Tag Archives: Michael Shermer

Skeptics, Top Ten Posts of 2012

Is There Ever Enough Evidence for the Hyper-Skeptic? #7 Post of 2012

102 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Recently I was listening to the Unbelievable podcast and heard something telling from atheist James Croft.  As he was discussing the historical, eyewitness evidence of Jesus’s resurrection with Christian Chris Sinkinson, he said the following (this is a paraphrase of what he said):

The amount of eyewitness testimony of the death and resurrection of Jesus can never be enough to convince me, and it shouldn’t be enough to convince any reasonable person.  I would never accept any amount of testimony as evidence of the resurrection.  The only way I would accept the death and resurrection of anyone is if there were detailed medical records, and there were medical professionals there to verify the death, and I could stand beside the corpse myself, watching what happened.

Croft, therefore, would never accept any testimony of any resurrection from the dead unless he saw it for himself and there were medical professionals there to certify all the facts.  But, of course, this means that he has conveniently set the bar so high that no resurrection claim from history could ever be believed.

By setting this impossibly high standard, Croft has to do no work, no investigation, no research, no thinking, no considering of the central claim of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus.  For him, this would all be a colossal waste of time, because he has decided, based on his atheistic presuppositions, that resurrections don’t happen.

Croft is a classic example of the hyper-skeptic.  Anybody who would say that no amount of eyewitness testimony from the past should ever convince anyone that a person came back from the dead is arguing not from a position of neutrality, but from an extreme philosophical skepticism in the tradition of David Hume.

Of course, the typical hyper-skeptic has no problem believing highly fantastical things such as the assembly of the first self-replicating organism by pure chance 4 billion years ago, even though the hyper-skeptic wasn’t there to see it, there were no scientific experts standing around watching it, and there are no written records from that time that we can examine.

Intelligent Design proponent Bill Dembski once asked hyper-skeptic Michael Shermer if Shermer would allow Dembski to write skeptical articles about Darwinian evolution in Shermer’s Skeptic magazine.  Shermer declined.  It seems that Skeptic magazine isn’t skeptical about everything.

The critical point to take home is this: hyper-skeptics are usually only skeptical about a small number of select topics, and are thus hopelessly inconsistent in their skepticism.  Their skepticism is, in most cases, just a philosophical cover for being anti-whatever-they-don’t-like.

Evolution, Science and God

Science as a Religion?

7 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

I just finished reading a book called Evolution by Donald Prothero, a paleontologist.  The book’s main purpose is to chronicle the fossil evidence for the evolution of animal life.  Prothero, as an expert in this field, seems to do a reasonable job of this throughout the book, although every tenth sentence seems to be a dress down of creationist, religious fundamentalism (back to that point at the end).  Still, he is extremely knowledgeable about fossil evidence, no doubt.

One thing that bothered me about the end of the book, however, is Prothero’s wholehearted and devoted worship of science.  I can almost imagine him bowing at an altar, it’s so overdone.  Read on to see why.

At the very beginning of his volume, he gave me hope that he understood the limits of science when he explained, “Science helps us understand the natural world and the way it works, but it does not deal with the supernatural, and it does not make statements of what ought to be, as do morals and ethics. . . . When science tries to proscribe morals or ethics, it falters.”  Sounds good.

But then we fast-forward to the conclusion, literally the last 2 pages, where he quotes three of his favorite science prophets.  First we hear from the Prophet Michael Shermer, who testifies, “Darwin matters because evolution matters.  Evolution matters because science matters.  Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.”  Science, it seems, is an epic saga.

Next Prothero quotes from the Gospel of the Prophet Carl Sagan: “The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.  Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us.  There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height.  We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”  Tingling in the spine?

And finally, a reading from the Book of Darwin, speaking on his theory of evolution.  “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.”  Evolution is full of grandeur.

After having heard from the Holy Trinity, I almost expected Prothero to burst into a hymn of science thanksgiving.  What place does all of this have in a book about fossils?  When all is said and done, Prothero is not just trying to teach about fossils; no, he is all about recruiting us to his religion, the religion of science.  After all, religions tell us who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.  This, according to Prophet Shermer, is what science does for us.

For Prothero, it seems that science is the answer to every question worth asking.  After 358 pages of berating religious fundamentalists, it turns out he is one, too.