What's A Skeptic To Do?

One of my favorite maxims is "Be open to anything, but skeptical of everything." Joe Nickell, a skeptic and self-described paranormal investigator, talks about the difference between "debunking" and skepticism. A debunker has an agenda, a bias, something to prove, a closed mind. A skeptic, on the other hand, at least ideally, has an open mind and seeks nothing more than the truth. We are born skeptics, always asking "why?" If you have a child, or remember being one, then you know it doesn't take 20 questions (often far less) to go from the sphere of the known to the realm of the unknown. And, particularly in today's world, pretty much everyone it seems has developed a healthy skepticism as a counter-measure to all the opinions and advertisements we continually receive.

However, one forms opinions. One sees the evidence--or most often, the lack thereof--and cannot help but form an opinion. In fact, one eventually realizes that there are very few paths to knowledge. When it comes right down to it, humanity has discovered only one process that works in this regard: science.

Many people, I've found, have a very poor idea of how science works, especially if they're predisposed to think that truth is somehow subjective on a deep level, or to think that all systems of knowledge are somehow relative and are an artifact of culture. However, I think that we've always had science to one degree or another. We just didn't have a name for it. An aboriginal shaman, let's say, who could recommend what plant to eat to cure an upset stomach, has knowledge that probably was not arrived at via mystical means. Very probably, this type of knowledge was passed down, and continually tested each time it was put into practice. So we are talking about repeatable, verifiable, objectively testable nuggets of knowledge. In other words, science.

That's not to say that science is always correct. It is of course prone to bias and error. I just read a long, fascinating article on "the decline effect" or, as one researcher put it, the conclusion that most new results in science are, in fact, wrong, as a result of hidden bias, the effect of believing what we want to believe. I've been close enough to good science in my career to see that it is largely a process of trying your damnedest to disprove your results, to in effect try to debunk your own theories before they are published and meet with the withering skepticism of the scientific community.

For this reason, science has been described as a process that doesn't really so much as arrive at truth as it is a process that discards falsehoods. It's a way of separating false ideas from those that are either true or not yet proven false.

That is something deep to ponder, but the important point for the purposes of this essay is, that science works. Nothing else has built-in processes for removing bias and error. If it did, it would be science. Everything else is much more prone to all the ways we fool ourselves.

This all leads up to the conclusion that there's really not much we know, and very little of that about which we can be sure. In fact, we can't be absolutely sure of anything. Is the world round? Well, to a certain degree yes. There are various ways of seeing that for yourself. But it's only an approximation, one that continues to be refined (to an absurdly accurate level). And this is true of all our knowledge.

So, what is a skeptic to do, adrift in this sea of non-belief, armed only with a map of these crudely drawn islands of knowledge? Two things. First, explore. In other words, continue to learn. Knowledge that is provisional is not valueless. Recognize the lay of the land, and you'll discern ways to determine the likelihood that something is true. Second, wonder. For just as science is our best path to knowledge, it is also our only known fully renewable source of wonder.