So this is the difficult second blog entry. I wasn't sure whether or not to do it at first and then, if so, what to talk about. But an obvious topic presented itself, so here it is. I attended the first Cardiff Skeptics in the Pub meeting last night. It was a great evening and Simon Perry, who spoke in some detail of his adventures in skepticism, was extremely entertaining. Being the first of these events in Cardiff, everyone was getting to know each other and trying to connect. A common question I encountered was "what brings you here tonight?" and on the way home afterwards this made me think about that question: "why am I here?"
I think I'm skeptical by nature and I associate this with having always been interested in understanding how things work. When I was 6 years old I used a screwdriver to take apart one of those old fashioned BT rotary telephones to see if I could make it into a walkie talkie. Not surprisingly I failed, fatally damaging the phone in the process, but what my parents lost in a working telephone, I gained in a new level of understanding into how the phone worked - I could see what happened when you turned the dial. For me, this is what science is all about - it's nicely summarised as "figuring out how stuff works" and it's a process for doing that in a robust, repeatable way. At the age of 6 I didn't understand deeper layers of understanding in the process - electrical pulses, the circuitry in the phone, switching networks, relay stations, electron flow, etc. I still don't understand many of these things in detail. But any and all of these could be described as "how it works".
I attended Skeptics in the Pub because I'm interested in how things work and I don't understand how people can believe in things that clearly don't work. If you read that sentence twice you'll note that consequently I'm also interested in understanding how those people work, too. My ambition as a skeptic is not to convert people to my way of thinking, it's just to make someone think "how does that work?" Because that's the start of critical thinking. Any conclusions that person draws from then on will be more valuable for having been understood rather than merely memorised. I'm always interested to know other people's reasons for getting involved in skepticism, too, as I think if it's to succeed in the goal of reducing the influence of pseudo-science and just plain fraud on the wider public then it has to appeal to a broad audience. And it's this goal that appeals to me and makes me want to be involved in Skeptics in the Pub. It may sound idealistic but I hope that we can each make the world even just a little bit better by helping expose fraud, question unfounded assumptions and publicise trickery.
But "why am I here" is of course also considered a metaphysical question. For me, it's a simple one - happenstance, or something like the anthropic principle, if you prefer a more scientific name for it. There is no "by design" reason. Why should one be required? However for many others this question seems to require a "meaningful" answer. And I think it's people for whom my answer is either not sufficient or just too alarming that are most at risk of accepting much of the pseudo-scientific nonsense without thinking it through. So perhaps the best way for us as skeptics to help is to encourage people to become more critical in their thinking. And for that I'd go back to the story of telephone dismantling - by helping people to enjoy the process of figuring stuff out they will naturally develop critical thinking skills. And by starting with that first level of explanation detail, we can hope to avoid immediate recoil from 'skepticism', 'rationalism' or, most scary of all, 'atheism'. So, the next time someone asks me "why are you here", I'll try to be more careful in my response.
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