Gordon Hewitt - Why I'm a skeptic

This week, Gordon Hewitt, one of NZ Skeptics' founding members tells us why he's a skeptic. Take it away, Gordon…

I had just turned 12 and was in my second month of secondary school when my father died. The world suddenly seemed a disorganised and dangerous place.

When the fundamentalist Christian group at Wellington College offered me a very certain view of the world, with eternal life as a bonus, it seemed just what I needed at the time [and perhaps was].

However, when I reached my last year at secondary school, our biology teacher finally got around to telling us about evolution. This seemed a much better theory than the idea of a magic tree and a talking snake. As a result, I abandoned fundamentalism for a wishy washy but devoted Anglicanism (most Anglicans do accept evolution).

At university I enrolled in biology, with an idea in mind that at some time I would become an Anglican priest. Towards the end of my degree it occurred to me that if I was to be serious about being an Anglican priest I should know something about other religions.

I started reading about most of the major religions in the world, from those close to Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, to those much more different such as the beliefs of the Buddhists and some of the other religions that seemed to have no need for God at all. There were also those religions, including the religious beliefs of our Maori [before the arrival of Christian missionaries] who had a range of gods. I decided that I could not choose between these and that the most likely explanation was that they were all stories made up by people.

I was lucky enough on completing my degree to be offered a lectureship at Victoria university, which led, after a time, to running an advanced paper in genetics and an honours paper in evolution. This in turn led me to debate from time to time with visiting creationists, such as Dr Morris of the Creation Research Institute in San Diego.

This experience gave me an insight into how gullible many people are in New Zealand. I met up with Dennis Dutton, and four other like-minded individuals, and we agreed that there was a need for an organisation which would promote scepticism. This was the start of the New Zealand Skeptics.

Towards the end of the 1980s, the government decided that universities should behave like competing businesses. The universities stopped being fun places to work, focusing on bums on seats. I left the universities and became a skeptical psychotherapist, a field I worked in for the next 30 years. However, that is a different story!