accept as true whatever they hear that confirms their own biases.  We are becoming a highly polarized society, and many people – even at times the highly educated – are so eager to find fault with those they disagree with that they are willing to throw caution to the wind and accept as true without making the slightest effort to find out if the information is correct, incorrect, mistaken, or deliberately false.    That failure is compounded when the person gleefully finds his or her own biases confirmed by the information. 

My plea is for us all to make a concerted effort to seek out the truth rather than mere opinion, even when we happen to agree with the opinion.  As I said at the beginning, the world we live in is highly complex, and misunderstanding and confusion abound in all areas of life.  Let’s not add to the confusion by spreading unfounded rumors, especially when the internet and a bit of common sense often makes it very easy to check on them.  Even more importantly, let’s strive to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume that evil rumors are true simply because the person in question belongs to a different political party or has different political or religious views from ours.

We live in a highly cynical age in which people are too ready to believe the worst of other people.  Again, I think this is true even of many educated people, who should know better.  Even worse is the intense political polarization we see increasing at every turn, in every election,  which could eventually lead to the kind of balkanization we see today in Iraq and the Muslim world generally, the hatred between Shiites and Sunni.  Although that division has been around for many centuries, it has recently become so pronounced that the two groups may, in some instances, no longer be able to live together in the same country.

My Mormon readers will also recognize this phenomenon from the Book of Mormon, where two centuries of remarkable peace and harmony were followed by a growing polarization of the people as they separated themselves into various factions and classes and began to see members of the opposing groups as evil – and as enemies.  This tearing of the social fabric led ultimately to a fracturing of the polity and to a vicious civil war, the complete disintegration of society, and finally the annihilation of one of the two major factions. 

Many commentators have pointed out that today’s media is so diverse that people can rely entirely on sources of information that agree with their own biases.  Liberals listen only to MSNBC and conservatives watch only Fox News.  This practice simply reinforces one’s own limited view of the world.  It amounts to deliberately putting blinders on oneself and leads to a very narrow – and narrow-minded – view of the world.  One of the great values of education is to expand one’s awareness of different points of view, so as to enrich the learner.

I encourage you to actively seek out opinions of people who disagree with you – who see the world differently than you.  I am currently reading a number of books by so the so-called Four Horsemen of Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, and Sam Harris), even though I disagree profoundly with their worldview.  Admittedly, these works are themselves rather vicious screeds against religion, rather than serious attempts to understand reality, and I am reading them primarily in order to disagree with them (in future blog postings – stay tuned!).  But nevertheless, as I read them I push myself to try to see the world, at least temporarily, through their eyes.  (Even a defense lawyer in court must make a serious effort to understand the viewpoint of the other side.  If he simply relies on false assumptions, based on his own biases, of what the other party probably thinks, rather than trying to understand how they actually see things, he will not be able to build a very strong case and will not be able to persuade the jury.)  As we attempt to understand the views of those we disagree with, we may come to the realization that there is room for more than one reasonable interpretation of the facts.  We may still believe that our view is superior, but we can at least partially empathize with the other side.  (The lawyer, of course, is fully aware that there are other legitimate points of view, but is specifically being paid not to sympathize with the other side!)

Augustine defined a people as “a multitudinous assemblage of rational beings united by concord regarding loved things held in common.”  Of course, it is not necessary for everyone to agree on everything.  But without such concord based on commonly-held fundamental beliefs, a country is at best a shell, like modern-day Iraq, which merely houses three separate peoples (Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurds) who have no common sympathies.  Indeed, they have literally become the fiercest of enemies.

(Interestingly, when I just now googled the word “Shi’a,” on the search page I got a brief excerpt from Wikipedia, but right next to it was an ad comprising a picture of three Shiite clerics with the legend:  “Shias are NOT Muslims!”  Below the pictures it read, “Shias do not represent Islam.  Shias are the enemies of Islam and Muslims!”   Need I say more?)

As Lincoln said (quoting Jesus), “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”  The United States today is not as divided as Iraq, nor even as divided as in the 1850s, in the lead-up to the Civil   War.  Nonetheless, I can’t see how our nation can survive in any meaningful sense unless and until people abandon this tendency to see those with whom they disagree in the worst possible light and to spread vicious rumors to try to destroy them. 

Vigorous argument on behalf of differing political viewpoints is normal and healthy in a democracy.  But closed-minded adherence to inflexible ideologies is unhealthy and leads to enmity and social and political disintegration.  Members of Congress should be able to discuss, debate, and argue over policy and legislation, but still be willing to talk (and even be friends!) with members of the other party.  So should we.

None of us is so intelligent or wise as to be able to claim infallibility in our views, and we ought not to act as if we are.  As I pointed out in my first blog (on January 2), Socrates preached intellectual humility because he understood that none of us (particularly himself!) really possesses much in the way of wisdom.  We all have much to learn from each other.  And, in the end of the analysis, the only true wisdom is that which comes from God.

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.

Three blind men, an elephant, and Socrates

Is there a God?  If, so what is his nature?  Chances are, if you were to ask fifty people that question, you’d get fifty different responses – well, maybe not fifty, but pretty close.  Get them all together in one room and you’d have quite a battle on your hands.  A Christian might say that God is our Father and is three beings in one.  A Jew might say that God is indeed our Father, but is one, not three.  A Muslim might assert that God is neither Father nor three, he is simply God.  A feminist Christian might contend that God is definitely not a He – indeed, he might even be a She.  An atheist might reject all these views as mere figments of their proponent’s opinions since God does not exist.  And finally, an agnostic might declare that the others were all wrong, since it is impossible to know whether God exists or not.

If there were a neutral listener in the room, once everyone else had had their say, he might respond, how can you be so sure you are right?  What evidence do you have showing that your view is the correct one and all the others are wrong?  The Christian would say that the Bible says so.  The Jew would say that, in fact, the original Bible (i.e., minus the New Testament) actually declares that God is One.  The Muslim would show that the Quran superseded both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as God’s word.  The feminist would insist that since the Bible and the Quran were both written by men, their views of God are clearly biased.  The atheist would simply wave his hand and say, “Look at the world around you.  See?  No sign of God.”

Oh, and the agnostic?  Well, the agnostic would probably say that he agreed with the atheist that there was no sign of God in the world, but he wasn’t willing to conclude from that one fact that God could not possibly exist.  “Besides,” he would add, “just look around this room.  Here we have six intelligent adults, all of them disagreeing vehemently about God’s existence and his nature.  There’s the proof that it’s impossible to know who’s right.  People have been arguing about God since the dawn of time, and no one has ever come up with an objective way of deciding which view is correct.  So the sensible thing is simply to throw up your hands and say, we’ll never know.”

The interesting thing is that, in all likelihood, the agnostic would be just as adamant in his views as the other five.  He would be just as certain that it is impossible to have any certain knowledge of God as the other five were that their ideas about God were correct.

The question is, how can any of these people – the agnostic included – be so certain of their opinions?  Countless wars and rumors of wars have arisen throughout human history because of adamant, inflexible religious beliefs – and, of course, not only religious beliefs, but political ideologies and many other things.  Why is it that so many people are so certain that their views are the only right ones and that everyone else who disagrees with them is obviously wrong?  If we stop and think about it for a minute, the world is a pretty huge place – not only huge, but complex and often confusing.  What makes us so certain that we understand it better than anyone else? 

The famous parable about the blind men and the elephant demonstrates just how little we all know.  For those that aren’t familiar with it, it tells of three blind men who came across an elephant for the first time and were curious to know what it looked like – but of course they couldn’t see it.  So one felt of the trunk, another of one of the legs, and the third felt of one of the ears.  They were each so overjoyed that they now they knew what an elephant was, and they began to discuss it.  An elephant, said the first man, is like a huge, strong snake.  No, no! said the second.  An elephant is like a huge tree trunk without any branches.  You’re both ridiculous, said the third.  An elephant is like a huge fan that waves back and forth.  I felt it myself!

The moral, of course, is that they were all equally right – and all equally wrong.  Why?  Because they each were familiar with only a tiny part of the whole animal, yet they immediately jumped to the conclusion that they because they understood a part, they understood the whole, and so the others must be wrong. 

We are all very much like these blind men.  How much do we actually know of the totality of existence?  Practically nothing – no matter how learned and how smart we are, the totality of our ignorance – what we don’t know – massively outweighs the little bit that we do.  Even if we happen to be right about certain things – like each of the blind men – if we listen to others, recognizing our own ignorance and acknowledging that we might be wrong and that others, indeed, might just happen to be right, we might actually learn something.  But if we remain closed-minded to everyone else’s ideas, we will remain just as ignorant as we are now.

In other words, we need to learn to cultivate intellectual humility.

One of my heroes is Socrates.  Socrates is commonly known for the statement that “the only thing I know is that I know nothing.”  That is the ultimate paradox.  If you can’t know anything, how can you know that you know nothing?  The only problem is that Socrates never actually said it.  What he in fact said was that he was not wise – because no human being is wise.  For Socrates, true wisdom is an attribute of the gods, not men. 

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates says (referring to a conversation he had with a certain well-known Athenian politician), “I reasoned to myself, ‘I am wiser than that man, for it is not likely that either of us knows anything that is fine and good; but while he supposes that he knows something, when he knows nothing, I, as I do not know anything [i.e., anything fine and good, which equates with wisdom], do not suppose that I do. In this one small way, then, I appear to be wiser than he, that I do not suppose that I know what I do not know.”  What Socrates is saying here is simply that he is fully aware of his massive ignorance and does not pretend to know more than he knows.  It is a statement of intellectual humility (as well as a top-notch put-down of arrogant politicians!), not a statement of a philosophical paradox.  But as the quotation in the text makes clear, the basis of his humility was his awareness of the massive gap between the knowledge and wisdom of humans and that of God.

I don’t think Socrates was saying that it is impossible for us to know anything worthwhile at all.  What he meant was twofold:  1) we have to recognize that, no matter how strongly we hold to an opinion, we might be wrong; and 2) that we need to recognize that humans are weak things compared to divinity, particularly with respect to wisdom and goodness.

By all means, let us have our strongly held opinions and let us argue them with confidence.  But at the same time, let us not suppose that we are inevitably right and that anyone who disagrees with us is obviously wrong.  A strong dose of intellectual humility is absolutely essential for the smooth working of society – we must be willing to express our opinions, but we must be open to the opinions of others, particularly those who disagree with us.  This is particularly true in the areas of – you guessed it! – politics and religion.  If we honestly acknowledge that our views are based on very limited knowledge and understanding, we have to realize that other people, with different backgrounds and a different understanding of the world, might just be a little bit right. 

In this New Year’s season of new beginnings, let us resolve to be a little more humble – intellectually humble.  Let us listen to those who disagree with us and see what we can learn from them.  Not only will the world run more smoothly, but we just might – just possibly – end up a little bit wiser in 2016 than we were in 2015.