Most of us are wrong about things we firmly believe
It seems natural to assume that we believe something because it is true. But we come by our beliefs in many different ways, from our parents, our teachers, our peers, and from individuals and groups accepted as authorities in our society.
The evidence is incontrovertible and quite obvious that most of us must be wrong in some of our most firmly held beliefs: Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others cannot all be right about what God tells us. Nor can those religious believers and also atheists, agnostics, pagans, and others be right about whether God exists.
Tolerance for others’ differing beliefs would therefore seem to be essential if large groups of people are to live together peacefully.
There is no reason to suspect that it is only about religious matters that we can be wrong while firmly believing to be right.
So we may unwittingly be wrong when we are sure that we are right even about matters on which we happen to be highly expert and where we think that our conclusions are solidly based on objective evidence — as is customary in science whenever one is in tune with the current “mainstream consensus”.
But the history of science tells a quite unambiguous story: Our conclusions, our theories, our beliefs are typically at first wrong, to some degree or other, in fact quite often totally wrong [1].
Nevertheless, scientific communities come to hold certain things as paradigmatic or axiomatic, some of them unchangingly so over time — but also, at any time, whatever the contemporary mainstream consensus is; and these consensuses exert so powerful an influence that they determine what lines of research receive support and which do not, and what results and evidence are published and what gets ignored or suppressed [2].
If a mainstream consensus is flawed, most usually some people will be aware of those flaws; but their attempts to influence the mainstream are typically ignored or resisted. It is not difficult to find instances of such conditions if one searches for examples of controversial topics, unorthodox claims, scientific anomalies [2, 3].
If one happens to be seriously interested in whether a mainstream consensus should be believed or whether dissenting claims seem more believable, one needs either to choose which authority or expert to believe, or to attempt to wade through all the evidence oneself.
Neither of those choices is ideal or, very often, even feasible, and that is why I favor [4] the establishment of a “Science Court” in which the mainstream position would be forced to engage publicly and substantively with dissenters.
Since my own professional academic specialty was the study of scientific controversies, I had the means and the time to wade through accumulated evidence, albeit on just a few topics.
The possibility that Loch Ness monsters are real animals had interested me since the 1960s, so my collecting and sifting and analyzing of evidence on that topic has continued for more than half a century, and it had been more than a decade before I had reached a firm conclusion.
I studied the controversy over whether HIV causes AIDS for well over a decade before reaching a firm conclusion over that.
In both those matters I believe the mainstream to be wrong: Loch Ness Monsters are real, and HIV does not cause AIDS.
I believe the mainstream consensus is also wrong on a number of other matters, notably over cholesterol and arteriovascular disease and over the role of greenhouse gases in climate change; but on those two latter topics, I had to rely more on judging which experts are believable than solely on my own evaluation of the evidence. So my personal experience leads me to think that it is unlikely that anyone would have the time, means, and background technical understanding to evaluate personally the evidence on more than a small number of such subjects; hence once again the desirability of, the sheer need for something like a Science Court in this modern world where collective as well as individual actions are increasingly influenced by authoritative claims of scientific knowledge.
Since anyone can be wrong about something even as they firmly believe they are right, it follows that I myself may be wrong about something I firmly believe. Is there any possible way for me to get any sense of the matters on which my beliefs might be mistaken?
One way to test whether one’s beliefs are based in actual reality might be to speculate about what evidence or what happenings might cause one to modify or abandon a particular belief.
So I have asked myself: What would it take for me to change my belief that Loch Ness Monsters are real animals?
First of all, I would need to discover an explanation for the Dinsdale film other than that it shows the hump of some living thing moving around at considerable speed, submerging and then reappearing. I would also want a convincing explanation for the innumerable sonar contacts made over several decades by a variety of individuals using a variety of a different instruments. I might then be less skeptical of the outlandish explanations offered by debunkers to explain away the underwater photographs.
As to HIV and AIDS: to believe that HIV is a transmissible virus, I would need to see electron micrographs of HIV virions — particles of whole virus — in samples taken directly from someone diagnosed with AIDS or as “HIV positive“. No such evidence exists at the present time. On the other hand, there are many different kinds of evidence that “HIV” is not an infectious agent [5].
As to the role of greenhouse gases in global warming and climate change, I will continue to rely on Steve Koonin’s Unsettled [6] until someone discovers errors in that book.
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[1] Bernard Barber, “Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery”, Science 134 (1961) 596-602; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed., enlarged; 1st ed. was 1962)
[2] Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012
[3] Journal of Scientific Exploration, https://www.scientificexploration.org/journal; Zeitschrift für Anomalistik /Journal of Anomalistics, https://www.anomalistik.de/zeitschrift
[4] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017; chapter 12
[5] Henry H. Bauer, “The case against HIV”, http://thecaseagainsthiv.net; The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007
[6] Steven Koonin, Unsettled What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, BenBella Books, 2021