Religion and Skepticism

The World Question Center asks of scientists and intellectuals, "what have you changed your mind about and why?" Paging through the responses is pretty interesting and provides a buffet of interesting ideas in take home sizes.

One of my favorites is this nugget of wisdom from Rupert Sheldrake:

I used to think of skepticism as a primary intellectual virtue, whose goal was truth. I have changed my mind. I now see it as a weapon.

Creationists opened my eyes. They use the techniques of critical thinking to expose weaknesses in the evidence for natural selection, gaps in the fossil record and problems with evolutionary theory. Is this because they are seeking truth? No. They believe they already know the truth. Skepticism is a weapon to defend their beliefs by attacking their opponents.
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In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief.

As a firm believer in the power of critical thinking and skepticism myself, I take his point to heart.

Scooby Doo and Skepticism

P.Z. Myers points out something that bothered me about the revival of the Scooby Doo characters:

Way back when I was a young'un, they always ended the same way: the Scooby Doo gang would always discover that the monster/spectre/alien was actually Old Man Cargill, dressed in a costume, trying to keep visitors away so they wouldn't discover his secret uranium mine, and they always led him away in handcuffs at the end, while he muttered, "If it weren't for those darned kids, I would have gotten away with it." I know, the cartoon was cheesily and cheaply animated, the plots were boring and predictable, and the characters were annoyingly trite, but at least they had a consistent message that the supernatural wasn't real.

That changed last time I saw it — the ghosts were "real". It was very strange: it was a badly done cartoon, waning in popularity, and instead of trying to reinvigorate it by, say, coming up with creative plots, or getting better artwork, or making the characters more interesting, they chose to throw away the one novel element of the show. The supernatural resort is often the act of lazy hacks.

The biggest problem with all supernatural fiction is, as Chris Mooney points out, the "conversion fantasy." The idea that it is better to be a true believer than a rational skeptic. It's what's always bothered me about Fox Mulder in The X-Files: that he was somehow morally superior to the other characters because he "believed."

Really good supernatural fiction treads lightly on this subject or views the conversion fantasy as the self-annihilating process it really is. In Lovecraft, the supernatural is a metaphor for the cold heartless universe and man's place in it. The universe is large, amoral, and indifferent to human suffering. Humans are small, mortal, emotionally fragile, and ultimately inconsequential. Anyone who is stupid enough to make a cult out of these elder gods usually ends up going mad or being destroyed.

The old version of Scooby Doo was dumb, but it did at least show that rationality and problem-solving could triumph over fear and chaos. The new Shaggy and Scooby Doo Get A Clue dodges the issue by being a G-rated version of the Venture Brothers, battling adventure story cliches. Still, how would Fred and the gang deal with the Call of Cthulu? Jinkies!