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“memories of an event more closely resemble a story undergoing constant revision than a packet of pristine information.”
But in everyday life it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged.
And if indeed somewhere, somehow we must eventually draw the line and conclude that some dreams are invented by the dreamer, why not all?
no legal penalties are exacted for falsely claiming you’ve been abducted by a UFO.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. SHERLOCK HOLMES,
Mack explicitly proposes the very dangerous doctrine that “the power or intensity with which something is felt” is a guide to whether it’s true.
What a more critical mind might recognize as a hallucination or a dream, a more credulous mind interprets as a glimpse of an elusive but profound external reality.
Misrememberings are the rule, not the exception.
The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan.
When we give credence to satanic ritual, we also raise the social status of those who warn us of the supposed danger.
If it was the sixteenth century instead of the twentieth, perhaps the whole family would have been burned at the stake—along with a good fraction of the leading citizens of Olympia, Washington.
But many of those dealing with abuse cases seem to have at best a casual acquaintance with science.
Might the competition among therapists for patients, and the obvious financial interest of therapists in prolonged therapy, make them less likely to offend patients by evincing some skepticism about their stories?
Does any of them say, “No, your problem isn’t due to forgotten childhood abuse” (or forgotten satanic ritual, or alien abduction, as appropriate)? How many of them say, “There’s a much more prosaic explanation”?
Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?
Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.
We’ve lost all that ability to know a world beyond the physical.*
GOOD!!!!!
We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It’s permitted not to be sure.
Another of Mack’s patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive system baffles her gynecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal of Medicine? Apparently it’s not that baffling.
The main challenge posed by Mack’s cases is the old one of how to teach critical thinking more broadly and more deeply in a society—conceivably even including Harvard professors of psychiatry—awash in gullibility.
Such a discovery would be momentous. If there were real artifacts, physicists and chemists would be fighting for the privilege of discovering that there are aliens among us—who use, say, unknown alloys, or materials of extraordinary tensile strength or ductility or conductivity. The practical implications of such a finding—never mind the confirmation of an alien invasion—would be immense. Discoveries like this are what scientists live for. Their absence must tell us something.
Keeping an open mind is a virtue—but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out.
Not all claims to knowledge have equal merit.
my testimony is worth quoting, it seems clear he hasn’t found much.
Likewise, why should it matter whether an antacid contains calcium if the calcium is for nutrition and irrelevant for gastritis? Commercial culture is full of similar misdirections and evasions at the expense of the consumer. You’re not supposed to ask. Don’t think. Buy.
Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that’s what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic—however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney.
What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument.
Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past.
And if they missed something, if independent scientists suggest a hazard, why would the companies protest? Would they rather kill people than lose profits?
They complain of the incredible, unprecedented and nefarious attack against the cigarette, constituting the greatest libel and slander ever perpetrated against any product in the history of free enterprise;
But there is obviously an important difference between an establishment that is open and invites every one to come, study its methods, and suggest improvement, and one that regards the questioning of its credentials as due to wickedness of heart,
But censoring knowledge, telling people what they must think, is the aperture to thought police, foolish and incompetent decision-making, and long-term decline.
[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. CHARLES DARWIN, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871)
But a multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some of the mysteries of today will be comprehensively solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a “spirit world” than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.
Despite the fact that Enlil and Ninlil were major gods—people all over the civilized Western world had prayed to them for two thousand years—was poor Mili-Shipak in fact praying to a phantom, to a societally condoned product of his imagination? And if so, what about us? Or is this blasphemy, a forbidden question—as doubtless it was among the worshipers of Enlil?
printed in 1994 in The Prayer and Action Weekly News: Iowa’s Weekly Christian Information Source: Can you join me in praying that God will burn down the Planned Parenthood in Des Moines in a manner no one can mistake for any human torching, which impartial investigators will have to attribute to miraculous (unexplainable) causes, and which Christians will have to attribute to the Hand of God?
assholes!!!!
But other sects, sometimes called conservative or fundamentalist—and today they seem to be in the ascendant, with the mainstream religions almost inaudible and invisible—have chosen to make a stand on matters subject to disproof, and thus have something to fear from science.
Or consider the mainstream religions. We are enjoined in Micah to do justly and love mercy; in Exodus we are forbidden to commit murder; in Leviticus we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves; and in the Gospels we are urged to love our enemies. Yet think of the rivers of blood spilled by fervent followers of the books in which these well-meaning exhortations are embedded.
The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justification for nearly any action it proposes—from incest, slavery, and mass murder to the most refined love, courage, and self-sacrifice.
to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically—not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told;
Because its explanatory power is so great, once you get the hang of scientific reasoning you’re eager to apply it everywhere. However, in the course of looking deeply within ourselves, we may challenge notions that give comfort before the terrors of the world.
Imagine that you enter a big-city taxicab and the moment you get settled in, the driver begins a harangue about the supposed iniquities and inferiorities of another ethnic group. Is your best course to keep quiet, bearing in mind that silence conveys assent? Or is it your moral responsibility to argue with him, to express outrage, even to leave the cab—because you know that every silent assent will encourage him next time, and every vigorous dissent will cause him next time to think twice?
