The Trouble With Skeptics, Occam's Razor and Negative Proofs aka Get Your Boot Off My Beliefs

As long as there are people, the human species will be divided into two defined groups, those that believe and those that don't. The Faithful and the Skeptics. There is an ideological "Jihad" between these two factions that has been waged since the beginning of recorded time and will continue until the Universe (or the Multiverse depending on which scientists you believe) has come to its frozen (or crushed, again, who to believe?) end. I must admit that I am a fence sitter. I am a skeptical believer. Before my inbox gets flooded with e-mails from people questioning this with statements like "How can you be both?" or "Isn't that an oxymoron?", it is important to remember that as Carl Sagan aptly stated "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". There is no proof that these phenomena can't happen.

This principle is often ignored by what is colloquially referred to as "real" or "straight" scientists. The claims of alternate healers, UFO proponents, psychics and a whole bunch of people that are laughed at have never been the subjected to rigorous study. And when there has been studies (and there are a few into UFO abductions) they are discounted as "group hallucinations" or "mass hysteria". How can this be? Is it not possible that within the "straight" science community these investigations are ridiculed, thus they will not receive funding and be doomed before they can even start? Could it be that they are pressured by the community to abuse principles like Occam's razor or to focus on anomalies and paradoxes to determine that there is a normal, down to earth explanation without any further investigation. And what of psychics? I personally have trouble believing in fortune tellers and people that commune spirits but that doesn't mean it can't legitimately happen. The trouble with these claims is that the phenomena in question are difficult to examine in a repeatable fashion. I will believe in a fortune teller when he/she can accurately predict an event in the future with enough detail that the prediction cannot be disputed, and then do it again and on demand. Often the famous fortune tellers such as Nostradamus are used retrospectively. People say this HAS happened and it matches with this prediction. These predictions can also match multiple events. So, which did he predict? All of them, the latest one, the first one? If they did predict events like the 9/11 attacks or the Great War, why couldn't we use that information to prevent these catastrophes? This sort of argument leads skeptics to overlook evidence of psychic ability without even investigating it, perhaps someone that is a true fortune teller has been discounted as a quack.

On the other hand there are scientists that face the ridicule gladly. These brave souls go to work every day and point their radio telescopes at the sky searching not for evidence of astrological phenomena like pulsars or black holes. No, they search for something less and maybe a little more exotic. Carrier signals. Carrier signals that are not of terrestrial origin. Carrier signals that prove that someone or something out there is broadcasting information in the same way that we have been sending out electronic signals into space since the Berlin Olympics. These people believe that there are civilizations that have at least reached the same level of technology as we have and have since surpassed it. So far they have been unsuccessful. This could mean that there are no aliens out there, or we haven't been looking in the right band, or they stopped using radio as a communication medium so long ago that their signals have arrived and gone while we where examining our navels, or more likely the signals just haven't arrived yet. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter, The light from some of the stars we can see has been traveling towards us for longer we have been around. Maybe a deliberate signal is next. There is a large part of the scientific community that are claiming the first outcome, that we are alone. Wow! Occam's razor has been abused by these people. These skeptics find it easier to assume that there is no life except what is here on Earth. They try to use the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life to prove that there is no life out there, a negative proof. They prefer to say I cannot see it therefore it doesn't exist. This is a huge assumption to be making without exploring the entire universe. It is simpler to assume that we haven't looked in the right places, this is correct according to Occam's Razor. My opinion is that life happened here and it can and will happen in other places, it just won't look like what has happened here. We may not even recognize it as life.

And now to the point, finally! We may be able to say definitively that this specific psychic is a fraud or that this specific person was not actually abducted by aliens or that this specific alternate treatment didn't work in this specific case but we should not be closed off to the possibility that there is one legitimate psychic, or one legitimate alternate treatment that actually works but has been ignored by the mainstream. The point is grow a brain, don't believe what people say, especially if they are the experts. find the arguments for and against something and make up your own damn mind, stop letting it be made up for you. If you disagree with anything I've said, comment on this article, part of thinking is listening to other people's ideas, and if they make sense, embracing them.

The author is a graduate engineer and part time (amateur) philosopher. Currently he is thinking very hard about being unemployed and how to remedy the situation. Caution should be taken when reading anything he has placed on paper, or the internet as it may be.