Extraordinary Religious Claims

EXTRAORDINARY RELIGIOUS CLAIMS

It would be easy to sidestep religion and just stick to raising questions about less contentious topics such as astrology and UFOs. But good skeptics don’t give a free pass to anyone or anything. Good skepticism demands consistency. It does no good to figure out that giving thousands of your hard-earned dollars to a psychic is a bad idea only to go running into the open arms of a faith healer who wants you to help pay for his fleet of luxury cars. I understand that religion tends to be far more serious to most people than many of these other claims, but doesn’t this greater importance indicate a need for more vigilance rather than less? If gods, sacred books, and heaven and hell really are crucial to our well-being, then why would anyone want to risk worshipping the wrong god, following the wrong rules, reading the wrong book, or trusting the wrong prophet? It’s complicated, to say the least, and skeptical thinking can help to sort it out. Over the last several thousand years, people—most of them smart, well-meaning, and sincere—have confidently believed in millions of gods and created hundreds of thousands of unique religions, most of them too contradictory to ever be reconciled logically. It is not rude to encourage everyone to think critically about this situation. If anything, it’s demanded by what we see in human belief today and in our past.

Many people who hold to one form of religious belief or another are pretty good skeptics already. They see right through the cons, distortions of history, logical errors, and outright lies that infect so many religions, including their own. There are numerous believers, for example, who are unflinchingly skeptical of the work of some millionaire holy men and consider them to be nothing more than liars and thieves who prey on believers who are not skeptical enough. Millions of believers think well enough to reject the teachings of leaders who insist that every storm is a divine punishment and every lucky break is a gift from the gods. The point is, skepticism should not halt at religion’s front door. It is appropriate, useful, and vital even for those who may feel they will not or cannot give up their core belief in a god or gods.

I suspect that far too many religious people shy away from skeptical thinking, or even feel hostile toward it, because they see it as a direct attack on the most important belief of all. But when religious people turn away from critical thinking, what happens? They leave themselves open to problems they don’t want. For example, how many millions of religious people have fallen victim to medical quackery and other scams or wasted their time and money on bad beliefs that they could have identified and rejected if they had been better skeptics? The answer is too many. I don’t hold back from encouraging religious people to be good skeptics because they need it, too. They have to live in this crazy world, too. Religious people need skepticism as much as anyone. I certainly don’t care about them any less than I do nonreligious people. It’s so important, in fact, that I encourage religious people to become good skeptics even if they insist on being selective about it. That’s not ideal, of course, but it’s better than not trying at all. Even if one decides that it is necessary to leave one’s particular god or gods untouched by critical thinking, at least apply vigorous and consistent skepticism to every other aspect of life.

Skepticism is important for religious people within their religion because wrong ideas and bad beliefs can sprout up there, too. The question of the existence of gods aside, religions often provide a protective bubble that nurtures and protects ideas nobody needs banging around in their head. This is not meant to insult any particular religion; it’s just reality. Everyone knows that religions, like any organization, can be used to motivate, excuse, and protect both self-destructive and socially destructive behavior. Consider the suffering of hundreds of millions of women who are mistreated every day, worldwide, by men who believe that such behavior is what their religion expects of them or that such treatment is acceptable because their religion allows them to get away with it unpunished. Think about the countless children who are taught outrageously bad pseudohistory and pseudoscience by parents and teachers who think it’s their duty because of a religion they adhere to. Creationism, for example, includes the profoundly unscientific claim that our world is only about 6,000 to 9,000 years old. But the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. So this claim is not just wrong; it’s stunningly wrong. It’s no less silly than saying that the distance between the Earth and the Moon (approximately 240,000 miles) is about one-third of a mile. Or that the distance between New York and Los Angeles is about twenty feet. Honestly, that’s how far off the mark this popular claim is. Although you would expect that no educated person in his or her right mind would believe in a 6,000-year-old Earth in the twenty-first century, in fact, many millions of otherwise-sensible people do because it’s a bad idea that thrives under the protective dome of some versions of some religions. Religious people who also happen to be pretty good skeptics, however, would easily identify problems with this claim and reject it. They would ask a few simple questions, note the convergence of so much evidence from astronomy, physics, paleontology, paleoanthropology, archaeology, botany, biology, and geology, and conclude that the Earth is obviously much, much older than 6,000 years. The end result would be a more enlightened person who still believes in his god or gods but is not clinging unnecessarily to a pseudoscientific claim that makes him less aware and less appreciative of the real world and universe he lives in.

Skepticism is good for everyone at all times. There should be no religious zones that are off-limits to asking questions and requesting evidence. Religious people are no different than everyone else in that they are confronted with lies and popular delusions every day. Sometimes this happens within the bounds of their particular religion. Hopefully believers will agree that all religions are imperfect because they are organized and led by imperfect human beings. Every religion has taken wrong turns somewhere in its past, and every religion has had some leaders who turned out to be undeserving of their followers’ trust. For these reasons, it only makes sense for religious people to embrace and apply skepticism for their own protection.