Organized skepticism has a reputation for attracting physicists and psychologists. To test that notion, I grabbed the March/April 2021 Skeptical Inquirer and looked at the affiliations of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) Fellows and its Scientific and Technical Consultants listed on the inside covers. According to my count, about 20 percent of the total have backgrounds in physics and astronomy, while psychologists came in second at 16 percent. All other disciplines were well behind. In particular, I saw only a couple of notable skeptics who were historians, specifically historians of science. Similarly, only a handful of sociologists or political scientists who study antiscience movements appear to have been recognized by CSI.

Some of this is no doubt due to the natural interests of various experts. I teach physics, and I find it easy to point out the scientific errors associated with claims of psychic powers, free energy, or alien encounters. Few but the physics majors will remember all the math I throw at them, but my students don’t forget the times I ask them to pull out their phones and search for “Quantum University,” warning them about the quantum bullshit attached to the sales pitches for many alternative medical practices. I first got seriously interested in fake science and the paranormal as examples of getting the physics very wrong.

I can also see why many psychologists like to criticize the weirdness that makes up the usual targets of skepticism. I teach an interdisciplinary seminar course called “Weird Science” that prompts students from all over campus to explore the nature of science through examining paranormal and fake scientific claims. I always have a couple of psychology majors in my class, and they usually seem well acquainted with the cognitive biases that feed weird beliefs. Physicists like to explain why an alleged phenomenon, such as clairvoyance, does not fit our current understanding of how the world works. Psychologists can show how psychic powers fail experimental tests. Moreover, psychologists push our understanding further, telling us why psychic beliefs are nonetheless compelling to so many people.

Our standard practice of skepticism, therefore, draws heavily on natural science and psychology, with a touch of mid-twentieth-century philosophy of science mixed in. Physicists, biologists, and chemists explain why a particular item of weirdness—quantum mysticism, Bigfoot, homeopathy—seems dubious. Psychologists test human capabilities and describe the cognitive quirks that make all of us susceptible to weird beliefs. And most skeptics round up their standard approach with a trusty list of informal fallacies (Boudry 2017), together with a checklist of properties of fake science, such as unfalsifiability and so forth. Science, we are liable to say, is defined by the scientific method. The trouble starts when purveyors of weirdness don’t follow the scientific method.

All that might seem to be a lot of background work just to nail psychic hotlines and lake monsters. But in a time when conspiracy theories are eating politics alive and antiscience movements embracing climate change denial are inviting the collapse of civilization, separating real from fake knowledge is no small detail. We hope that our standard skeptical approach, honed on nuisances such as astrology and energy healing, prepares us to deal with far more consequential forms of weirdness.

Method? What Method?

However, the standard skeptical approach has a few shortcomings. Our philosophy of science, for example, is badly outdated. Many skeptics today still invoke a preset scientific method, a foundational logic of science, and criteria such as falsifiability that cleanly separate real science from pretenders. None of these ideas has aged well. There are plenty of philosophers, historians, and sociologists who study how science works. They don’t make armchair pronouncements about science but carefully study the details of actual episodes of scientific change. And such scholars in science studies are likely to say that there is no special method that defines science. Instead, we have many overlapping methods that help us build up knowledge in different domains. If we think of the scientific method as something prior to poking and prodding and explaining—as a collection of transcendent rules that underwrite knowledge and home in on the best explanations—that is a mistake. Methods have to do with better and worse ways of learning about the world: whether any method works is itself a fact about the world (Edis 2018a). In science, as in most aspects of life, we constantly make it up as we go along.

Our lists of cognitive biases and reasoning errors are useful enough, but we can be tempted to overextend them. Some kinds of weirdness—belief in spirits and ghosts, for example—are rooted in common features of human minds (Turner et al. 2017). Even in highly technological, secular societies, we should expect plenty of disorganized, low-level belief in ghosts and psychic powers. We can guard against the cognitive biases that prompt belief in ghosts and maybe keep such biases out of our more scholarly forms of knowledge, but that is perhaps the best we can do.

Other kinds of weirdness, such as creationism, are different. While creationism takes advantage of cognitive biases favoring perceptions of design and purpose (Kelemen 2012), the elaborate fake sciences of “scientific” creationism and intelligent design are impossible to understand outside the context of highly organized monotheistic religion and reactions against secularizing trends. Creationism has more social and historical depth than those ghost beliefs that bubble up from cognitive biases.

Confronting Creationism

The species of weirdness that have fascinated me most have been intelligent design and the Islamic varieties of creationism. I started by chasing down creationist mistakes in physics and biology. After all, identifying how explanations go wrong can be very useful when figuring out how the world actually works. However, looking for a fuller understanding of creationism led me beyond scientific mistakes and cognitive biases. Why, for example, do we see movements that coalesce around elaborate fake sciences? Deeply religious communities do not have to adopt creationism. Instead, they can passively reject evolution and ignore scientific challenges to traditional beliefs. But sometimes, in some places, religious intellectuals have not only proposed an alternative to mainstream science, such an apologetic approach has caught fire. Denying evolution has become important, and creationism has achieved mass popularity. Religious intellectuals have founded institutions that develop and build on creationist ideas. Such examples of fake science, to me, are more interesting and more consequential than bands of amateur ghost hunters misusing lab instruments. Figuring out exactly how creationists fail to describe the world should tell us a lot about the nature of real science as well.

Studying creationism soon leads to the complex histories of reactions to evolution around the globe (see, for example, Brown 2020) and how creationism takes shape as part of right-wing populist movements. Knowing the science helps us see how creationists go wrong. The standard skeptical checklists sometimes help us understand how creationists appeal to their constituencies in conservative religious populations. But lists of cognitive biases and reasoning errors are not very useful for anyone who is trying to figure out the historical and social contexts that mark varieties of creationism.

Creationism does not proceed out of individual cognitive errors; it is organized and promoted by institutions. These start with apologetics factories such as Answers in Genesis or the Discovery Institute but also include conservative religious and media networks. Creationists then try to bypass or transform mainstream scientific institutions such as university science departments. In some conditions, as in Islamist-governed Turkey, they can enjoy considerable success (Edis 2021). If we think that varieties of creationism are not really scientific, this is not because creationism fails to satisfy an outdated checklist of features such as falsifiability. The main creationist claims misrepresent physics or biology and are straightforwardly false. Creationism is not science, because creationist institutions are not structured to successfully learn about the world (Edis 2018b).

Creationists work toward producing an alternative intellectual culture in which claims that appear crazy to mainstream scientists instead seem plausible. Some of this work involves exploiting cognitive biases and common reasoning errors for apologetic purposes. But there is more to the story. In social settings, beliefs have costs: we need to devote resources to acquiring beliefs about the world, and we also incur costs associated with possessing and acting upon our beliefs. In political environments where signaling group loyalty is important, such costs make some false beliefs instrumentally rational. In such cases, even slow-moving, rational belief-forming mechanisms can be recruited to favor false beliefs (Edis and Boudry 2019). Skeptical checklists emphasizing individual reasoning errors are of limited help in such circumstances.

If we want to apply skepticism beyond ghosts and Bigfoot, tackling the civilization-threatening antiscience movements of today, we need to learn more from examples such as creationism. The most consequential forms of science denial are organized, social, and political; they demand that we pay attention to institutions, not just flaws in individual cognition.

Socially Constructing Skepticism

Because skeptics emphasize natural science and psychology, we are not as used to more historical and social ways of thinking. We don’t like politics, preferring a “just the facts, ma’am” style of expertise. Organized skepticism, moreover, has a strong element of advocacy for science, which attracts us toward a heroic image of science identified with human progress (see, for example, Pinker 2018). However, if we shift our focus to institutions, we soon find that analyses of institutions can also be applied to science and skepticism. This means criticism as well as celebration, and skeptics are not guaranteed to be happy with the results.

One reason to be wary is skeptics’ recent history with philosophies of science that emphasize how knowledge is socially constructed. Prominent scientists and skeptics still point to episodes from the “Science Wars” of decades ago to illustrate how postmodern critiques of science go off the deep end (Dawkins 2021).

That is unfortunate. In today’s science studies, it has become a commonplace that science is a social construction—for good reason. But the fact that we construct knowledge through social mechanisms does not mean that science is unreliable, arbitrary, or divorced from reality checks in the lab. Social construction does not imply that science is a fairy tale any more than neuroscientists telling us that our reasoning is due to our neurons firing implies that all our thoughts are fantasies. It just means that we have to treat science and reason as earthly phenomena rather than transcendent ideals. Science studies casts doubt on skeptics’ myths such as a preset, universal scientific method. But that doubt arises from detailed investigation of scientific institutions, often aiming to explain the undeniable progress science has made. At least one CSI fellow, science historian Naomi Oreskes, adopts the more complex perspective of science studies to argue that that scientific expertise fully deserves public trust (Oreskes 2019).

I am convinced that the messier, less heroic picture of science that emerges from studying institutions is also more accurate. If we want accuracy, making better contact with complicated material realities is a good thing.

Still, bringing reason down to earth also raises some awkward questions. If we can identify institutional pathologies in creationism, we can also wonder about shortcomings in our own universities and research institutes. Any working scientist who has had reason to complain about university administrations, funding agencies, or the peer review process knows that institutions matter and that they are never perfect. But then, if we learn something about the institutional features that promote paranormal and fake scientific beliefs, we can use this knowledge to help improve how we do real science. For those of us who care about accuracy, this also has to be a good thing.

Skeptics also promote the public communication of science. Attending to the historical and social context of knowledge production is especially important if we want to communicate correctly. We often adopt a model where we skeptics represent scientific expertise and act to correct those who are misled by cognitive biases and faulty reasoning. But examples such as creationism—where fake science is woven into right-wing populist movements that come to distrust politically inconvenient forms of expertise—also expose the limits of such a model. Slogans such as “trust the science” do not just express a politically neutral recognition of reality but are too often joined with a technocratic politics that promotes the interests of a credentialed professional class over competing groups—and the professionals are not unified. The interests of scientists and skeptics are not always the same as those of economists, management consultants, or tech oligarchs. Our desire for accurate knowledge is not well-served by populist politics centered on loyalty to ethnicity or religion. But then, our scientific interests can also conflict with factions of professionals who would turn science into a mill for intellectual property production and mere infrastructure for business and technology (Edis 2020).

The advancement of our sciences has always been accompanied by institutional changes. Often these are responses to external pressures such as the demands of funding sources. But we can also be more reflective, asking how to do science even better in changing circumstances.

Historians and Social Scientists

A more accurate understanding of science requires moving beyond our diagnostic checklists and our heroic image of science. Figuring out the persistence of fake science requires that we pay more attention to institutions. All this demands that skeptics make better use of historical and social perspectives, going beyond physics and psychology.

I certainly would enjoy running into more historians and social scientists in skeptical circles. My involvement with skepticism has roots in the same kinds of curiosity that led me to physics. But what has kept me fascinated for decades now is the way I have encountered not just psychologists and other academics but also magicians, media critics, and consumer advocates. When I teach my students some esoteric detail about quantum mechanics, I always worry that I am spending time on matters that only a few aspiring specialists would care about. But when I bring in skepticism about paranormal and fake scientific claims, I make a connection to deeper questions about the nature of knowledge and reality. Almost anyone could find something to care about, even something to contribute. When I teach my Weird Science class, I always learn from students who do not instinctively defer to scientists. Doing an even better job with skepticism requires, I think, that we should further broaden our perspective and learn more from historians and social scientists.

With any luck, if we manage not to destroy civilization, perhaps in a decade or two, a count of CSI Fellows and Consultants will reveal a slightly smaller proportion of physicists and psychologists and a larger number of historians and social scientists. That, I think, would be progress.

References

Boudry, Maarten. 2017. The fallacy fork: Why it’s time to get rid of fallacy theory. Skeptical Inquirer 41(5): 46–51.

Brown, C. Mackenzie, ed. 2020. Asian Religious Responses to Darwinism: Evolutionary Theories in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian Cultural Contexts. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Springer Nature.

Dawkins, Richard. 2021. Science: The gold standard of truth. Skeptical Inquirer 45(2): 38–40.

Edis, Taner. 2018a. Two cheers for scientism. In Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci, eds., Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2018b. From creationism to economics: How far should analyses of pseudoscience extend? Mètode Science Studies Journal 8: 141–147.

———. 2020. A revolt against expertise: Pseudoscience, right-wing populism, and post-truth politics. Disputatio Philosophical Research Bulletin 9: 13.

———. 2021. The Turkish model of Islamic creationism. Almagest 12: 40–65.

Edis, Taner, and Maarten Boudry. 2019. Truth and consequences: When is it rational to accept falsehoods? Journal of Cognition and Culture 19: 153–175.

Kelemen, Deborah. 2012. Teleological minds: How natural intuitions about agency and purpose influence learning about evolution. In Karl S. Rosengren, Sarah K. Brem, E. Margaret Evans, et al., eds. Evolution Challenges: Integrating Research and Practice in Teaching and Learning about Evolution. Oxford, United Kingsom: Oxford University Press.

Oreskes, Naomi. 2019. Why Trust Science? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2018. Progressophobia: Why things are better than you think they are. Skeptical Inquirer 42(3): 26–35.

Turner, Jonathan H., Alexandra Maryanski, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, et al., eds. 2017. The Emergence and Evolution of Religion: By Means of Natural Selection. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.