“Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary levels of evidence if they are to be believed.” – Carl Sagan
It may surprise you to read that I completely agree with Carl Sagan on the quote above, though I disagree with his application. Carl Sagan popularized that quote, though it probably came from a gentleman named Marcello Truzzi. He started the magazine, The Zetetic Scholar, and was reputed to have said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” He was a skeptic’s skeptic, which means that he even doubted the skeptics! That is, he called anyone a pseudoskeptic who assumed that any proposition is false without bothering to investigate it. Of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), he stated:
They tend to block honest inquiry, in my opinion. Most of them are not agnostic toward claims of the paranormal; they are out to knock them. […] When an experiment of the paranormal meets their requirements, then they move the goal posts. Then, if the experiment is reputable, they say it’s a mere anomaly.
Thus though he was a skeptic, he was not actually a Carl Sagan type of skeptic. Rather, he insisted that all claims have to be subjected to scientific inquiry with no preconception. He further insisted that any claim which drastically changes the received scientific wisdom requires extraordinary levels of evidence in order to make the change in belief. He was also a founding member of the Society for Scientific Exploration (now somewhat defunct) whose mission statement is/was:
The primary goal of the international Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) is to provide a professional forum for presentations, criticism, and debate concerning topics which are for various reasons ignored or studied inadequately within mainstream science. A secondary goal is to promote improved understanding of those factors that unnecessarily limit the scope of scientific inquiry, such as sociological constraints, restrictive world views, hidden theoretical assumptions, and the temptation to convert prevailing theory into prevailing dogma.
Topics under investigation cover a wide spectrum. At one end are apparent anomalies in well established disciplines. At the other, we find paradoxical phenomena that belong to no established discipline and therefore may offer the greatest potential for scientific advance and the expansion of human knowledge.
That is, unlike Carl Sagan, he was quite willing to admit “apparent anomalies” (paradoxes) in what we know, as well as phenomena that are not really being studied by anyone and which may yield future scientific advances. He was quite aware of the problems of “sociological constraints, restrictive world views, hidden theoretical assumptions, and the temptation to convert prevailing theory into prevailing dogma.” Nevertheless, should you think of him as friendly towards religion(s), that would be untrue. Rather, he was a rigorous applicant of the scientific method, to the point that he did not paper over the problems nor ignore the limitations of the method nor minimize the gaps that are found in every discipline. In fact, he defined the true scientist in an article about himself in 1987 as:
In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new “fact.” Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of “conventional science” as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis—saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact—he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof.
Notice the very careful wording that he uses above. It is actually a quite worthy wording, and one with which Christians could generally agree with certain caveats. “The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. … But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis—saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact—he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof.” That is, the most a skeptic should say is that a particular claim “is not proved.” If s/he moves beyond that to saying that a claim is “due to an artifact” (or disproved) then s/he themself must then prove that s/he has disproven the earlier claim.
Now, that may not seem like much, but it has some strong implications. Dr. Truzzi would have looked at the Carl Sagans, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennetts, etc., and probably considered that they had gone far beyond the evidence in their statements that they had shown religion to be false. But, he also would have had little patience with the people who do one study or who find one study on the Internet and promptly declare that all the previous scientific orthodoxy has been disproven. That is, if his beliefs prevent a skeptic from simply declaring something to be false without adequate proof of falsity, they also prevent a person from declaring a change in an existing belief simply based on a study or two. That is, a major change in belief requires major proof to be adduced. This principle was designed to counter the easy-believism found in so many of the “fringe” groups in the USA who make some outrageous claims about vaccinations, autism, chelation therapy for cancer, etc., etc. Just because a medicine is alternative in no wise makes it true. It also is subject to something stronger than merely making the claim that “our” worldview makes it impossible for us to accept the truth of the alternative medicinal claim.
Oddly enough, it may surprise you to know that I think that God also seems to have held to some version of that saying. (Hint: think of events like the Crossing of the Red Sea, the Resurrection, etc.)
===MORE TO COME===
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