Where do I start? How do I teach myself the skills required to become a critical thinker? The obvious first place was the internet. While I might not be able to teach myself from what I found there, I could certainly find a place to start.

As with any community, there is a huge presence of skeptics on the web. I found more sites than I could easily manage to follow, so read a few posts from most of them, and then added the really good ones to my newsreader. (I should also point out that my first official link/blogroll entry on the sidebar over there has now been entered, and it is the wonderful SkepChick, edited by Rebecca Watson, on whom I seem to be developing a bit of a crush.) [Editor's note: I have since removed it from the sidebar, when it started featuring less original writing, and more solicitation of reader comments.]

These have shown me several things. First, and to be pushed off for another time, but certainly addressed in this space, is that all of these people seem to be proud atheists. Second, most of the ones I have chosen to follow, are respectful enough that they don’t resort to name-calling, and are trying the gentle education route. Third, and most important, they all value critical thinking skills, and try to assist the readers in developing their own.

Now is probably the point where I should highlight my own beliefs, as of this writing. I have never been a Christian, never baptized and can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been in a church with one of my family members. I have been known to believe in things that could not be proven to exist, such as a soul, UFO’s, and Bigfoot. Generally speaking, though, I tend to believe only those things that have been “proven” by science.

If I was truly to become a skeptic, all of this would have to be discarded. I would have to completely abandon anything I thought I knew, and re-evaluate everything with a skeptical eye. This is far more difficult than I imagined it would be.

First, it requires abandoning beliefs that I have had for a very long time. I had generally always believed ghosts to be paranormal, meaning that they exist as something outside of what science can explain. Whether they were souls communicating from the afterlife, or a sort of time-shifted memory, I would not venture to say. But, I had heard enough anecdotal “evidence” from people I trusted to believe that they were more than natural, explainable phenomena. I could therefore say that I thought something might be true, but cannot say for certain why, or what it is.

This leads to the second difficulty. I have to get off the fence. On many issues where things could not be proven conclusively, I had never made a decision. Is there an afterlife? Maybe. Do humans have souls? Maybe. In order to have any sort of opinion on them I would need to question them, and in questioning them I could no longer say “maybe” or “it’s possible.” I would have to say “all evidence indicates,” or “there is no evidence to indicate,” etc.

And this, in turn, leads to the third difficulty. How do I go about evaluating arguments and evidence, especially if I do not have the training in a specific field of study? As an example, I have no experience in the field of evolutionary biology. How do I know whether to believe Stephen J Gould or Michael Behe?

This is where The Book comes in, for it answers all of these questions, and makes me address all three of these difficulties. The Book is actually Asking the Right Questions by Neil Browne & Stuart Keeley. And, before reading this blog any further, stop, click on that link, and go buy the book. I am not an Amazon associate, so buy it wherever you want. But just buy it.

Still not convinced to buy it? Okay. What the Book does is ask you to train yourself to ask 14 questions of anything you read, hear, watch, whatever. These 14 questions enable you to evaluate the position of the argument being put forth. It is intended for college students as a means of evaluating what they read in their textbooks, and as means of strengthening the arguments they make in their own essays. What it actually is, though, is a way of seeing through all of the bullshit thrown at everyone every day by politicians, corporations, marketers, news programs, corporate development types, et cetera.

If I sound like a rube who was taken in by everything I saw and heard, then perhaps I am misrepresenting myself. But, what the Book offers is an alternative to what they call the sponge approach to learning.

If the reader relied on the sponge approach all the time, she would believe whatever she read last.

I will not go through each of the 14 questions, as that is not my intent here. But, the most important questions to me were the ones that addressed the 3 difficulties I mentioned above. The third one, how to evaluate arguments and evidence if I do not have the specific training, is addressed directly in several of the questions. The reader/questioner is walked through the scientific process, and given the basic skills of recognizing some of the flaws in statistics, sampling, and experimentation.

The second difficulty, getting off the fence and making a decision about something, while not directly addressed, is certainly made easier by asking “What are the rival hypotheses?” After evaluating the evidence yourself, you are then to ask, “what conclusion do I think the evidence would support?” This is getting off the fence.

Finally, and most importantly, you are required to ask “what are my own value preferences in this issue?” This requires a sort of soul seeking that many people are unaccustomed to. Not only does it require you to ask yourself, “Am in favor of [fill in the blank]?”, but also to ask why or why not. Then to ask again to examine those reasons and so on and so on, until you reach your core values and assumptions. And this addresses my first difficulty, evaluating everything I thought I knew and asking myself why I believe what I believe.

This process greatly impacts several other items on my list, which I am sure I will be writing about soon. Right now, though, I am still reeling a little from the impact reading this book has had on my thinking. It can be summed up in this pithy, bumper-sticker piece of wisdom, claimed as a rallying cry by some skeptics:

Question everything, or believe anything.

But what does it mean to be a skeptic? When I wrote that one down, it was a little muddy in my mind, but I knew I’d know a skeptic when I saw it. Now, though, it is important that I really look at it, and determine what being a skeptic means.

[note: in the interest of full disclosure, #49 – Become a skeptic - used to be something else. I changed it at some point, though I'm not exactly certain when, or what #49 used to be. I have changed several items on the list since I first created it. Some things that seemed very important to me at the time became significantly less important. The only rule: if I have already written about it here, it cannot change. Other than that, the list is flexible, a living document, if you will]

We all remember the guy at school (grade-, high-, or college) who would argue with anyone about anything, and would usually insult everyone else’s beliefs in order to prove his point. Or the woman who, upon hearing a story that “really happened to this friend of mine’s friend,” always shouts, “Oh, don’t be stupid, that’s an urban myth!”

I think this is how most people see skeptics. People who think everyone who disagrees with them is stupid. If we only look at their words, this isn’t too far off the mark for many people who call themselves skeptics. While trying to refute a particular belief, they too often attack the person who believes it. In this post the blogger rightly takes on unlicensed mid-wives. I see no problem with what he does in stating that they are a danger to the mother and child, and I actually find his attacks quite funny. Where I start to question his tactics is when he starts calling the expectant mother a dipshit.

This is the major problem with skeptics. It seems as if they think they have all of the answers (many of them believe they do), and resort to personal attacks on those who do not see the world in the same way as they do. This, actually, is the major problem with humans, no matter what they believe or why. We seem to have a need to feel superior, as if this feeling makes us more correct. For some reason though, skeptics seem to be painted with this brush more often than others. Perhaps it is because they use the word “stupid” a lot in their writing, and most people don’t like being called stupid. (I know I’d rather be told that I’ll be spending eternity in a lake of fire than being told that I’m stupid.)

Because of this tendency in some skeptics, I think many people confuse a skeptic with a cynic.

Is there a gentler way to define a skeptic? Skeptics Society founder Michael Shermer, in his Skeptical Manifesto, defines modern skepticism as being “embodied in the scientific method, that involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena.” Further, he writes,

A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions. Some claims, such as water dowsing, ESP, and creationism, have been tested (and failed the tests) often enough that we can provisionally conclude that they are false. Other claims, such as hypnosis and chaos theory, have been tested but results are inconclusive so we must continue formulating and testing hypotheses and theories until we can reach a provisional conclusion. The key to skepticism is to continuously and vigorously apply the methods of science to navigate the treacherous straits between “know nothing” skepticism and “anything goes” credulity.

This is a definition I can live with, for it explains what he believes, while at the same time showing some humility and explaining why he does not believe some of the claims made by others. He doesn’t belittle them, just calmly explains why. As said by another skeptic, “I’m not angry. I just disagree with you.”

As a philosophy, it is one I agree with wholeheartedly. The problem is, how do we know when a claim is confirmed? We obviously cannot verify every claim ourselves, so how do we know who to believe, and who not to believe?

Many years ago I was in a café, reading The Last Temptation of Christ. Sitting at the table next to me was a guy about my age, reading the New Testament, in Greek. At one point we struck up a conversation, both interested in the seeming coincidence of what we were reading. We started getting into the idea of faith, and he said to me, “You accept science on the same sort of faith that I accept Christ as my personal savior.” I knew this was not true, but could not easily refute him. I said I trusted the sources and methods of those that told me evolution was a fact, and he said he trusted his sources and their methods that told him it was a lie. This went on, until the dreaded “agree to disagree” sentence, and we both went on our way.

What that experience taught me was that, though I considered myself of a rationalist bent, I had never had any scientific training. I could not refute his argument, even to my own satisfaction, because I did not have the tools to readily explain why I believed and trusted the science behind my beliefs.

Perhaps this is why some skeptics seem so arrogant, so angry. They have these tools, the ability to see into arguments and understand them through a process of deep evaluation, and when other people do not use the same skill to apply to their own reasoning, it makes them mad. The skill is called critical thinking by most people, and though I have been rather well educated in the liberal arts, I had never actually been taught the skills required to subject everything to this process.

When S and I were at the Ob/Gyn office several months ago, one of the first of her pre-natal appointments, she was given a huge stack of papers, information and advertising for all of the things she might need during and immediately following her pregnancy. While going through the stack, we found a brochure for a cord blood storage facility (CBSF).

For those who don’t know what these are, a private CBSF will store your child’s cord blood, and have it available at a moment’s notice in case you ever need it again in the future. They will send you a kit to give to your obstetrician, who, upon the birth of your child, is supposed to drain blood from the umbilical cord and package it into the kit. You are then to send the kit to the CBSF, and for a fee of around $2000, they will begin the storage process. Then for around $100 a year, they will continue to store the blood for the future use of your child, or any compatible family member.

Cord blood can have tremendous benefits for people suffering from all sorts of disease, and many people claim that the number of diseases that will be treated with cord blood will only increase over time. But, this post is not about cord blood and its benefits.

I was tasked with determining which CBSF we were going to use. How could we not do it? It’s our child after all! What’s a few thousand dollars?

While doing the research on the two big private CBSF’s, I came across some articles regarding a controversy about these places. A controversy? How could there possibly be a controversy? Everyone knows about the benefits of cord blood, and everyone cares about their children. Who would think that this is anything but a great idea?

The American Academy of Pediatrics, apparently.

According to a statement issued by the AAP in January 2007, “private cord blood banks target parents at an emotionally vulnerable time when the reality is most conditions that might be helped by cord blood stem cells already exist in the infant’s cord blood.” They further recommend that cord blood be donated to a public cord blood bank, where it will be available to anyone who might benefit from it. (They also recommend that the private banks should be used if an older sibling has a condition that could be treated using cord blood.)

Both S and I were ashamed of ourselves. We had blindly accepted the word of the marketing brochure that it was the best thing to do for our unborn child. How many more times over the course of my child’s life will I be confronted with similar claims, all vying for our money, time, and attention?

This was when I decided it was time to tackle #49 – Become a skeptic.