Dogmatic Skeptics and Scientists

There is no evidence that this page exists because I refuse to look.

Opinion page by Duane Alan Hahn.

It seems like most skeptics and scientists are not interested in the truth, they are only interested in impressing their colleagues, old college professors, and protecting whatever bad habits they happen to have. They grasp for whatever obscure study they can get their hands on to prove their points just as many times as 'New Age quacks' do.

It is true that so-called New Age quacks are guilty of fuzzy thinking a lot of the time, but skeptics are usually guilty of illogical denials and excuses, irrational explanations, and hiding behind the phrase, there is no evidence.

Most scientists are not neutral, they are skeptics who share a negative opinion about a subject, not based on evidence, but based on their world view. Before there can be credible evidence concerning a certain subject, scientists have to study it. If the subject is one that most scientists think is 'hogwash' to begin with, they won't waste their time studying it. This is a self-perpetuating loop which creates a bubble of protection, a shield called there is no evidence that they can pull out to defend against any subject that might threaten the status quo.

History has shown us that any scientist who dares to study what is considered 'hogwash' is called a nut, or worse. It doesn't matter what evidence he finds because he has been discredited by just looking at what other scientists run away from. Time combined with necessity provides its own evidence.

There are some things that you have to make a decision about before there is enough evidence from scientists who may or may not be studying the subject. And if they are studying it, who's paying for the study? For example, most skeptics and scientists claim that there isn't enough 'evidence' at this time to prove that secondhand smoke is dangerous to others. But lack of evidence does not excuse you from making a choice.

There should be no doubt to the sane mind that breathing in the smoke from anything that burns is not good for your body. That's smoke from cigarettes, cigars, marijuana, incense, candles, car exhaust, fireworks (pyrotechnics) and the list goes on. If you're smart enough to avoid smoke from a pile of burning leaves in your back yard, why would you think that breathing in smoke from any other source could be good for you and the people around you?

If you wait until all of the evidence is in before you use your inner wisdom to choose, you will still be waiting on your death bed.

Excerpt from DyslexiaOnline.com

by Dr. Harold Levinson

To date, the traditionalists cannot accept the various therapies reported helpful in dyslexia, defensively referring to them as "magic cures." In fact, their thinking-brain theories mandate or predict the failure of all therapies that cannot heal or cure the damaged reading processor believed responsible for dyslexia. And no therapy can do this, thus explaining the complete inability of traditionalist theorists to find any medical treatment for dyslexics despite a century of trying.

Had these very same researchers been more humble and clinically minded, they might have reasoned differently, as I was eventually forced to do. If indeed these varied non-thinking- brain therapies are helpful, as reported by many respected professionals and patients alike, and if these therapies cannot heal or "cure" the thinking-brain's reading processor, then dyslexia must not be of thinking-brain origin, especially since there currently exists absolutely no neurological evidence supporting a thinking-brain impairment in dyslexics.

And were the traditionalists objective — theoretically speaking of course — then they might have even carried the above reasoning another "giant leap for mankind." If indeed all the reported helpful dyslexia therapies can and do improve inner-ear functioning — directly or indirectly — then dyslexia most probably is of inner-ear origin, especially since only balance/coordination/rhythmic inner-ear neurological signs and symptoms characterize more than 96% of examined dyslexics.

The Day the Universe Changed

Excerpts from Changing Knowledge, Changing Reality Part 2

by James Burke (Video Series)

…your view of the world dictates what you do down through every level of investigation, even down to the point where during your research, it controls what you take to be reliable evidence.…

…So you see how this structure, the view of things at the time, controls what science does at every level from the cosmic questions about the whole universe, to what bits of that universe are worth investigating, to how far you let the questions take you, what experiments to do, what evidence you can and can't accept. And down at that detailed level the control still operates because it even tells you what instruments you should use. And of course at this stage, you're looking for data to prove your theory, so you design the kind of instruments, to find the kind of data you reckon you're going to find. The whole argument comes full circle when you get the raw data itself because it isn't raw data, it's what you planned to find from the start.

This instrument, for instance, will find only one thing, how many inches across my forehead, between my ears, and so on. It's a nineteenth century craniological caliper, and it was built because they already decided that skull size and intelligence were related. For them inches, the raw data, were brain power. That's when the myth of clever people having big heads started. Now there's only one fly in all this ointment, and you've already guessed it. What about big heads that are stupid? That's where the whole system can lead to its own destruction, when some detail doesn't fit. That's when you see science hanging on like grim death to stop the rug being pulled out from under years of happy status quo.

That's why I'm on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. You see, back in 1912, the accepted view of the planet was that while geological ups and downs were okay throughout history, everything on Earth was in the same basic position as it had always been. And then a weatherman called Wegener, said "uh, I've been thinking, um look how well South America and Africa fit and isn't it funny how they have the same fossil animals up to a certain date and then different animals? And these Scandinavian mountains, they're the same as the ones in Scotland and in North America. Maybe everything was all joined up once and then drifted apart? Hmm?"

Well, by the time the geologists finished with Wegener there was nothing left but the feathers. The continents don't fit exactly, the animals could have crossed over on temporary land bridges, and anyway continents drifting in solid rock? Do us a favor! So, for forty years Wegener was a dirty word. Then in the 1950's the magnetometer was invented. It identifies magnetic fields. Now the Earth's got one, in fact it's like a giant magnet, and rocks have traces of the Earth's magnetic field in them. As the magnetic field in the rock turns with it, you can see the needle reacting to the north south variations in the field. Only if you looked at a rock sample drilled from the Earth, with the oldest rocks at the bottom and the youngest rocks at the top, about every two-hundred thousand years, the rock magnetic field would reverse, first this way, then this way, then this way, then this way, and so on. Now, since the rocks got their magnetism from the Earth's magnetic field when they cooled and formed in the first place, that meant that the Earth's magnetic field was reversing, about five times every million years. Now, remember that for a minute. In the 1960's oceanographers discovered these, ten thousand foot high ridges, running down the seabed like that. Volcanic. Hot. And to everybody's surprise the ocean floor around them was very young as rocks go. It looked as if molten rock was coming up at these ridges and spreading out on either side and hardening all the time. Now, one way to check was the magnetic state. If new rock was being made all the time, parallel to those ridges, it should pick up those reversing magnetic fields I just mentioned, in strips.

Trouble was, as they moved around the ocean, all the magnetic mapping they were doing looked like this; here's the average sea bed magnetically, just a jumble. And then, right in mid ocean, they found these; giant strips of ocean floor on either side of the ridge. Each strip magnetically opposite to the one before.… The second they saw these, they knew that Wegener had been right. The ridge volcanoes were making new ocean floor and as that spread, it pushed the continents apart. Gradually, they arrived at where they are today.… As the ocean floor came up and pushed out and hit against the continents, it would be forced back down again and the pressure where that happened would cause earthquakes.… As the continents drift and the seabed moves, formations buckle and form cavities that fill with oil. A detailed continental drift map will tell us where to look for more oil in a planet that is totally not what science said it was before Wegener; today's version of the truth about the world, irreconcilable with the previous version.

So you see how the only structure in the shifting, changing face of nature is the one we impose on it with our theories. Each one the latest version of what we call the truth. New structures, new versions of how the world works, only appear because of some bit of detail the old version couldn't accommodate that causes everything to change. In spite of what science would have us believe, that kind of switch doesn't happen because of science steadily and purposefully heading towards the truth with one discovery somehow following another along the way as part of some grand plan. As you've seen, each structure in the past worked perfectly well, that's what the truth was for a while. And as for one discovery following another along the way, what way? Going where? The so-called voyage of discovery has as often as not made landfall for reasons little to do with the search for knowledge. Science, like all other human activities, is a product of what society at the time thinks is important. What science has done in the last few hundred years has been directed by that fact.…

…non-scientific views of the world … aren't necessarily ignorant. In their own way they explain the universe as completely as science does. And as you've seen from this series, all that science gives us is what their belief gives them, certainty. Only ours changes all the time, theirs doesn't. As for the permanent values that are supposed to remain unchanged in spite of our changing knowledge, well they change too. Once it was good to burn women, wrong to claim the Earth went round the sun, logical to argue about angels on the head of a pin. The values change every time the universe changes and that's every time we redefine a big enough bit of it, which we do all the time through the process of discovery that isn't discovery, just the invention of another version of how things are. And yet, in spite of that, we still go on believing that today's version of things is the only right one, because as you've learned from this series, we can only handle one way of seeing things at a time. We've never had systems that would let us do more than that, so we've always had to have conformity with the current view. Disagree with the church and you were punished as a heretic, with the political system, as a revolutionary, with the scientific establishment, as a charlatan, with the educational system, as a failure. If you didn't fit the mold, you were rejected.

But, ironically, the latest product of that way of doing things is a new instrument, a new system that while it could make conformity more rigid, more totalitarian than ever before in history, could also blow everything wide open because with it we could operate on the basis that values and standards and ethics and facts and truth all depend on what your view of the world is. And that there may be as many views of that as there are people. And with this [holds up a computer chip] capable of keeping a tally on those millions of opinions voiced electronically, we might be able to lift the limitations of conforming to any centralized representational form of government originally invented because there was no way for everybody's voice to be heard. You might be able to give everybody unhindered, untested access to knowledge because the computer would do the day to day work for which we once qualified the select few in an educational system originally designed for a world where only the few could be taught. You might end the regimentation of people living and working in vast unmanageable cities, uniting them instead in an electronic community where the Himalayas and Manhattan were only a split second apart. You might, with that and much more, break the mold that has held us back since the beginning, in a future world that we would describe as balanced anarchy and they will describe as an open society tolerant of every view, aware that there is no single privileged way of doing things. Above all, able to do away with the greatest tragedy of our era, the centuries old waste of human talent that we couldn't or wouldn't use. Utopia? Why? If as I've said all along the universe is at any time what you say it is, then say.