There are those who generally don’t like the hard work it takes to fill in those ruts, so they construct huge works of fiction. Intricate and fantastic tapestries to lay over the ugly pitted truth of reality. The holes we should be exploring and working hard to fill are instead covered with a thin and beautiful, albeit fragile veneer. Looking out at the perfectly sculpted and smooth landscape, they’re content to dust off their hands and commend themselves on a job well done. But the holes are still there, obscured and treacherous. But because it looks good, they are perfectly happy to hand this botched and hazardous mess off to their kids.

I know… I, like many of you have broken through the beautiful lie, to lay dazed for a time, on the uneven ground below. It’s terrifying, exciting and far more interesting than anything I was told to accept as “true” up there.

There’s a funny idiom that comes to mind – ‘it’s always in the last place you look.’ – It’s funny to me because, once you found something why would you keep looking, right? But in this case it’s a double edged sword. Because of the sheer amount of misinformation out there, what if all you found was a fabrication or a lie? Can you imagine the tragedy of living that life thinking you no longer had to seek truth because the veneer explained it all? Progress and enlightenment would come to a standstill, leaving us all stagnant, boring, and laughing inanely at Jersey Shore.

There is a symbol in mathematics as well as written language. It’s simple, concise, inspiring, limitless and humble; It’s the perfect placeholder for truth but it isn’t used nearly enough in this age of information and answers.

I remember when I thought that being a skeptic was a bad thing. Watching the X-Files as a kid, I always thought Scully was a stick in the mud and Mulder was by far the star of the show. Granted, this was just a TV show, but at the time I wondered why Scully couldn’t believe her own stupid eyes! There were space aliens, CHUDS, vampires, teens with super-human speed—the list of extraordinary things goes on and on; yet she always approached every investigation with a grain of salt, and the end of every episode her findings were “inconclusive.” Understatement of the century!

I was a just kid when I watched that. I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. I loved paranormal investigation movies and read all the books of mystery: The Healing Power of Pyramids, Bermuda Triangle, The Search for Atlantis, How to Increase Your ESP, etc. It all seemed perfectly reasonable to me that such things exist. But as I got older I found that no matter how much I exercised my pineal gland, I couldn’t read minds; no matter how many cups of milk I put into my pyramid, I never got yogurt. My reality had become vastly different from my beliefs, and all I had to show for it was a sore forehead and an unlimited supply of sour milk (with or without maggots).

What happened? Why are there so many books and TV shows dedicated to these things if they don’t actually exist? I think I can sum it up in one simple phrase.

Everybody loves a good magic act.

Penn & Teller are awesome for this reason. They give enough of the process away in their stage show to let you know that you’re witnessing a “trick” or some slight of hand, but they still capture the whimsy of the crowd by keeping some of their act a secret. Magic is all about control and deception: if done in an innocent fashion for entertainment purposes, it’s very cool. Unfortunately, with this in mind, it’s not so cool that purveyors of magical thinking know full well what “magic” is all about and have perfected many ways to control and deceive you without your knowledge and/or consent.

I suppose the best general rule to follow in order to make sure you’re not being taken for a ride is to ask questions. If something doesn’t feel right about the line someone is feeding you, just keep asking questions until it makes sense for you. If it doesn’t make sense, you’re probably getting swindled in some way and should probably graciously back away.

Relax….

There are no “100% risk-free” opportunities that only come along once in a lifetime that you can’t live without. A lot of these ‘opportunities’ require you to make split-second decisions regarding your finances. If you feel pressured to make a purchase to hand over your cash or credentials for a service you don’t understand, or don’t remember applying for, then you’re probably about to become a trophy on some con artist’s wall.

Watch out for conversational ‘shotgunning’

Beware of people who talk too fast and don’t listen to the responses to their questions — they’re ‘shotgunning.’ This line of attention control makes it impossible for you to keep up, but they seem to know what they’re talking about by the sheer amount of drivel they’re spilling. Only after their rant, when you have a moment to go over the glut of information and misinformation they’ve fired your way, will you be able to discern what they were talking about and what their arguments were really full of. These conclusions often come too late to act on and usually after you agreed with the person just to shut them up. When confronted with people like this, it’s best to back away slowly. Unless you can fit a word in edgewise and you’re really familiar with their arguments, you stand a good chance of getting owned when attempting to debate or rationalize with them.

So who should you trust?

You, ya turkey! We don’t live in a dictatorship. We should be able to look into anything we want, especially if it’s going to cost us our health or life savings. If something in your life comes into question, look into it. Is there a way for you to test the claims a group, corporation, or product makes? Absolutely! Get creative, ask for a demo, look at public forums, look into suspect industries, see what your peers are saying. Is there consensus, or is there a huge divide between the claims mentioned by the parties in question and the actual people using the products and services of interest? If so, ask questions. And keep asking questions.

Welcome to the slippery world of logical fallacies. In this case you’ve fallen for the old post hoc argument.

This fallacy follows the basic format of: A preceded B, therefore A caused B, and therefore assumes cause and effect for two events just because they are temporally related (the Latin translates to ‘after this, therefore because of this’). (theskepticsguide.org)

Well, what’s actually going on then? Mathematically the odds seem to be incomprehensibly stacked against you — 1:10,000,000 or more! But if you look at the big picture, it seems that someone at random wins every other week. So the odds for just any random person winning are about 1:3, which are much better odds. When push comes to shove, the numbers don’t really care what they’re doing. It does seem magical when it happens to you, but really you have just witnessed a truly random event, one of many such events that happen to you all the time; the only difference is your emotional investment in this particular one.

Let’s look at some other random events that you may take for granted that could be just as magical if you make it all about you.

Magic rain

You’re standing outside and a single drop of rain lands on the very end of your nose. “It’s about to rain,” you think, and seek shelter. But consider, if you will, the sheer amount of space that single raindrop had to travel through, and how many wind currents guided it to its final destination at the end of your nose. It’s almost like someone guided it to land perfectly and exactly in that spot. NASA would have a hard time doing the math on that one. Seems almost impossible that one raindrop would pick that exact place to land in order to warn you of the weather, but it did. In terms of odds, it’s much more likely that you’d win the lottery.

Now the rain starts and you don’t find shelter in time. You are getting pelted by rain and wind. The odds are the same for each individual raindrop hitting you as for the first one, but now you’re only able to see the raindrops as a downpour; you don’t consider them to be individual drops anymore. You have 1:1 odds of getting hit by just any rain drop. Has it lost its magic yet?

Prayer

You pray for a sick loved one and they get better, so you feel somewhat responsible. But how many prayers do you make on behalf of people that don’t come to fruition? Do you make excuses or move the goalpost to allow the prayer to be answered, even if it’s not what you asked for? Prayers are tricky for this reason. What you expect is a collaboration between you and a spiritual entity of your choosing; therefore, you can dismiss a negative outcome as the entity simply saying “no” rather than putting the blame completely on yourself. But it’s impossible to prove that there was any spiritual involvement either way. Your emotional investment in the outcome makes it seem to you that there was a connection made, but it’s more plausible to accept that people get better or worse on their own, without your spiritual sway if you don’t have actual evidence beyond emotion to back up your claim.

Precognition

You have a dream that comes true, or a daydream that seems too real and the events are unfolding just as you had pictured them. But how many dreams do you have that you can’t remember or that don’t come true? How many thoughts or daydreams do you have in a day or week? Do all of them come true, or was it just this one? When you try to count every thought or daydream, these numbers can be staggering. If you look at the figures, you are wrong infinitely more often than you are right. But let’s say you were correct in your predictions — how many of the details are accurate? Often dreams deal with familiar scenes or behaviors but the details are surreal: “In my dream I was driving toward my childhood home with my deceased father, and he kept weeping jewels from his eyes. Then we got into an accident. Two weeks later, I had a real car accident. I can’t help but think my father was trying to warn me.”

Which part of the dream came true exactly? The driving part? I drive every day, so there’s nothing significant there. The accident part? Everyone has anxiety about getting in an accident, car accidents are the number one cause of death among adults under thirty, and they are in the news almost every day — that could have affected the dream. Heading toward my childhood home? Technically, every time I travel in an easterly direction I’m heading toward my childhood home. Did the jewels symbolize financial loss from the accident? Well, the jewels could mean anything at all. If the accident happened six months or a year later instead of two weeks later, would it still be considered prophetic? You can see here how pretty much anything in the dream can be interpreted as an accurate prediction, regardless of how mundane the circumstance.

There are a number of things at play when making dream predictions:

1. We are creatures of habit; most of our days follow a routine; only the finer details of each day change for us.
2. Because dreams are loosely based on your waking life, you are bound to find parallels between the two states.
3. Your mind is constantly running hypothetical simulations drawing from everything you’ve experienced in life; that’s how we’re able to make cogent predictions based on careful observation. However, it works against us sometimes. It’s only a matter of time before the random sequencing of your unconscious mind generates an outcome based on the details of your routine-based waking life and superimposes a set of anxiety-causing situations that might have some amount of plausibility — and with seemingly apt timing. It won’t happen for everyone, but it does happen more than you would expect.

So with all that, do you really stand out that much among your peers with your ability to channel random events to your favour, or does it just seem that way because you have an emotional investment in the final, random-chance outcome? In all these events (lottery, prayer, psychic predictions, etc.), the magic relies on a simple set of self-deceptions — either confirmation bias or hindsight bias. Both force you to ignore all the times when things didn’t work in your favour and cherry pick the best outcomes to prove the magical truth. These beliefs can be very comforting because they can offer a sense of control in a situation where you had none. But be warned: if you rely on this type of magical thinking to get through life, you’re not really living in reality. Putting too much faith in this kind of magical thinking can actually do more harm than good because you might believe that merely concentrating on a problem can make it go away, when in fact you should be acting to affect the situation in a real way.

It seems that, the only way to make an argument against either side is to throw a straw man arguments at your opponent hoping the opposing side will burst into flames, since both sides refuse to deal with the core arguments of the other. Allow me to illustrate:

Science side: Everything I’ve uncovered shows that we, as a species, are the result of a hugely complex system that evolved over billions of years. And billions of years before that everything was born from a single point of space and energy. A “Big Bang” if you will.

Intelligent Design side: What about all the stuff you haven’t uncovered yet? You can’t prove that the stuff you don’t know didn’t come from God!

Science side: B-but, I didn’t even mention Go…

Intelligent Design side: Let me stop you right there, you are talking about things I have no interest in and therefore reject as being a part of my reality. God created everything, this is what I KNOW!

Science side: How do you know? Can you come up with a single piece of evidence to support this claim? Can you write it down in an equation and predict a real-world outcome, to backup a statement like that? I have no interest in things that can’t be measured, therefore I reject your reality. I don’t yet know what created everything, but I’m going to keep looking.

Intelligent Design side: STOP LOOKING, God exists! I KNOW IT! Be humbled by my knowledge. You can’t measure Love, but it exists, you can’t measure pleasure or pain… or time! The earth is 6,000 years old! And to deny THAT is to pay for, and stamp, a one way ticket to H. E. Double hockey-sticks!

Science side: Why are you yelling at me?  And what’s this business about time? You can’t expect me to belie…

And so on… You get the picture. The arguments are coming from completely separate worlds. People can speak the same language but completely misunderstand each other, because the context of the arguments is so far removed from each side’s experience. One’s life is based on careful observation, record keeping and patience, while the other is based on tradition, obedience and emotion. To both parties, the world they live in is absolutely real, and the other’s is a work of fantasy and delusion. The irony is both sides fear the other is leading our whole species toward certain doom by corrupting the minds of our youth.

Now, I must admit, I do lean toward the science side of the spectrum, but I also remember my days as a born-again christian (seems like a lifetime ago); as much as I hate to admit it, the religion side has a point when viewed from their perspective. Join me there for a moment please, this will all make sense in the end.

Narrator: Meet Joe Christian. He’s an average man, with a good job 2.5 kids and a loving wife. He’s thankful for the level of comfort he enjoys in his life and shows his thanks every Sunday in church with his family. His church community has frequent fund raisers and gives their time and money to charity on a regular basis. Joe’s family and his community is running in a beneficial way for the rest of the people in this world, and as long as he walks the strait and narrow, works hard and only asks questions when necessary, Joe will have a long and happy life.

One day Joe meets Charles at a bus stop. Charles doesn’t go to church, doesn’t have a family and lives very successfully as a scientist at the local chemical plant. Just on a whim Joe strikes up a conversation with Charles by asking him how his walk with the Lord is going. Charles looks back astonished at the friendly yet forward question and answers honestly, by saying “I don’t believe in God, so my walk is going rather smoothly, a little quiet at times but not too bad over all.”

Joe now has mixed feelings, how can Charles say he doesn’t believe in God? To Joe, who never questioned his religiously peppered education or his place in society, and who lived a pretty privileged life, God was responsible for everything he held dear. That’s like saying he doesn’t believe in air, or light. It doesn’t make any rational sense. So, what should he do with this information?

1. He can follow up with Charles and ask him to clarify his statement.
2. He can end the conversation and forget about everything.
3. He can get offended with Charles and try to teach him a thing or two about God, to try to show him a little humility.

No matter what the outcome, the damage is done. Joe’s faith has been shaken with one simple statement from an outsider. Now if Joe starts to investigate further into this matter, he’s going to have way more questions crop up than answers, those questions lead to talk, and then more and more people in his community will be asking questions that the church can’t answer. The church will eventually lose is members, and the members will lose their common bonds and all the good they did in the past will cease. All because, one person asked too many questions.

Thankfully most good creationists aren’t like Joe, in that the fear they have for their immortal souls keeps them from digging too deep into the control mechanisms of the Church, and most of them can go on living somewhat fulfilling lives, never knowing, and never wanting to know a more complex and beautiful world. It’s this fear that keeps them in check, and it’s this fear that makes them respond with anger when challenged.

If a person is going to be receptive to an argument from the side of science, then they will have already dealt with some serious doubt and would be on the fence with their faith already. In a world where faith is seen as a blessing and a strong character trait, there aren’t many who have the courage to make it that far down the rabbit hole of science, without running screaming back into the blissfully ignorant and comforting arms of the church.

For me, looking back, I remember a time when I was certain God was watching over us all, and I took comfort in “knowing” all rhetorical questions had absolute answers. I thought I knew it all. But I see now, that the world is much larger and more intricate than I ever imagined. I finally understand the power of unanswerable questions. Take, for instance, the question “Is there a God?”. The only suitable answer to this question for me now is … stillness. I find a lot of comfort in that reflection.

I think you have to be a certain kind of person, if you’re going to be a scientist. Or a science enthusiast. You need to have a rare and innate curiosity, that most people lack. These precious few are the ones keeping our progress running forward instead of backward. The depths of science shrouds the true intentions of our actions to the people who live very surface lives. This seemingly enigmatic existence scares the hell out of a lot of people and leads to conspiracy and rumor.

What’s the point of debating with group of people who have no intention of listening? I think we need each other; with each debate both sides walk away with a clearer understanding of what they’re fighting for. So, we fight to hone our own skills, but if we intend to win the battle of science vs. ignorance, we need to remember that we aren’t dealing with people who want to learn. Therefore the dance steps need to be different when dealing with these arguments. They attack because they feel you are contradicting everything they believe to be true. You seem like irrational fools when compared to the awesome power of a deity they’ve deluded themselves into seeing everywhere.

I know, nothing irks me more than some some low-brow chuckle-head laughing at my “arrogance” (book smarts), thinking he’s out witted me with a non sequitur God bomb, when in truth he’s only proven his own limitations. It doesn’t make him evil, or crazy. Just limited… held back and misguided, and standing up for what he believes to be right.

A battle of wits is best won in even tones, not loud retorts. It’s not up to us to change their minds or educate them, just plant a single seed of doubt and see if it takes root.