Scientific Integrity, Self-Honesty, and Belief

If there is one thing that people have chided me about (well, at least people who know me in real life) is how uncertain and equivocal I can be, especially with answering questions. "I guess", "I think", "probably", "maybe", "possibly", "hopefully", "I suppose so", "I don't know", etc. It used to bug the hell of out my dad (it might still).

"Why can't you ever give me a definite answer?" He would ask. "Can't you just simply say 'yes' or 'no'?" To which I would often just shrug my shoulders and say "I don't know", which would only bug him even more.

I did know why though. I tried to explain it once to him, but I don't think I did a very good job (I believe I was only in middle school at the time), because he just dismissed it almost immediately. "That's nonsense, Mikael" he said (or something equivalent to that), "no one is going to be interested in such technicalities. People are only going to want hear definite confirmations and definite results! You can't be so wishy-washy about it." I think I said something like "I see", and then proceeded not to really follow his advice.

I mean, I did listen and follow it somewhat. I now try to keep in mind how my responses might come off to others, and so I put a more enthusiastic emphasis on it, but I never really changed the certainty of it, like, for example, saying "I'll try my best".

You see, if there is one thing that has been instilled in me successfully by my parents and my teachers it is being honest. Yes, being honest to others was nice and good for society and all that, but it was most important, above all else, to be honest with yourself. In a way, self-honesty is the most important virtue of all. If you aren't honest with yourself, how can you be honest with others? And without self-honesty, you also cannot have good thinking, which, I hope most people realize, is important for a wide variety of things and just getting through life in general.

So, when I answer, I'm just being very honest about the fact that there is hardly any, if any at all, 100% certainties in life. For all I know, I could die in the middle of the night, or a huge storm might come along and hugely void any sort of otherwise planned activities for the immediate future. There is very little certain in life, so I could never bring myself to say that I would definitely be able to 100% be able to do X by time Y. There is the possibility, a very small possibility no doubt but a possibility nonetheless, that a meteorite would strike the Earth and end life as we know it. Thus, it would make it rather difficult to have completed my task by that specific time, to say at the least.

Now, you might think I'm a paranoid schizoid but I don't think I am. I honestly don't really always think about something that might come along and kill me at any given moment, it slips my mind most of the time. But, the point is, when it does come to mind, I acknowledge it. I don't make any delusions about myself like "I can't die unless I've done X or found Y", or especially things like "I'm fated to do such and such". It would be nice if I didn't die before I accomplished certain things, but I can't realistically expect death to hold itself back on my account. That's another thing about being self-honest: you aren't entitled to achieve or perform something.

The biggest most important aspect about self-honesty though, and the one that most people have the hardest time with, is the ability to truly realize and accept the possibility you can be dead wrong about everything. There are varying degrees to how probable it is you might be wrong about any given thing, of course. For example, the chances of being wrong about oxygen being necessary for aerobic respiration or that hydrogen has only 1 proton are hugely and vanishingly tiny, as in comparison to the thought that you for sure left your shoes in the closet this morning.

Be sure also not to take it too far in the other direction, though, that the admittance of possibility that it is wrong doesn't mean that it is wrong. Ideas that have evidence for them being true, while they can never be proved to be 100% correct, it would be highly dishonest to think of them as wrong, especially if you have no solid evidence that says otherwise.

There is this thing called "confirmation bias". It's a well documented psychological occurrence in which people tend to pick out and remember data or events that help prove or coincides with already held beliefs, and forget or overlook data/events that goes against those beliefs. Part of being self-honest is to being aware of this, and constantly being on guard against it. For one should always be searching for the truth, not just what will enable one to look best or win an argument. For when armed with the truth, people and society can benefit much more than off a biased delusion or lie.

Seems straight forward enough, doesn't it? Now, what was the point of all that?

I recently have read a lecture by the esteemed physicist Richard Feynman. In it, he laments over what he calls the "cargo cult" science that seems to run rampant. He cries out for standing against training and educating people to look only for particular results, results that will simply get them money, fame, votes, etc. Instead, he wants people to practice what he calls "scientific integrity", to go fight against all this bad science being done.

What is scientific integrity? Well, funnily enough, I've already essentially told you what it is. It's simply being honest. It's the attempt to be objective, and to allow as little bias as humanly possible. It's the refusal to show only the results that support your beliefs/argument and hide the ones that don't. It's the placing of truth above personal beliefs and wants. Don't start out with a preset idea of what you want to find or think you should find, and then work only to achieve results that fulfill that. Be open to any result you may find, and be prepared to find a truth that is different from one you thought existed.

One of the examples Feynman talks about is hearing about how he heard the Director of the Institute of Parapsychology telling people to only train students who already get results at proving people have telepathic/psychic abilities, and not to waste time training other students who only get what they called "chance results", a.k.a. results that showed people did not have an inherent telepathic or psychic ability. That is not science, only culling and leading people to produce the results you want. That is not helping anyone find out the truth.

Some of you may be thinking something along the lines of "why does this matter? This is something for scientists to worry about, not me. I'm not trying to do scientific studies or research." It's also possible that absolutely none of you are thinking that and I'm just a presumptuous ass, and if that's the case, please indulge me so that I may make a point here.

Science is every where, and affects everyone. It's not a field only limited to those people who call themselves scientists, slaving over complicated mathematical formulas, or meticulously operating complex machines to ascertain the character of certain small bits of matter. No, not at all. Everyone and anyone can do science. You know why? At the very base of it, science is just a process, a mindset for solving problems or understanding something. You formulate an idea of what you think is happening or why something is happening, then you perform some way to test that idea, see what the results are, and see if that either validates or invalidates your original idea. It's as simple as that, though, in execution, it can turn out to be quite complex for certain ideas or problems.

The scientific method has applicability to just about every field and every question, from whether it's as something as mundane as "why does my computer not work?", to the silly ("I wonder if there's a way to make an egg survive a 10 story drop"), or to the more abstract and theoretical such as "do black holes store information?". Almost all fields of knowledge has been formed and refined thanks to the scientific thinking, even whether the people realized they were doing it or not. So, while the average person may not get a research article printed by a peer-reviewed publisher, or win a Nobel prize, science is regularly performed by everyone on some level. It's broad applicability and role in pretty much every aspect of human life means that having scientific integrity is very important quality to have and strive for.

Now to get the crux of this post. It's because of my dedication to scientific integrity and truth, and seeing how important it is, that I have not been able to accept a religious view of life.

I was brought to churches by my parents from a fairly early age, and I was always uncomfortable with being at them and talking with people there about religion. Something about them just did not sit well with me, but, being young and my faculties not yet at the level they are now, I never really could tell why. I just always assumed it was because it bored me, or that I would've rather been spending the time playing with friends or doing something more exciting. But those were not really reasons why I wasn't comfortable with it, they were just my reactions to it growing from that original source of discomfort.

It was not until years later that I understood why I was never really comfortable with religion, why I could never make myself believe in it, and why I always felt so awkward whenever my parents tried to have religious conversations with me. As I was growing up, I was, I think, a very curious and honest kid (as honest as a kid could be, granted, which might not seem all that honest to people). I loved questioning things, and finding things out. Unfortunately, this sometimes was taken as me questioning people's authority at times, which sometimes led me to trouble. In the end, however, I loved figuring out the "why"s and "why not"s of things, which, most importantly, always involved the questions of "well, what if you're/it's wrong?" and "how do we know that you're/it's right?".

I realized that while at school, such lines of inquiry were encouraged and often resulted in me learning something interesting or new, at church, it was quite the opposite. Such questions were discouraged and if I did ask them, would often receive unsatisfactory answers. "Why is it this way?" "Because God/the Bible/Jesus said so." I always hated that answer, especially as a kid. I never liked it when my parents would answer a question with "because I said so", and I didn't like it anymore when someone else used it.

I knew even as a kid that "because I said so" was not a good reason for doing anything, in fact, it's not even a reason at all! Why? Because these very people would teach that to me themselves. It was often in the situation of "don't listen to strangers" lessons that they give to young kids, and I always was like "why should I not accept that answer from certain people, but should from others? I should just not accept it from anyone!". I learned that I had to have a good reason to believe or act upon something somebody else was telling me, and I wasn't going to relax it for anyone, much to my parents later frustration.

Anyway, I began to realize these people thought such lines of inquiry were bad, because that's what the Bible itself said. To doubt and ask the question "am I possibly wrong about this?" was considered a bad thing. They were assuming very huge assumptions, that there was this super-powerful guy named god, who made everything, who sent his very own son (how did he have a son? It was never made very clear to me) to Earth, and that there was a place called heaven and a place called hell. One you went to if you believed in the Bible and this Jesus guy and followed certain instructions, and you went to the other place if you didn't.

I've always been taught to wary of the fallibility of assumptions, particularly ones that don't have any easily accessible evidence for them, but these people didn't even try to realize that these were simply assumptions. They acted as if they were true, and they were setting themselves up in a belief system that wouldn't allow them to question the validity of these assumptions. They were deceiving themselves. They weren't being honest with their line of reasoning.

I think this is what I detected even at an early age, even though I couldn't realize it exactly until I was much older. It was encapsulated in the quandary that I had thought up when I was little. Why is it Sunday is such an especially reserved day for going to church? I had learned in school that day and night were caused by the Earth's rotation, thus, the idea of there being seven "days" to the week was just an arbitrary creation of keeping track of time. It could've easily been week of eight days (which would've been awesome, I had though as a kid, because then we would always have three day weekends), or six, or ten, or two. The distinction that a random, arbitrary day of a random, arbitrary time frame was "holy" puzzled me as a kid, but these people whole-heartedly believed that this day really was a special day to commemorate to some big invisible thing in the sky.

It's just crazy to me. A belief system where it's a bad thing that admit that you might be wrong? Being open to the idea that you might be wrong was always the first step I was taught to being empathetic, being modest, and being a good thinker. Yet, religions seem to actively call for their followers to purposefully lie to and deceive themselves. It's astounding to me, and, as events in history have shown, positively dangerous and alarming.

I've rambled on long enough. I hope I've managed to say something of worth amidst all this text. I hope, just like Feynman hoped, that you, dear reader, have the freedom and ability to be honest with yourself. It would be a disservice to your own intelligence and ability if you weren't.