Scepticism is good for you and other lessons from Jesus Christ

We all know that friend who talks all the time about the illuminati, the Aliens, the Government conspiracy,  the chemtrail controlling weather, and the green lizards poisoning our food with evil portions they got from Satan himself. Or maybe it’s your other friend, who tells you none of this is real and we should meditate to wake up from the matrix. Those people refer to themselves as “Sceptics”

But the story of scepticism doesn’t begin here, you have to go back to the ancient Greece, where we have the first documented attempts of philosophical critical thinking, way back to Plato who said “About myself I knew that I know nothing” then with Arcesilaus with the establishment of “Academic scepticism” , followed by the famous school of pyrrhonism that preaches that truth cannot be obtained by senses since they are fooled easily.  Scepticism lays in the core of philosophy and logical thought. So what is scepticism ?

The word itself is from the ancient Greek word “skeptomai”, which means think. The attributed meaning of doubt, uncertainty appears later in history. So by definition, it doesn’t mean denialism, as it’s been used that way and more than it should, as an example, Climate change sceptics, the Holocaust sceptics or maybe 9/11 Sceptic  claim to analyse the concept, while they totally deny the idea. Critical thinking doesn’t work that way, scepticism is actually seeking knowledge trough analyse and justification, a sceptic wouldn’t accept a statement just because “it feels right” or “it gives him comfort”, he would consider all the conditions and circumstances before giving a conclusion, as Bertnard Russel once said  :

“When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts, and what us the truth that facts bears out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts”

By so, he traces the line between, Critical thinking and logical reasoning, what some call good scepticism, and denying the facts and sticking to one and rigid idea and not thinking outside of the box, bad scepticism.

Asking questions is very fundamental to knowledge, science does it all the time, it’s the mechanism of testing theoretical claim by the falsifiability of the scientific method that moves along the development of thought, that’s what got us to this scientifically advanced status, and counting. This position of scientific scepticism works as the motor but also as the immune system of science, preventing any form of pseudoscience to be considered truthful. It also bring a sense of humility to science toward our perception of the world surrounding us, along with philosophy, questions our own thinking, forging through the limits of knowledge and discovering more about ourselves and the universe. Credence is the death of critical and logical thinking. Reptilian minds tend more to be sure about their beliefs, while a scientific mind always questions his thoughts and put his principles into test, as physician and Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman likes to put it

“Some people say, how can you live without knowing? I do not know what they mean, I always live without knowing. That’s easy. How you get to know is what I want to know”

People usually accuse scientists to be arrogant toward the masses, that they believe in science as a modern age dogma, and that’s totally wrong, because the more we know, the more we realise how small and irrelevant in the totality of the universe we are, it humbles us and trims our superiority and egocentrism. That’s what got Kopernik killed, putting in question and ripping from humanity its egoism, and many more with him that put aside fundamentalism and started questioning reality.  

And now, Religion. ( Oh boy ) . Religion is by definition a faith and belief system, it relies on accepting “truth” and not questioning it, at best cases, thinking about it without refuting its principles and staying inside the faith canvas. The banishment of Satan from heaven after questioning the will of god is a great example. But in the other hand you have all this religious figures, prophet, men of god, messengers, that questioned their society’s standers. At this point we go back to the title, what can we learn from the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Well, he’s a mid-eastern Jew who questioned the roman and the rabbi’s authority, preaching that we shouldn’t live in a world of injustice and greed, but a world of compassion and love. He wondered around teaching people the virtue of Scepticism. This might sound to today’s conservatives a very “Liberal” and maybe “destructive” message. So why don’t we follow their lead, questioning is a healthy exercise, even in the daily basis, you don’t have to be a philosophe, a scientist, or an atheist to question everything, early humans questioned the unknown as a defence mechanism, and by then it helped us to be as advanced as we are now. Doubt works and it’s good for you, embrace it and love it as you love reasonable thinking and logical thought. By this I say be sceptic and enjoy your journey through space and time.

 Disorder and the perception of order

We look up to the sky to  watch the biggest stars and look into a microscope to see the smallest organisms so we could find the meaning about the world surrounding us, thus finding the meaning about ourselves, assuming the universe is communicating itself through meaning and order, through languages rigidly and firmly structured, mathematics as an example, the language of the universe as they say,   is based on order and logic, otherwise it wouldn’t have any perceivable meaning, those languages are there to project reality, so if language is order and language is the projection of reality, is reality a manifestation of  order, or it’s just the way we perceive it ? of course, if you see the complexity of life on earth, the vastness of the universe, the way stars and planets and black holes they are, you know there is a meaning in the universe, isn’t it ? 

Well to begin with, are meaning and order true to the entity of everything or they are just a production of the human mind? Order is a state of logical and comprehensible arrangement among separate elements, so by definition order is our perception of  the outside world in the situation of logical interpretation , but that doesn’t deny that our environment is in disorder, right ? Well, to explain more, let’s imagine you’re sitting in an old Moroccan house, with a beautiful arabesque in front of you, just like the one above, you watch this ornament and you admire it because it represent symmetry, aesthetic shapes and your vision of beauty and perfection, it creates an impression of satisfaction because it represents order, it follows a certain logic and path, and that way a pattern forms in your mind between this arabesque and beauty trough the median of order. Now imagine with me another ornament that doesn’t follow any path or logics and has no recognizable shape, when you look at it, it repels you, maybe you’d call it modern art, but like the rest of the sane population of this blue planet, you’ll turn your head away in non-understanding  and you’ll enjoy the rest of your mint tea. That’s why realistic painting appeal more people than abstract, because the first is logic abiding, while the other represents rebellion expression from that same logic. By this example I want to explain that the human mind tends more to recognize order than disorder, and finds it easy to make patterns if it finds dots to connect, and through this modality we comprehend, we constitute a certain knowledge that could be useful, that’s how our ancestors got to survive and prosper. So does this perception of order exists outside our consciousness ?

To try to find an answer to this question, we need to comprehend disorder first. Our reality is a series of conditions that gather to form our perception. As an example, if it’s round, smooth, red and sweet , it’s an apple, so those conditions by themselves don’t make up a reality but by combining they do, and to understand our reality we make paths between those conditions through our senses and ability to analyse, sometime it’s easy if they are stable and controllable, it’s easy to predict  that an apple will fall down to the ground wherever you go on earth , because the condition ( gravity ) that influence this process is unchangeable. But sometimes it isn’t that easy, just ask a meteorologist. To know what will be the weather tonight, you need to know the conduct of every molecule of air on the planet to the scale of millimetres, which is very difficult, and all we can do about it is just projections, plus, if we count the enormous difference a negligible factor can make we fall in a situation we cannot calculate its outcome, this situation gives us an image of anarchist reality. Although, it’s not impossible if we knew every contributing factor in this process, but it’s very difficult. So this state of “disorder” is the result of our lack of knowledge of the conditions that affect our environment and ourselves, and the human personality had this urge to control its surrounding, because we know that if in a state of blindness toward our world, it means weakness in our capability, thus a treat to our survival and wellbeing. Our primitive selves made high designers and ultimate creators beyond our understanding and over the lack of control to fill in the blank and fulfil our need to safety and “order”, but lately science taught us that what is unknown and uncontrollable is not to be feared, but to be studied and understood, not to give premature, mythical and comforting answers to provide some psychological stability, but to challenge this state of disorder and look through ignorance and construct provable and logical explanations, it taught us that the chaos is “natural” and it’s a part of  or maybe our entire reality, and if we need to comprehend the world, we need to embrace the disorder and work within it, to move a little step further to understand it and make it less confusing. So is the universe in disorder?

Well, if the universe had a self-awareness, which we can discuss in a later article, it wouldn’t see chaos as one of its enemies, in fact, and as thermodynamic teaches us, in an isolated system entropy tends to increase, and entropy is the fancy name for chaos or disorder, if it wouldn’t for entropy no reaction would ever take place, energy wouldn’t move around, there wouldn’t be no stars or planets, no life either, chemical reaction wouldn’t happen and I wouldn’t be writing this article, so disorder  is “good” because it’s the motor of everything, it’s what makes energy flow and metamorphose. To try to sum up this out of order thoughts of mine, we must see order in our surrounding,  otherwise we won’t understand or make senses of anything, but we must also understand that disorder is everywhere and it doesn’t hold the pejorative meaning we often give it . So embrace the disorder and enjoy your order while it lasts, because the universe is running and so is time,  and by that time, have a great philosophical journey.