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During my time on Twitter, I have dealt with quite an assortment of individuals, ranging from COVID-19 and global warming deniers, 2020 election skeptics, and antivaxxers, to proponents of the 911 and chemtrail conspiracies, creationists, Flat Earthers, and QAnon. Apart from these people, I have also had to deal with a group of people whom I had not expected to cross paths with: militant atheists! But here I am not talking about people merely claiming that God does not exist or people pushing for freedom from religion. When I say “militant atheists”, I mean people who claim that a belief in God is incompatible with rational thinking. These people often insult believers calling them stupid or other monikers, while claiming that the belief in God has no place in a mind devoted to rationality and science. I find this claim surprising because the concept of God is beyond the realm of science. It cannot be proven or disproven by science. Viewed from this vantage point, in fact, atheism is not a rigorous intellectual position rationally grounded in evidence and facts, but rather just another belief. In any case, the claim that believers are somehow stupid or irrational is simply not true. For example, when it comes to scientists, some of the greatest scientific minds in the history of science as well as good number of contemporary scientists of renown (including Nobel Prize winners) have been or are believers. Several examples are Nicolaus Copernicus, Blaise Pascal, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Antonie Lavoisier, Louis Pasteur, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, John Dalton, Max Planck, Robert Millikan, Werner Heisenberg, Arthur Compton, Albert Einstein, John Eccles, Gerty Cori, Joseph Murray, Freeman Dyson, Antony Hewish, and Peter Grunberg.  A Pew Research Center poll of scientists in 2009 found that, while the proportion of scientists that believe in God is lower than that of the general population, about 33% of scientists believe in God while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. The point is that rational thinking is not necessarily hindered by belief in a God, spirit, or a higher power. Having said that, everything depends, of course, on what you believe, how you believe it, and your circumstances. Take for example the belief in creationism. If you are a scientist who believes that the world is 10,000 years old, you will have problems if you work in fields such as geology or astronomy. If you don’t accept evolution, you will have problems if you work in fields such as biology, genetics, or molecular biology. On the other hand, if you are a scientist in the field of metallurgy, belief in creationism may not affect your work at all. I believe in God (although not the God depicted by traditional religions), and I don’t believe myself to be irrational or stupid. I also I do not find my belief to be in contradiction with science, as I subscribe to the proposal by the late Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). This means that science and religion have different areas of expertise, and rather than be in conflict with each other they should complement each other because science lacks what religion has and vice versa. Things such as values, morals, ethics, right and wrong, good and bad are the realm of religion. On the other hand, the behavior of matter and energy in the world around us is the realm of science. Religion and related disciplines should guide us in navigating the tricky maze of moral choices that we make throughout our lives. But science should guide us in choosing which beliefs to accept, modify, or discard when aspects of these beliefs clash with reality. Of course, there are some areas of friction between science and religion, but the goal is to deal with these cases in a way that endeavors to maximize the separation between the areas of competence of the two disciplines. When it comes to the belief in a God, spirit, or a higher power, I distinguish two modalities. The first modality occurs when individuals come to accept the existence of God through a process that involves faith and evidence, facts, and reason. I consider this a healthy belief in God because there is an intellectual element involved in the process. The second modality is one that occurs when the process described in the first modality is deficient or absent. This occurs, for example, when individuals believe in God because they were taught to believe in God, or because they grew up surrounded by people who believed in God. In these cases, the belief in God is just a form of social inertia. Another way of believing in God within this second modality is through a highly emotional event that may have involved a conversion from living a wicked life, or at least a life a person felt bad about, into being a better person. For these people the mere fact that they changed their lives is proof that God exists and made this happen and no further analysis is necessary. This second modality of belief in God is unhealthy, because it is unexamined and therefore prone to the uncritical acceptance of the beliefs of groups or churches that may hold views of the world that are contrary to science and reason. Most scientists who believe in God, a spirit, or a higher power, believe in them in a reasonable way, because they allow their beliefs to be tempered by evidence, facts, and reason. For example, evangelical protestants tend to have creationists views that deny the age of the Earth and evolution while accepting that there was a universal flood (although there are subtleties to this claim). In the Pew Research Center poll mentioned above, while 28% of the general public claimed an evangelical protestant affiliation, only 4% of scientists did. To recap, I don’t consider the belief in God to be anathema to rational thinking, but I do consider that the unexamined belief in God is unhealthy, as it may lead to the denial of the reality around us as discovered by science. Image by Van Ericsen was taken from flickr and is used here under an Attribution 4.0 International Deed. The image was not modified and the licensor does not endorse my use of this image.
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10/24/2019 Can Believers and Skeptics Agree on Something When It Comes to the Supernatural?Read Now When it comes to the supernatural, believers and skeptics have a set of seemingly irreconcilable differences. Religious believers claim that faith healers can make miraculous healings happen. Believers in psychic phenomena claim that things like extrasensory perception (ESP) are real. Believers in spiritualism claim that the spirits of the dead can be contacted by individuals with special powers such as mediums. Skeptics however, point out that every time such occurrences have been investigated thoroughly, no evidence for their existence has been found. The disagreement between believers and skeptics has led to a lot of acrimony peppered with plenty of throwing up of hands, shaking of heads, and rolling of eyes. Can’t believers and skeptics agree on some things?  Seance I think they can. For one thing, the vast majority of both believers and skeptics would agree that it is not ethical or moral for a fake faith healer, or psychic, or medium to deprive people of their hard-earned money through lies and trickery. There are many examples of such fakes. Many mediums in the United States in the 1920s were exploiting people’s pain over losing loved ones, tricking them into thinking they could communicate with their spirits. In the 1980s many psychics such as James Hydrick deceived people into believing they had supernatural powers. During this time period, the televangelist Peter Popoff was also active tricking people into believing he could cure them of their ailments through the power of God. In the 2000s psychics like Rosemary Altea fooled people into believing she could communicate with their dead relatives. In the 2010s, the psychic Maria Duval and her associates tricked as many as 1.4 million American, most of them elderly and sick, into sending money by mail in exchange for psychic help to heal their ailments or improve their economic situation. If a person is promised a service such as contacting their dearly departed, or the healing of a malady, finding love, improving their economic situation, or a peek into their future in exchange for their money, then said person is entitled to receive just what they were promised. This is a very basic and straightforward principle based on universal common sense notions of honesty. But this just leads us to the cause of the acrimony between believers and skeptics. By which procedure do we determine whether a faith healer, a psychic, or a medium is honest or fake in a manner that will be accepted by both sides? I don’t know a definite answer to this question, but I do have a suggestion regarding how stringent the procedure should be. Let me build my case for it. Let’s start with Penn and Teller. These guys are a fantastic duo of magicians. They have been in the business for decades. They have a huge knowledge regarding how magic is performed, and not only do they perform amazing tricks, but they also invent new ones. Penn and Teller have a show called “Fool Us” where they invite the best magicians in the world to try to fool them. In other words, to try to perform a magic trick for them that they can’t figure out how it’s done. Despite their experience and their knowledge, Penn and Teller have been fooled quite a number of times by other magicians such as Rebecca Herrera as shown in the video below. I am a scientist and a skeptic, and I consider myself smart. However, for the life of me I cannot figure out even how some of the most mediocre magicians do their tricks, let alone Penn and Teller or other world class magicians. However, as long as a trick is limited to its magic context, there is no problem. It’s all wonder, fun, and games. But in the moment a trick is removed from this context and performed as part of a séance, a psychic demonstration, or a faith healing event under the pretense that it is not a trick but a bona fide supernatural event, that is where the problem arises. Imagine if the magician Rebecca Herrera featured in the video above used her talents to try to convince people that she really has supernatural abilities. It would be too easy. We are all accustomed to dealing with nature, and nature does not lie, but when it comes to dealing with dishonest tricksters, the truth is that the vast majority of people are sitting ducks. When individuals witness things they cannot explain, many will be inclined to accept the reality of these things and jettison skepticism out the window, which will soon be followed by their money. This is especially true in the case of the most vulnerable such as those who have lost loved ones, or are facing difficult family situations, or are experiencing health problems. There are literally thousands of ways in which a dishonest person can fool others into believing they have supernatural powers. This often involves using very basic techniques to obtain information such as “cold reading” coupled to other more elaborate tricks such as those described in the video below from The Real Hustle series. Nowadays with the advent of the internet it is even easier to obtain personal information from individuals and present it as having been obtained by supernatural means. The performance of these tricks is safer for the performer if they are carried out within a religious context. This is due to the fact that any miracle that didn’t work can be blamed on weak faith. There are several people who have deserted the faith healing profession and they have revealed many of the tricks they use to dupe believers. In the video below by Derren Brown you can check some of them. So now let me get to my suggestion. Without suggesting to believers that ALL faith healers, psychics, or mediums are fake, I nevertheless want to posit that, because it is virtually impossible for regular folks like you or me to tell the difference between a trick and the real thing, you should set the bar for accepting that the powers of these characters is real very, very high. I would even recommend that before believing, you should get help from someone in the magical profession to identify any tell-tale signs of cheating. Do not try to do this yourself! Fake faith healers, psychics, or mediums can have decades of experience deceiving people. They will use their tricks, manipulate your emotions, and fool you. This is especially true if you WANT to believe. If we accept that there are liars and cheats out there, displaying skepticism is not a weakness in your capacity to believe or your faith. Rather it signals that you are prudent and discriminating in your beliefs, which is a good thing to be. Psychic picture from Pixabay is in the public domain. Séance scene from “Weird of What?” by Sgerbic is used here under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. |
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