How skepticism became a bad word in science and why faith needs to become a good one
When I was a teen in the ‘90’s, skepticism was mainly seen as a branch of scientific thinking. The Skeptical Inquirer was dedicated to debunking belief in the supernatural, magic, and con-artists world wide. Skepticism was something good that people needed more of. With a copy of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World tucked into my backpack, I was, naively it turns out, devoted to this way of seeing the world.
Nowadays, it seems like skepticism has become a bad thing. (Sometimes people even spell them differently, US skepticism=good, UK scepticism=bad.) The phrase “climate skeptic” has come to mean somebody who denies settled climate science, not a scientist who questions theories about the climate, e.g., the erroneous theory that water vapor causes global warming instead of carbon dioxide.
Meanwhile faith is seen as only existing within religion. You may have thought by the title of this article that I was saying that science needs religion. That is a topic for another article. But faith does not mean believing in something with no evidence. That is an outgrowth of 18th century, rationalist philosophy. No, “faith” means “trust”, not unexamined belief, and this matters in both religion and science.
Faith is, moreover, not mental. It informs your actions. If you are “faithful” to your spouse, you can’t just tell yourself you believe in your marriage while at the same time having an extra-marital affair. In both religion and science, you do your faith by making choices that trust in what you have been told or discerned for yourself.
In the world today, faith is on the run while skepticism rules and that is bad for science as well as religion.
So what has changed?
Firstly, faith in institutions has been on a downward trend since the 1960s. Institutions include not only churches, but schools and the government. Widespread distrust leads to skepticism of anything those institutions promote. This means that, ironically, not only do people trust science less but they trust organized religion less as well.
Secondly, the world has at the same time become more polarized. The decline in faith in institutions has led to the breakdown of cooperation within those institutions. People have decided that it is more important that their side express itself than problems actually get solved. This means that the more institutions ask for faith to tackle bigger problems, the more ire they generate in those opposed to them.
Thirdly, there is a growth in individualism, led by the decline in institutional or tribal affiliation. Social media has succeeded because of this individualism, not because, as it claims, it connects people together. Rather, people on social media are more interested in attracting attention to themselves and proving themselves special rather than connecting with others. Individualism leads to apathy about global problems in favor of personal problems. Self-help, self-promotion, and self-care all replace concern for what is happening locally, in the nation, and the world.
Hence, distrust, infighting, and apathy all lead to a decline in the power of science to affect people’s actions. Like the mythical Greek prophetess Cassandra, scientists have found their prophecies frequently ignored, belittled, and denied. Yet, unlike religion, science can, presumably, be promoted as not requiring faith.
But this is manifestly not true. As a scientist, you have to have faith in evidence, repeatability of phenomena, statistical regularity of phenomena, and the scientific method itself. And that is the minimum. In general, scientists, to do their job properly, also have to have faith in scientific institutions like peer review and replication because they cannot personally examine all the data that every scientific study had access to.
That is just for scientists. When it comes to the general population, we cannot expect everyone to have the knowledge and background to understand the science directly. Therefore, we must ask for faith in the institution of science.
Yet, there is reason for people to doubt. Science is known for changing its stances repeatedly as new information comes in. During the pandemic, for example, opinions on masks changed several times and long term models never worked well. This is part of science, we don’t know what we don’t know, but communicating uncertainty to people while at the same time asking for compliance with regulations that may be based on considerable uncertainty is difficult and erodes confidence in later, better founded recommendations. Yet, making changes based on something, no matter how uncertain, is often better than keeping the status quo which is based on even less certain data.
Science benefits humanity only insofar as people have faith in it. For even if it is practiced by a small group of people, if it is ignored, its benefits are left in esoteric journal pages or worse used by a small group of power brokers to their own ends.
This leads me back to the word: skepticism. To be skeptical is useful but so is faith. Wisdom is discerning which one is required when.
Oddly enough the founder of the Christian religion, Jesus Christ, promoted skeptical thinking in his warning against false prophets and teachers:
And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.
Matt. 24:3.
And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
Matt 24:11. Also,
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
Matt. 7:15.
In a religion founded on faith, why does Jesus recommend skepticism?
As with science, religion requires both skepticism and faith and the wisdom to discern which to use for there are many more false doctrines and beliefs than true ones. Yet, we have to believe one (even if that doctrine is “I don’t know”) and come to that belief by some process. In science, that is faith in the scientific method and evidence, which itself is a philosophical stance that has no scientific basis other than it appears to bear good fruit. Likewise it is faith in good teachers and the wisdom to discern who they are.
In Christianity there is bad and good skepticism: skepticism about the fulfillment of God’s promises through Jesus Christ, for example, has to be avoided. Rather one finds by faith the fruit it produces, e.g., the nine Paul suggests in Galatians: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Yet we are asked to be skeptical of teachers who recommend actions that do not lead to these fruits. Jesus knew this because people at the time were being led astray, which eventually led to armed revolution and the destruction of Jerusalem.
There are numerous signs and wonders recorded in the New Testament precisely because people did demand evidence from both Jesus and, later, the Apostles. They didn’t expect people to have faith in them though they asked for it. Who would have faith in a condemned and executed man? It is a modern invention of the enlightenment that religion is entirely lacking in respect for evidence. They expected skepticism not instant faith. Today we are skeptical of “faith healers” because they are clearly after your money. Who ever heard of a faith healer that asked for nothing in return? Likewise, we often see that the evidence for healing is lacking in these cases, yet in the NT we see that the authors deliberately try to address both these problems. (The healing in Acts is a particularly good example where a man with a congenital lameness is made to walk again and Peter is put in prison for it.) Whether you believe these events occurred is up to your own faith, but that the author was mindful about the demands of evidence is clear.
In science, there is also bad and good skepticism: one can deny scientific conclusions all day long, but at the end of the day what fruit does that produce? If you only get there by denying the core doctrines of science, by denying multiple sources of evidence as in the study of global warming, for example, then you are going to get bad fruit — climate change, catastrophes, and death. Now, you can certainly get bad fruit from good science, weapons like the atom bomb, for example, but that is an ethical problem, not an issue for skepticism vs. faith.
If there is a good and bad skepticism, then there is a good and bad faith as well. In science it is easy to be fooled and easier still to fool yourself. Becoming attached to theories that produce nothing but a stack of dusty papers and no evidence is an example of bad faith. I won’t name names *cough* string theory *cough*. Yet, putting your faith in a well-studied concept like natural selection or quantum theory is perfectly acceptable because it matches the evidence so well.
This leads me to conclude that faith and skepticism are powers that we must use in most aspects of life and that in every aspect we have to develop the wisdom to see the fruit they produce accurately. Becoming attached to a particular way of seeing things because it is more “scientific” (like utilitarianism) or more “faithful” (like young Earth creationism) is foolish.