My advisor insisted that to doubt and question what we were told by those in authority was the path to truth and independent thinking. This was back in the late sixties and early seventies and my advisor was himself an atheist and a political radical in much the same mold as Bernie Sanders.
I think I absorbed those informal lessons pretty thoroughly, but I came eventually to think his own skepticism ironic since as skeptical as he professed to be, he seemed dogmatically certain that his political views were truth itself, that there was no god of the sort that Christians believed in, and that Charles Darwin was as correct as any scientist ever was about what we might today call Molecules to Man evolution.
I was reminded of my advisor, for whom I had a deep respect, and our many conversations as I read a column on skepticism by neuroscientist Michael Egnor.
Egnor begins by noting that our social betters often consider those of us who have doubts about anthropogenic climate change, or Darwinian explanations of life, or the ability of metaphysical naturalism to offer a satisfactory account of morality, free will, human consciousness, etc. "anti-intellectual science deniers."
He then describes for us a typical example of the species, a guy named Joe:
Joe has no scientific education. He’s a truck driver. He works a couple of jobs to support his family, he pays his taxes, coaches his son’s little league team, and goes to church on Sundays. He is anything but a scientific expert, but he does know a few things.Egnor has more to say about the reasons for Joe's doubts about what he hears from the scientific priesthood, but I think we all get the picture. Joe may not know much about how scientists over the course of his lifetime have arrived at their conclusions, but he does know that quite often those conclusions have been very wrong. Maybe a little less trust and a bit more skepticism would've been a good thing and would still be a good thing today.
Joe has been told since the 1980s that the world is going to end due to global warming. It sounds like those crazy guys with the placards who say the world is gonna end tomorrow. The earth’s sell-by-date keeps getting pushed forward — polar ice caps were supposed to melt, but didn’t, polar bears were supposed to go extinct, but didn’t, sea levels were supposed to inundate coastal cities, but didn’t, and tens of millions of climate refugees were supposed to perish fleeing the catastrophic heat. Joe’s still waiting.
He is also still waiting for the apocalyptic global cooling he was told about in the 1970s (Joe ain’t no scientist, but he has a good memory). He remembers watching Paul Ehrlich on TV in the late 1960s warning that overpopulation was going to cause billions of people to die of starvation and cause nations to disintegrate over the next couple of decades.
Joe wonders how a scientist could be so wrong and still keep his job and even get elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Joe knows that if he screwed up his own job like that, he’d be fired before the day was out. But those rules don’t apply to scientists. Joe remembers hearing that DDT and other pesticides was going to kill all birds and give us all cancer. DDT was banned, and lots of people started (again) dying of malaria, and scientists were pretty proud of themselves for getting DDT banned and told people who didn’t want to get malaria to sleep with nets.
Joe remembers being told by scientists in the 1990s that AIDS was going to spread to the heterosexual community and kill millions of Americans. He remembers the panic over Y2K, when nothing happened except that some scientists got big grants to study it.
Joe has heard a lot about the science replication crisis — he doesn’t fully understand it, but he knows that it means that a whole lot of science is basically made up.
Joe remembers his father talking about when the U.S. government sterilized tens of thousands of innocent people against their will because scientific experts insisted that humanity was degenerating due to poor breeding. Joe isn’t exactly sure what eugenics was, but he knows that nearly all scientific institutions embraced it for nearly a century, and Joe suspects that it was just a way to make sure there weren’t too many people like Joe.
Joe doesn’t know what to think about evolution. He believes in God, and knows that it’s obvious that a Higher Power made this beautiful and vastly complex world. He doesn’t have a problem with the claim that animals change over time, but he doesn’t think that scientists should drag his son’s teachers into federal court to force them to teach his boy that there’s no purpose in life.
He thinks we should be able to question science, especially in schools. And he wonders why Darwin’s theory is so certain, since it can’t even stand up to questions from schoolchildren.
P.S. For what it's worth, although I included Egnor's paragraph on DDT, I disagree with his apparent disapproval of the ban on this pesticide and am myself glad it's no longer poisoning our ecosystems.