Weird Earth. Donald R. ProtheroЧитать онлайн книгу.
I see is black, if the Church so decides it.”13 That’s fine if you are willing to accept that system and suspend disbelief in favor of emotional and mystical connections.
If you pass off your belief system as science, however, you must play by the rules of science. When con artists try to sell you snake oil and someone points out an inconvenient fact about it, they will try to attack this fact or to explain it away with an after-the-fact or ad hoc (Latin for “for this purpose”) explanation. If the snake oil fails to work, they might say, “You didn’t use it right” or “It doesn’t work on days when the moon is full.” If the séance fails to contact the dead, the medium might scold the skeptic by saying, “You didn’t believe in it sufficiently” or “The room wasn’t dark enough” or “The spirits just don’t feel like talking today.” If we point out that there are millions of species on earth that could not have fit into the biblical Noah’s ark, the creationist tries to salvage their hypothesis by saying, “Only the created kinds were on board” or “Insects and fish don’t count” or “God miraculously crammed all these animals into this tiny space, where they lived in harmony for forty days and forty nights” or some similar dodge. Similarly, if you show a claim to be false, the believer may move the goalpost by changing how a falsification of their ideas would be determined.
As we shall see in the chapters that follow, ad hoc hypotheses are common when the conclusion is already accepted and the believer must find any explanation to wiggle out of inconvenient contradictory facts. But they are not acceptable in science. If the conclusion is a given and cannot be rejected or falsified, then it is no longer scientific.
7. Not All “Persecuted Geniuses” Are Right
People trying to promote wild ideas that seem crazy to us will often point to the persecution of Galileo (arrested and tried for advocating Copernican astronomy) or Alfred Wegener (ridiculed for his ideas about continental drift) and will take solace in how these geniuses were eventually proven right. But as Carl Sagan put it, “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”14 The annals of science are full of wild and crackpot notions that didn’t survive testing and were eventually abandoned, and these ideas far outnumber the handful of misunderstood geniuses who were vindicated in the end.
These “misunderstood geniuses” often turn to Schopenhauer, who wrote, “All truths pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”15 But Schopenhauer was wrong. Many revolutionary and radical ideas (such as Einstein’s theory of relativity) were never ridiculed or violently opposed. In the case of Einstein, his theories were mostly ignored as interesting but untestable until scientific observations made in 1919 corroborated them.
Science is open to all sorts of ideas, from the conventional to the wacky. It doesn’t matter where the ideas come from, but they all have to pass muster. If your ideology has failed the test of science, you can’t just claim you’re a misunderstood genius; it is more likely that your cherished hypothesis is just plain wrong. Scientists are too busy, and there are too many worthwhile and important scientific goals for them to pursue, for them to waste their time testing and evaluating every wild scheme that comes along. People might wail that they are persecuted and misunderstood geniuses. But if you want to be taken seriously, you must play by the rules of science: get to know other scientists, exchange ideas, be willing to change your own ideas, present your results in scientific conferences, and submit them to the scrutiny of peer-reviewed journals and books. If your ideas can survive this rigorous gauntlet, then they will get the attention they deserve from scientists.
The Skeptic Society in Pasadena, California (I am a member of their editorial board) gets hundreds of letters each year by lone “geniuses” who claim to have made some great discovery, or debunked Einsteinian relativity or quantum physics, or discovered a working perpetual-motion machine or cold fusion or something equally startling. They demand that Skeptic magazine publish their “revolutionary” ideas. Most of the ideas are laughably bad and the people clearly crackpots, but every once in a while a somewhat legitimate-sounding idea will emerge, and I am often consulted to see whether it holds muster. But the real test of whether the idea is worthy is peer review. Find a legitimate place to publish your idea, and then let the scientific community test it. If your idea is truly groundbreaking or revolutionary, sooner or later scientists will find its merits and test it, and if it survives repeated scrutiny, scientists will begin to accept it and promote it. Grousing about how you are a misunderstood genius will get you nowhere. Nor will claiming that there is a great conspiracy among scientists to suppress your brilliant idea.
It’s a Conspiracy!
Conspiracy thinking, in particular, plays a huge part in weird ideas about the earth. Flat-earthers, geocentrists, moon-landing deniers, creationists, and many others we will discuss in this book insist that they are not taken seriously because a great conspiracy of scientists, or the world in general, is against their ideas. Lately, conspiracy thinking has become rife in society as whole segments of the population are taken in by media that cater to their need for conspiracies, especially shows like Alex Jones’s Infowars. As the political philosopher John Gray wrote, “Modern political religions may reject Christianity, but they cannot do without demonology. The Jacobins, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis all believed in vast conspiracies against them, as do radical Islamists today. It is never the flaws of human nature that stand in the way of Utopia. It is the workings of evil forces.”16
Conspiracy theories are everywhere in our culture, and lots of people indulge in them. Ever since President John F. Kennedy (JFK) was shot in 1963, there have been dozens of different conspiracy theories about who shot him and why. Conspiracies have been hatched around Princess Diana’s death. Others claim that the moon landing was a hoax (see chap. 6) or that climate change science is a hoax by the entire scientific community trying to destroy capitalism. Just days after the 9/11 terror attacks, a large number of 9/11 “Truthers” emerged to claim that it was all a conspiracy, an inside job by powerful forces—pick your favorite conspirator here—for unstated motives. Of course, the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy—by nineteen Muslim men who hijacked the planes according to a plan hatched by Al-Qaeda. But this is not what the 9/11 Truthers want to accept. It has to be something bigger and more sinister, usually planned by the Bush administration.
High percentages of Americans (on the order of 25–40%) believe in at least one or more conspiracy theory, and studies have shown that those who believe one conspiracy tend to accept many others. Sometimes they are not even consistent. As William Saletan wrote,
The appeal of these theories—the simplification of complex events to human agency and evil—overrides not just their cumulative implausibility (which, perversely, becomes cumulative plausibility as you buy into the premise) but also, in many cases, their incompatibility. Consider the 2003 survey in which Gallup asked 471 Americans about JFK’s death. Thirty-seven percent said the Mafia was involved, 34 percent said the CIA was involved, 18 percent blamed Vice President Johnson, 15 percent blamed the Soviets, and 15 percent blamed the Cubans. If you’re doing the math, you’ve figured out by now that many respondents named more than one culprit. In fact, 21 percent blamed two conspiring groups or individuals, and 12 percent blamed three. The CIA, the Mafia, the Cubans—somehow, they were all in on the plot.17
Two years ago, psychologists at the University of Kent led by Michael Wood, who blogs at a delightful website on conspiracy psychology, https://conspiracypsychology.com/author/disinfoagent/, escalated the challenge. They offered UK college students five conspiracy theories about Princess Diana: four in which she was deliberately killed and one in which she faked her death. In a second experiment, they brought up two more theories: Osama Bin Laden was still alive (contrary to reports of his death in a US raid earlier that year), and alternatively, he was already dead before the raid. Sure enough, “The more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they