I was having a conversation the other day. It was friendly enough. Until it turned to the reliability of journalism and media. They said that they did not trust Fox news, unless of-course, if it was reporting on events in Israel. This was a surprising admission. Being polite, I did not point out that this was an obvious example of confirmation bias. Maybe that was when our conversation deteriorated. Or perhaps, when I pointed out that it often took several alternate sources for me to arrive at a balanced understanding of a topic. I gave examples of news sources I reference, they included ABC, BBC and Al Jazeera. I suppose the last one was a bit inflammatory considering the previous admission, but I do honestly respect their reporting. My intentions were honest. How can you make an informed decision without considering alternate viewpoints, sources and data? That is after all, a principal characteristic to rational thinking.
Next, they made an attack on science. They gave an example. The specifics are not important. The inference though, was the challenge: "How can you have complete knowledge?" Despite my probably feeble efforts to describe the scientific method, their attack continued. This was not what rattled me though. I got annoyed when they asked, “Can you admit you may be wrong?”.
It took me some time to reflect how the conversation arrived at this often used anti-science argument. Here is a person of faith, a person with no evidence for their beliefs, with little, if any understanding of the scientific method, fishing for meaningless admissions.
What is a good response?
Or am I missing the point?
- Is it not better to know one's limitations?
- Is it not better to have a reliable process of obtaining knowledge?
- Is it not better to be able evaluate and if found wanting, throw out bad ideas?
- Is it not better to have evidence?
What may be going on, is that faith prevents you from changing your mind even when given contradictory information. One defence is to go on the attack: Get your adversary to admit doubt. As if doubt is of itself, bad. This diverts attention from their own fallacy and rigidly held beliefs. After-all, they can't be wrong as they have faith!
Perhaps it is a ploy to level faith with imperfect scientific knowledge? This is a distraction. I freely admit we do not know or indeed can know, everything. But that does not change my confidence in the scientific method. It has proven to be a reliable tool to describe our world. It is able to adapt to new knowledge. It accepts being challenged. It does not ignore conflicting data. It is not faith.
