Asking “The Big Questions” about life – who am I, where did I come from, why am I here, what happens when I die, how does it all work – is a natural consequence of being human and having a sense of self-awareness. Even if, in our modern consumerist society, these questions are sometimes buried by thoughts about how we can buy more crap we don’t need, they lie there somewhere in our psyche, waiting to have their day, and often assert themselves during moments of personal crisis.
Throughout recorded history, humans have used our infinite imagination to come up with a myriad answers to these questions. From primitive creation myths through to string theory, humans have dreamed up thousands of possibilities, all of which might be true.
If we want to get as close to knowing The Truth as possible, then we need to sort through these possibilities and work out which of this vast list of possibilities is most likely to be true?
How do we go about doing this?
First of all we might ask – Is it possible that ALL of them are equally true?
This seems implausible. For one reason, many of these ideas are in conflict and it’s difficult to see how they could co-exist.
Can the universe, for example, have been created both by an omni-present God and also been created by natural forces?
It seems that either one or the other must be true.
Either intelligent alien being are living on our planet – or they are not. Both cannot be true. These questions have binary answers – true or false.
What we need, then, is a process to help us choose which ideas are most likely to be true.
Notice I didn’t say which of them is true, but which is most likely to be true. We don’t need to be concerned with absolutes at this stage, just in finding a useful process that might lead us closer to the truth.
So let’s examine some of the processes which might work.
Process #1 – Whatever Feels Good
One process might be to just determine which of the nearly endless list of possibilities makes us feel good and decide THAT is true. This seems to be what many adherents of religions and alternative medicine do. They pick an idea that just “feels right” to them and go with that.
Based on the wide range of religions that people around the world believe in, this method seems to be flawed. All of the adherents of those religions, if asked deep questions about why they believe what they believe, will ultimately tell you that it just “feels right”.
However, as all of the major religions believe in different things, obviously they cannot all be correct. Therefore, at least some of those people must be misguided and what “feels right”, is not.
How, then, do we know which of these people are right and which are not?
Obviously we can’t use the “what feels right” process to sort out this conundrum, because this is what caused the problem in the first place. So we need a better system.
Process #2 – Tradition
Throughout human history, people have tended to adopt the beliefs of their parents and elders. Even today, many people take on board the beliefs of their ancestors for no other reason than these were the beliefs they were raised with and they avoid thinking about them in depth, perhaps because to do so would seem to be an affront to their forebears.
This process also seems to be flawed, for much the same reasons as the previous process. All over the world, people have inherited competing beliefs from their parents. Can all of them be true if they are conflict with each other?
It would seem not. And so how do we determine which of these inherited beliefs are most likely to be true?
We need another process.
Process #3 – I’ve Seen It With My Own Eyes
Often people will have claimed to see “proof” that their idea is true with their own eyes. This may seem, at first glance, to be a reasonable way to know what is true – until we realize a few things.
First we should realise, again, that many people with conflicting ideas claim to have seen things with their own eyes. As before, they cannot all be right.
Next we should accept that our sense usually don’t give us an accurate representation of what’s going on. Anybody who has seen a performance by a professional magician knows this is true. Our senses are easily mislead. Just because it SEEMS like something is happening, doesn’t necessarily mean that it IS going on.
For most of human history, it seemed like it was the Sun that rose in the morning and set at night but today we know this isn’t true. Our senses cannot be trusted.
Process #4 – The Scientific Method
One of the great tragedies of modern times is how poorly the scientific method is understood by the general public. It is, without doubt, one of the crowning achievements of human intelligence and yet the majority of people in the early 21st century do not understand either how it works or why it is such an achievement.
I’m constantly meeting people who demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of how science works or why it is a far superior method to those discussed above.
The process itself is quite simple and requires no knowledge of science to comprehend.
It works through a series of simple steps.
Step 1: Ask a Question.
Why is grass green? Why is the sky blue?
Step 2: Do Background Research
Has this question been studied before? If so, what knowledge do we have on the subject already?
Step 3: Construct a Hypothesis
Perhaps grass is green because… it comes from Ireland. Perhaps the sky is blue because…. it is made of water.
Step 4: Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
How do we determine whether or not grass really does all come from Ireland? How do we work out if the sky really is made of water? Do the experiment and gather your data.
Step 5: Analyse Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
What did we learn? Based on the evidence we developed from our experiments, does grass all come from Ireland? Was your theory supported or refuted by the evidence?
Step 6: Communicate Your Results
Publish your findings somewhere other scientists interested in the same subject can review them. Everybody can make mistakes, so let others check your work. If they agree with your findings, perhaps you might be on to something.
One of the most important aspects of the scientific method is that the findings that we develop are always open to revision. In scientific parlance, “truths” are just theories that have not yet been proven to be incorrect. This point seems to confuse many people. They think that, because scientific truths are not written in stone, they are not sound. What we need to understand is that the current theory is the BEST theory and the MOST SUPPORTED theory that we have been able to develop. Based on the information, models and tools we have today, this is the strongest theory.
Some people try to justify a personal theory, which isn’t currently supported by evidence, by saying that science may one day develop better tools or models which will support their preferred theory. While this is quite possible, it begs the question – if your personally favourite theory is not currently supported by the evidence, why do you believe to be true? Typically they have drawn their beliefs from one of the earlier processes that we have already shown to be flawed.
If a theory has been analysed by the scientific method and is not supported by the evidence, while another theory is supported, then it would be rational to believe in the theory that is supported unless you can demonstrate why that theory has substantial flaws.
People who don’t understand the scientific method will often cite historical examples of theories that scientists believed to be true that have today been abandoned. The most common is the ‘flat earth’ theory.
This is actually a classic example of how science works.
Pythagoras first postulated that the Earth must be a sphere way back in 570 BCE and the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes even measured the circumference of the Earth using the shadows cast by the sun in the third century BCE. The only people who thought the earth was flat during the intervening centuries were the uneducated or the foolish. In other words, the only people who believe in the flat earth theory were those who accepted what seemed to “feel right” or believed what they saw “with their own eyes” or who believed without question what they were told by their ancestors and elders. Those that bothered to research the findings of people who had done previous research (admittedly a difficult thing to do in those times), or who did primary research themselves, would probably have come to the same conclusions as Pythagoras or Eratosthenes. Eventually, in 1492, Columbus sailed from one side of the earth to the other without falling off the edge of the world, but this only proved the point finally to the uneducated.
Of course, there are many, many other scientific theories that were once believed but have since been discarded, but this only proves what a terrific achievement the scientific method truly is. It is flexible and disciplined enough to be constantly searching for the truth, using the latest models and tools to push our understanding forwards. Again, the scientific method tries to discover what is most likely to be true. Is it always open to correction and revision, never constrained by dogma.
Therefore, the most rational approach to determine, on a personal level, what is most likely to be true, is to follow the scientific method.
Of course, most of us are not scientists, so we cannot personally do the research. We have to rely on the scientists that spend their lives trying to answer these questions for us.
We might ask, then, how we can know that these scientists are telling us the truth and not just leading us astray? How do we know our scientists are not just like witch doctors or religious leaders who have lead humans astray in the past?
Fortunately, we are able to use a method similar to the scientific method to help us answer such questions.
If we were to ask the question “is the scientific community lying to us?”, we can create a hypothesis to explain why they would do such a thing, what their motivations would be, how it would work that you would get the entire scientific community to agree on a particular lie, etc. Then, once we have a hypothesis, we can search for evidence to refute it.
While it is certainly possible that this is true, I have yet to hear a logical hypothesis to explain how it would work. Until someone develops such a hypothesis and finds evidence to support it, I suggest we work with the alternative theory that scientists are primarily motivated by doing good science.
Rational thinking is also important when applied to other subjects such as medicine. In a recent discussion about homeopathy, a friend was trying to argue that homeopathy is valid, despite the weight of scientific studies showing the opposite. When he was unable to point to any scientific evidence to support the theory of homeopathy, he tried to argue that “Big Pharma” corrupted the scientific trials that studied homeopathy, therefore the studies couldn’t be trusted to be accurate.
While that might be true, it doesn’t stand as a proxy for having evidence to support your theory. The argument “they are lying therefore my theory is right” isn’t acceptable if you can’t provide scientific studies to support your theory. Your theory is still of the category “Might Be True” until you can provide scientific studies to support it. Even if you can prove that everyone else is lying, it doesn’t necessarily follow that your theory is correct.
In conclusion, this is why the scientific method is the best way for us to work out which ideas are likely to be correct. If you believe ideas which are NOT supported by hard science, It is very likely that you are fooling yourself.
