Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.
One of our readers emailed us this week after Mark's excellent editorial last week about skepticism and what type of skeptic you are.
Our Facebook page occasionally gets interactions from the non-skeptical public. Invariably they come to criticise - and often think that being a skeptic means being a contrarian, and automatically doubting mainstream views! We know that's not the sort of skepticism we promote.
This week, one of our readers posted us an interesting comment:
“I've been thinking recently about the subject of belief, both good and bad and the relationship with the scientific method. If we “know” something to be true, do we automatically “believe” it's true? I'm sure philosophers have written whole books on the subject, but I haven't heard much about it from Skeptics.”
I'm not a philosopher, but I'll take an initial stab at this, but I'm sure we could flesh this out with a much more nuanced discussion that I can do justice to.
For me, and I think any honest skeptic, belief should be supported by evidence.
I bristle when somebody claims they “know” something, when, in fact, they don't know that thing - they just believe it.
Conversely, it annoys me when people ask about “believing” in evolution or climate change when, more accurately, we've understood and appreciated the evidence for evolution and climate change being so strong that it doesn't require belief, but requires acceptance.
But perhaps we can write these off to the colloquial use of the terms “know” and “believe”.
What about incongruities in what we believe and what the evidence shows? I think a good example of this is freewill. It seems that we live in a deterministic universe, and that freewill is an illusion. But I'd be fairly certain that most of us live our lives believing freewill to exist, that we're in charge of our actions, that we choose to do what we do.
What do you think? We'd be most interested in feedback.
