by Benjamen Johnson
On the way home from the Meetup last night I was scanning through the stations and found Darkness Radio on KTLK. In this episode they were interviewing people from Celebrity Ghost Hunters*. A few minutes into listening, I heard one of the interviewees say (I am paraphrasing): ” it was more fun to be a believer when investigating the paranormal.”
This reminded me of sentiments that skeptics hear all the time:
- We take all the fun and mystery out of life by explaining things or debunking the paranormal
- How can you have any sense of wonder in your life if you don’t believe in (insert deity or pseudoscience).
- I feel sorry for you living with such a closed mind; it must be boring to know everything
Let’s take the last one first. The more I learn the more I realize how much that both I and science don’t know. The ghost hunter who automatically assumes that a disturbance is caused by a ghost is the one who has closed his mind to the possibilities. At that point he isn’t investigating, he’s trying to shoehorn whatever “evidence” he finds into his predetermined conclusion. No amount of evidence to the contrary will change his belief, whereas a skeptic will make conclusions based on the weight of the evidence, or more importantly if the evidence is inconclusive, he will say he doesn’t know — a real mystery. Which prospect sounds more exciting to you?
Next saying that a skeptic has no sense of wonder is a misunderstanding at best. Just because the skeptic doesn’t buy into metaphysical mumbo-jumbo doesn’t mean he can’t find wonder in things like medical progress or the ingenious methods humans have devised to measure our world. The fact that a being on a tiny spec of dust in the backwater of an insignificant spiral galaxy can resolve structure in other galaxies billions of light years away (and therefore billions of years ago) is mind boggling. And every time we do, we form more questions than we answer. Or take my dad having five of his arteries bypassed and getting up and walking around two days later — I marvel at the medical advances that have allowed us to take a death sentence to an almost routine operation in the span of a few short years. Believing that a deity had all the answers didn’t cause these wonderful things to happen, people performing science did.
Again which do you think is more wonderful? A bird that evolved from a single-cell life form over millions of years defying gravity and soaring gracefully in the air or that some omniscient creator designed it to fly? Guess which has my vote.
To the first item and my main topic, skepticism doesn’t take the fun and mystery out of life, rather I find it is belief that does. Belief rarely adapts when new evidence is discovered. It doesn’t leave room for a true mystery because it presupposes the solution. I’d say it’s even becoming more an more irrelevant with each advance in science. The real excitement is unraveling the mysteries of the natural world. The real wonder comes from how the complex environment of the universe and the biosphere emerged from a few comprehensible and relatively simple set of laws.
* I’m purposely not linking to any of these sites. I don’t want to increase their search rankings any further.
Minnesota Skeptics 
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