who want to promote their radical ideas are prone to exaggeration and famous for making amazing pronouncements such as “a milestone in human history” or “the greatest discovery since Copernicus” or “a revolution in human thinking.” Our baloney-detection alarms should go off automatically when we hear politicians or actors hyping policies or movies that turn out to be much less than claimed. The alarms should also scream when we hear people making claims about human knowledge or science that seem overblown.
Another strategy for making a wild idea acceptable to the mainstream is to cloak it in the language of science. This cashes in on the goodwill and credibility that science has in our culture and attempts to make such outrageous ideas more believable. For example, when the creationists realized that they could not pass off their religious beliefs in public school classrooms as science, they began calling themselves “creation-scientists” and eliminating overt references to God in their public school textbooks (but the religious motivation and source of the ideas is still transparently obvious). Several religions (including Christian Science and Scientology) appropriate the aura of scientific authority by using the word in their name, even though the religions are not falsifiable and do not fit the criteria of science as discussed here.
Similarly, the snake oils and nostrums peddled by telemarketers and by New Age alternative-medicine advocates are often described in what appears to be scientific lingo, but when you examine it closely, the makers of the products do not actually follow scientific protocols or the scientific method. We all know examples of television commercials that show an actor in a white lab coat, often with a stethoscope around his or her neck, saying, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” and then promoting a product. The “doctor” has no medical training, but just the appearance of scientific and medical authority is sufficient to sway people to buy the product.
6. Special Pleading, Moving the Goalposts, and Ad Hoc Hypotheses
In science, when an observation comes up that appears to falsify your hypothesis, it is a good idea to examine the observation closely or to run the experiment again to be sure that it is real. But if the contradictory data are sound, then the original hypothesis is falsified, dead, kaput. It is time to throw it out and come up with a new, possibly better, hypothesis.
In the case of many nonscientific belief systems, from religions to mysticism to Marxism, it does not work this way. Belief systems often have a profound emotional and mystical attachment for people who hold these beliefs in spite of contradictory observations and refuse to let rationality or the facts shake them. As Tertullian put it, “I believe because it is incredible.”12 St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, wrote, “To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see is black, if the Church so decides it.”13 That’s fine if you are willing to accept that system and suspend disbelief in favor of emotional and mystical connections.
If you pass off your belief system as science, however, you must play by the rules of science. When con artists try to sell you snake oil and someone points out an inconvenient fact about it, they will try to attack this fact or to explain it away with an after-the-fact or ad hoc (Latin for “for this purpose”) explanation. If the snake oil fails to work, they might say, “You didn’t use it right” or “It doesn’t work on days when the moon is full.” If the séance fails to contact the dead, the medium might scold the skeptic by saying, “You didn’t believe in it sufficiently” or “The room wasn’t dark enough” or “The spirits just don’t feel like talking today.” If we point out that there are millions of species on earth that could not have fit into the biblical Noah’s ark, the creationist tries to salvage their hypothesis by saying, “Only the created kinds were on board” or “Insects and fish don’t count” or “God miraculously crammed all these animals into this tiny space, where they lived in harmony for forty days and forty nights” or some similar dodge. Similarly, if you show a claim to be false, the believer may move the goalpost by changing how a falsification of their ideas would be determined.
As we shall see in the chapters that follow, ad hoc hypotheses are common when the conclusion is already accepted and the believer must find any explanation to wiggle out of inconvenient contradictory facts. But they are not acceptable in science. If the conclusion is a given and cannot be rejected or falsified, then it is no longer scientific.
7. Not All “Persecuted Geniuses” Are Right
People trying to promote wild ideas that seem crazy to us will often point to the persecution of Galileo (arrested and tried for advocating Copernican astronomy) or Alfred Wegener (ridiculed for his ideas about continental drift) and will take solace in how these geniuses were eventually proven right. But as Carl Sagan put it, “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”14 The annals of science are full of wild and crackpot notions that didn’t survive testing and were eventually abandoned, and these ideas far outnumber the handful of misunderstood geniuses who were vindicated in the end.
These “misunderstood geniuses” often turn to Schopenhauer, who wrote, “All truths pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”15 But Schopenhauer was wrong. Many revolutionary and radical ideas (such as Einstein’s theory of relativity) were never ridiculed or violently opposed. In the case of Einstein, his theories were mostly ignored as interesting but untestable until scientific observations made in 1919 corroborated them.
Science is open to all sorts of ideas, from the conventional to the wacky. It doesn’t matter where the ideas come from, but they all have to pass muster. If your ideology has failed the test of science, you can’t just claim you’re a misunderstood genius; it is more likely that your cherished hypothesis is just plain wrong. Scientists are too busy, and there are too many worthwhile and important scientific goals for them to pursue, for them to waste their time testing and evaluating every wild scheme that comes along. People might wail that they are persecuted and misunderstood geniuses. But if you want to be taken seriously, you must play by the rules of science: get to know other scientists, exchange ideas, be willing to change your own ideas, present your results in scientific conferences, and submit them to the scrutiny of peer-reviewed journals and books. If your ideas can survive this rigorous gauntlet, then they will get the attention they deserve from scientists.
The Skeptic Society in Pasadena, California (I am a member of their editorial board) gets hundreds of letters each year by lone “geniuses” who claim to have made some great discovery, or debunked Einsteinian relativity or quantum physics, or discovered a working perpetual-motion machine or cold fusion or something equally startling. They demand that Skeptic magazine publish their “revolutionary” ideas. Most of the ideas are laughably bad and the people clearly crackpots, but every once in a while a somewhat legitimate-sounding idea will emerge, and I am often consulted to see whether it holds muster. But the real test of whether the idea is worthy is peer review. Find a legitimate place to publish your idea, and then let the scientific community test it. If your idea is truly groundbreaking or revolutionary, sooner or later scientists will find its merits and test it, and if it survives repeated scrutiny, scientists will begin to accept it and promote it. Grousing about how you are a misunderstood genius will get you nowhere. Nor will claiming that there is a great conspiracy among scientists to suppress your brilliant idea.
It’s a Conspiracy!
Conspiracy thinking, in particular, plays a huge part in weird ideas about the earth. Flat-earthers, geocentrists, moon-landing deniers, creationists, and many others we will discuss in this book insist that they are not taken seriously because a great conspiracy of scientists, or the world in general, is against their ideas. Lately, conspiracy thinking has become rife in society as whole segments of the population are taken in by
