I’ve been trying to think of a simple story to illustrate how so many people try to make use of “problems” or “holes” in knowledge in order to justify ignoring vast amounts of things that are explained or explainable in much simpler ways, even if still incomplete. Here is what I’ve come up with so far - feedback welcomed.
A parable about skepticism.
Imagine the following scenario. A principal walks into the building early one morning and finds a stack of chairs reaching nearly all the way to the ceiling! The first conclusion leaping to mind is that some students had too much time on their hands and were just having some fun – a prank as it were.
But someone else had some other ideas about this. It was noted that it would be very difficult for anyone to stack the chairs so high – indeed, it was quite the challenge to safely dismantle the stack. So the alternative explanation for this state of affairs was as follows. Space aliens must have visited the school during the night, and using special powers of theirs they stacked the chairs, perhaps as a kind of message or sign for us to consider. When others mocked this possibility, the proponents replied that actually, the alien hypothesis does explain how the chairs could have been put that way – because it would have been very difficult – maybe impossible, for any students to do such a thing. Besides, the janitor reported that the chairs had not been that way the night before, and the school was entirely locked and vacated when he left. So unless the others can explain just how all this was done, it is insisted that the alien hypothesis must be the right one.
But doesn’t this just raise more questions than it answers? Why would any space aliens be interested in performing such a bizarre feat? Isn’t there much more productive stuff they could have done if they had wanted to give a sign? Why were there no signs of forced entry into the building? Nothing else seemed to be out-of-place or amiss. Isn’t the simplest answer just that some creative kids got a collaborating adult with keys to let them in, and worked together to do this? But the alien enthusiasts reply that this “normal” kind of explanation has too many unexplained or speculative holes in it. None of us were there to see it, so how can we rule out the alien hypothesis? We can’t!
As the uproar of the day died down, the wise old Janitor just locked the school doors that evening and went on home, bemused be all that he heard. People haven’t changed much – in all their ‘skepticism’, they strain out the gnats only to swallow a camel.