I get told all the time that I’m closed minded, and I thought I’d take a moment today to kvetch about that. You see, skepticism is not the same thing as being closed minded. Far from it, a skeptical mind should always be open, but not blindly open. It’s a pretty important difference, and one that gets lost on a lot of people, so I thought I’d put a few thoughts down on the topic.
Skepticism is, at least in my words, the fine art of questioning stuff. A skeptic is someone who attempts to evaluate the information that comes to them and determine whether or not it is accurate. Nobody is perfect, least of all me, and there are plenty of times I fail badly at this. But we try. But questioning something isn’t being closed minded, it’s evaluating as best we can which things are worth letting in to our minds. When someone tells me that some exposure to sunlight is healthy because your body requires Vitamin D which is absorbed through the skin, I let that one in. When I read that you can survive entirely on feeding off the sun’s magical energythen I block it from becoming something I accept. Why? Because that violates what we know about how the world works. It fails Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detection Kit in a variety of ways.
In case you haven’t seen the great RDF TV presentation of this, take a moment and watch it here.
Done? Good. So the basic questions we can ask based on that kit are:
1. How reliable is the source of the claim?Well, the site in question comes from Dr. Mercola, who is in my opinion a very dangerous quack who constantly shills the alt-med garbage, so not so good.
2. Does the source make similar claims? Not about eating sunlight, admittedly, but unscientific claims are all the rage at Mercola’s website.
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else? In this case, they haven’t even been verified by him. So no.
4. Does this fit with the way the world works? No. We know that the body requires energy that we get from a variety of sources. I’m no expert on this, but the idea that sunlight is the only source a body requires is pretty laughable. If that was the case, wouldn’t people who lived in Equatorial climates and still ate regular meals be massively fat? With no need of energy, their bodies would convert all that food energy into fat.
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? I don’t think that anyone has, but I certainly hope not. The way to disprove it is ultimately to create starvation, which is not nice.
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point? Everything I’ve ever heard on the topic of energy in the body and¬†how we derive sustenance¬†points to our highly advanced digestive system. We have evolved it to best make use of the foodstuffs around us. The claim makes no sense at all.
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science? Hell no. There’s no experimentation here, just what looks to me like a testimonial with nothing more to it.
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence? Nope. Alt-med types don’t need to.
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory? Nope.
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?Absolutely. The promotion of Mercola’s fantasy world where the loving Mother Nature will heal all your ills is the entire point of his posting this.
So we fail on every point. And this should be human nature, to see a claim as outrageous as this and dismiss it outright when it’s held to even a little bit of scrutiny. Had there been a lot more evidence presented, this might well have been an intriguing bit of theory that could be tested.
Being closed minded means being unable to change your mind. Skeptics approve and reject information based on whether or not it’s valid. That is not the same thing at all. By way of example, once upon a time I was a Christian. As a wee lad I even entertained the idea of becoming a minister and sharing God’s love with everyone. But as I grew and began to evaluate the world around me, learning about the processes of life and change and growth, the more I saw that the things in this world that made sense to me were in stark contrast to the religion I had been brought up to believe. It was a long and very painful process, and in the end I was forced to change my mind. There was no evidence for God, and loads of evidence that the world in all it’s glory and wonder could be understood totally outside of any need for faith. I had been kidding myself.
So who is truly closed minded? Well, I’d say anyone who dismisses evidence in favor of the opinions they presently hold would qualify. A Young Earth Creationist who argues that the massive quantity of evidence in favor of his belief that the world is a handful of years old is acting closed mindedly.
I admit that I am dismissive on a lot of stuff. People who tell me that psychics are real, for example, usually warrant a good belly-laugh. If I ever met a psychic who could show me that there was any reason to believe their words, I would have no choice but to change my opinion. But fooling psychics is drastically easy. A friend of mine, for example, went to see a psychic. She told him all about his next girlfriend who was just around the corner. She described this mystery woman in nebulous but compelling details, vague enough to be a good many girls but enough to tantalize. Unfortunately, this friend of mine forgot to tell the psychic that he is gay.
We all have those things in our heads, usually the product of our childhood experiences and lessons. When confronted with those, I do my best to use my skeptical mind to either confirm or dismiss them, but most of the time we never really think about these things. They’re just there, because they’ve always been, and that is why I’m so quick to not let just anything into my brain. For example, it wasn’t that long ago that I realized (much to my embarrassment) that women and men have the same number of ribs. I had always been told that the reason women had one more rib than men was due to the creation of woman from Adam’s rib. When I lost my faith, I never considered that this could be mistaken because it simply wasn’t on my radar. Then one day I mentioned it, caught myself, and felt like the biggest idiot on earth. We should be careful of what we accept as facts.
There is a difference between being closed to new information and being dismissive of garbage. I heartily admit to being dismissive of garbage, and I would hope that everyone would take on that perspective. But sadly, that’s not likely. Too often, people either accept their information as writ by the media or equally as writ by the alternative viewpoints. Very seldom, at least in my experience, do people doubt what they hear. But hopefully more and more people will try to be more skeptical.
Jim
