Imagination and Skepticism
I have come to wonder of late whether or not much that is commonly regarded as skepticism is merely a lack of imaginative power on the part of the alleged skeptic.
In other words, I am skeptical of the skeptic’s claim to be skeptical.
Real skepticism consists in the ability to question one’s own unquestioned assumptions, and to put those assumptions on trial with the same objectivity as if they were not one’s own. It is an exercise of the imagination. It is much the same as the exercise of the imagination reading science fiction demands of the reader: the ability to picture what the world would be like if the rules of the world were different than current knowledge says
Science fiction has been called speculative fiction but could be called skeptical fiction. All other genres, from Westerns to Romances to Detective stories, invent persons and props and places and details, but they do not invent new worlds with new laws of nature. Science fiction is the genre where we ask questions like: how does the invisible man see?
There is no need to answer this question in a muggle genre, since there are no invisible men in Westerns and Romances and so on, for invisible men do not exist in our world as we know it and never did. The Invisible Man cannot exist under our rules of nature or our current technology ability to exploit those rules (albeit in a few years, this statement may be out of date).
You can also have an invisible man in a spy story, or an invisible sportscar, but that is because the development of new technology with military applications has been a part of the spy genre since World War Two, with the development of rockets and radar u-boats and jetplanes and other gosh-wow wonder weapons of the future. Indeed, even spy stories set in the past contain this trope.
In the television show WILD WILD WEST, for example, the James Bond of the old West (named, appropriately enough, James West) often found himself tangling with gosh-wow wonder weapons of the future such as Gatling guns and steam-powered armored cars. Invisibility, provided it is portrayed as a rare and experimental secret technology, is allowed in a spy thriller, but if every spy and soldier and policeman has an inviso-cloak, you are writing a science fiction story, because you have changed the rules of the world.
The invisible man is an old and familiar inhabitant of the fantasy tale, whether he wears the tarnhelm or the helm of Pluto, the magic ring of Angelica in ORLANDO FURIOSO or the magic ring of Bilbo in THE HOBBIT.
You can have an invisible man in a horror story, provided only the execution is scary, or in a comedy, provided that the execution is funny, but you would not bring up the question of how he can see unless that question itself were scary or funny.
Likewise, you would not bring up the question of how Bilbo can see if his body ergo his eye ergo his retina is transparent to photons, because the idea that seeing requires photons to bounce off one’s retina is a scientific idea coming from the scientific world-view, and intruding the scientific world-view into a fantasy story turns it into a slightly different genre, perhaps a science fantasy like THE DYING EARTH by Jack Vance. The intrusion would break the mood of fantasy, which is a nostalgic return the world view of the pre-scientific ages.
But in a science fiction story, one of the main delights of the tale is to take some unreal premise (what if there were an invisible man?) and draw out the most realistic implications possible (if his eye were invisible, his retina would be transparent, and he would be blind, etc. If his flesh but not his clothing were invisible, he would be naked, etc.)
Indeed, we might offer this as a working definition of science fiction. All other stories have invented characters and settings and props and plots, but only science fiction has invented worlds operating by laws of nature that are realistic yet unreal. Fantasy is also is also set in unreal worlds, but they operate by unrealistic laws of nature, or, rather, they subject the supernatural rather than natural law: they are realms of magic.
To think through the realistic implications of an unreal premise is a principle art of the trained imagination, and it is what skeptics use when being skeptical.
Here let us make a crucial distinction. There are two kinds of skeptics. What I have described above is a philosophical or pure skeptic, that is, a man who puts his own beloved assumptions and ideas on trial, and requires they justify themselves if they can. This method was popularized by Descartes, who attempted to drill down from his foundations to an indubitable bedrock of belief.
Pure skeptics maintain philosophical doubts for the sake of argument, even of those things they are not inclined personally to doubt. It is professional doubt, as it were.
The other kind is the congenital skeptic, that is, a man who scoffs at the ideals and beliefs of his neighbors and friends because he is emotionally inclined to cynicism. He smirks and rolls his eyes because he likes to smirk and roll his eyes, and he just as likely to smirk at a logically consistent and time-tested theological belief, or an indubitable moral principle, as he is to smirk at fatuous claims by telephone psychics.
This is not because the scoffer is capable of an unemotional examination of the evidence or capable of making an objective assessment of its probative value. It is precisely because he is emotional. The emotion happens to be an emotion of doubt. The scoffer maintains personal doubts because that is the bent of his personality, or because the doubts amuse him, or for any number of arbitrary and emotional reason. He lacks the emotion of certainty even of those things reason tells them are certain.
Both scoffers and philosophers are called ‘skeptics’ when in fact what they do is opposite. A philosopher uses his imagination much as a science fiction reader, to draw out the realistic implications of an idea he thinks is unreal, but which he is treating as real for the sake of the argument. He gives the ideas a fair trial whether he likes them or not, and accepts the implications whether he likes them or not. A scoffer dismisses ideas he does not like with a supercilious laugh, without bothering to discover whether they are real or unreal, or what they imply.
I doubt this is often due to malice or negligence. I suspect many a scoffer lacks the imaginative power to treat an unrealistic idea seriously enough to draw out its realistic implications.
There is a reason why the science fiction genre is small. There are many people who can exercise their imaginations but are not entertained by using it here. They have the ability but lack the desire. And then there are many people who cannot exercise their imaginations because they lack the ability.
As I said above, I have come to wonder how much of what is commonly called skepticism is merely scoffing, that is, a mental act of stopping the thought process due to a lack of imaginative power.
The most clear example is I personally encountered is one, unfortunately, that I cannot recall in sufficient detail to be completely fair. I hope the reader will excuse the summation rather than any exact quote: I long since lost the reference to whichever of his many writings this came from.
It comes from John Derbyshire, a conservative writer I admire for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is his bitterly astringent wit, his typically English distaste for theory, his refreshing cynicism. One cannot live on a steady diet of scalding bitterness, of course, but the occasional jolt of hot spice does wonders to clear the sinuses.
My admiration waned over the years as his writing became ever more idiosyncratic and disconnected from reality. He lost his religion at about the same time he found the odd cult of radical materialism. His humanity seemed to ebb after he lost any metaphysical or foundational belief which might justify any compassion, trust, faith or love for humanity, not to mention the loss of any reason to believe humanity per se existed, as opposed to an endless horde of automatons misprogrammed to think themselves human.
Fairly early in the process, I believe before he lost his religion, he recounted an conversation with an Anglican man of the cloth in which Derbyshire asked the divine why a man should believe in the virgin birth.
Derbyshire opined that it was far more believable that the non-virgin Mary was pregnant from fornication or rape and lied about it than that a miracle occurred. The priest asked rhetorically, “But why would the Mother of God lie about such a thing?” Derbyshire, telling the story, sputtered in apoplectic laughter at the naivety of this response.
But he did not answer the question.
I assume from his wording (which I cannot here reproduce for the reader’s benefit) Derbyshire could not even see the question, that is, he was not imaginative enough to draw out the realistic implications of the idea he rejected as unrealistic.
But Derbyshire at least claimed to have been a Christian at this point in his life. So this was not an agnostic talking to a Christian saying, “Assume the premise that miracles never occur under any circumstances. This implies either that Jesus Christ never lived, and all the events of his life are a literary invention of a conspiracy of lunatic lying fanatics; or that Jesus Christ was merely a wise teacher or confidence trickster or lunatic rabbi who did live, but all the miraculous events of his life are a literary invention of a conspiracy of lunatic lying fanatics. In either case, Christ is not God. If Jesus Christ never lived, then there was no Virgin Birth. If Jesus Christ did live, but he was merely a wise teacher or a lunatic, is it not far more believable that the non-virgin Mary was pregnant from fornication or rape and lied about it than that a miracle occurred?”
Given this question in this context, yes indeed, the answer “But why would the Mother of God lie about that?” is an inadequate answer, and Derbyshire snorting with disbelief through his nose would be justified.
That answer assumes the very point being denied, namely “Assume for the sake of argument that Mary were not the Mother of God. Is it not more believable that the Mother of God lied than that a miracle occurred?”
Well, of course the idea that the Mother of God lied is believable if she is not the Mother of God.
But that was not the context here. Derbyshire’s snorting is not only not justified, it is egregiously stupid. It is so stupid in fact that I can only assume he lacks the imagination to understand a hypothetical question.
Let me explain what the hypothetical actually is.
Suppose you have never heard the Christ story before, and have no opinion as to its validity or truth. You are sent through a Wayback Machine to First Century Palestine, but you do not know if this is the real universe you come from or a realistic parallel dimension which operates by different laws altogether.
Perhaps you are as certain as can be that there is no God and nothing supernatural in your home universe: but now you are in a different universe altogether, so you have no empirical evidence or experiential wisdom to confirm that this universe works by those same rules.
You see a man who speaks certain wise sayings and upbraids the hypocrisy of the rich and powerful. He is a clever enough teacher of the Jewish law that even lawyers are baffled by his penetrating questions, and dumbfounded. He often speaks in riddles or parables which, upon reflection, you find to have a dizzying profound meaning, and which return to haunt you years later.
Then you see him heal a leper by lying hands on him. You see him heal a feverish servant by speaking a word, even when he is not present. He straightens a bent man’s crippled hand, he cures a madman no one else is able to approach, he recovers sight to a man blind since birth. He raises a girl from the dead, and then a man three days dead to full life and health again. To make matter worse, you are on the boat when you see him walking on the water; and another time he halts a storm with a word. You are in the crowd when he takes a few loaves and fishes and multiples them, creating substance out of nothing. You feel the bread in your hand and see the crumbling flakes of crust and smell the loaf and taste it, and likewise for the fish.
Some days later, you see him in the mountains transformed in the likeness of a divine being, his robes shining whiter than any whiteness of the Earth, and at his side are a prophet and a lawgiver long known to be dead. Voices speak out of the sky.
Then he himself is killed by torture, and the sun is hidden for several hours, and the moon rises red as blood. Three days later, you see him again, and he sits and eats a meal with you. It seems in all respects to be the same man, and not a ghost, even though he entered a locked room unobserved. Other witnesses also see and talk with him. At the end of fifty days, he levitates up in the sky, and is lost to sight. You see it yourself with your own eyes. There is not the slightest doubt in your mind.
During all these events, he claimed indirectly to be a divine being, to be God. After his death and resurrection, his loyal followers made that claim directly and openly. The man you saw was God, the supreme supernatural being, the creator and sovereign ruler of earth and heaven, the source of all life, truth, goodness, sacredness, honesty, joy, and the fountainhead of eternity.
Then you go talk to his mother, whom everyone says is a Virgin. You ask who the father is? She replies that there is no father, that her child came forth from the power of the Holy Spirit alone.
At this point, let us ask the priest’s question again. Why would the Mother of God lie?
At this point, let us turn Derbyshire’s question on its head. Which is more believable than the theory that the Mother of God told the truth about her son’s birth: Is it more believable that a man who could do all these godlike things is actually the son of a moneylender named Schlomo with whom young Mary had a torrid and hidden affair? That a man who could do all these godlike things is actually the son of a Roman soldier named Phallocrites who raped her and beat her and told her not tell anyone? That a man who could do all these godlike things is actually the son of Joseph, who had carnal knowledge of his wife in the ordinary course of things, but decided, because he was a lunatic or craved that reputation, to tell everyone he was cuckolded by the Holy Spirit?
Or is it more believable that a man who could do all these godlike things is actually the son of God, as he claimed he was?
Notice I am not asking what you personally believe. You yourself might find the story of Christ very appealing or very repellant. You might think it impossible that such a story could be true, or you might think it impossible that the story is not true. That is not what I am asking.
I am asking you to use your imagination. Use that same art of speculation which allows you to wonder, assuming an invisible man actually did exist, how his transparent eyes capture light-waves.
Treat it like a science fiction story. We can all surely enjoyed science fiction stories in which gods or godlike beings are characters, like Cthulhu from H.P. Lovecraft or Apollo from STAR TREK or angels from BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, or Wotan from Wagner and even mainstream fantasies like IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE or BEWITCHED or I DREAM OF JEANNIE where angels or witches or genii appear. I know of no one so unimaginative that he can neither weep with George Bailey nor laugh at Darren Stevens one the grounds that he does not believe angels to be elevated human beings, or does not believe witches to exist at all.
I assume there is nothing in Christianity which makes us innately more imaginative than unbelievers. So I assume any unbeliever of an ordinary scope and power of imagination can envision the hypothetical at least as well as a Christian can envision the stories of Hercules or Sinbad the Sailor which are set in universes where Jove or Allah is the Supreme Being, but not God; or stories like STARMAKER or TIME BANDITS or THE GOLDEN ASS or THE GOLDEN COMPASS.
Come, let us reason together. Assume you lived in the universe of the Marvel comics, and had met students of Professor X possessed of strange superhuman powers. Their powers are genetic, that is, the powers are created by an accident in the gene code, but thereafter passed from parent to child.
If there was a student who said he was the son of Magneto, the Mutant Master of Magnetism, and that student displayed the power to levitate bullets and ballpoint pens, airplanes and automobiles, and you overheard this student’s mother claiming to be the wife or paramour of Magneto, and said no human being was that student’s father, surely her claim is more believable than the claim that she is lying, and the father is Schlomo or Phallocrites, Jives the Butler or Howard the Duck.
Now, you and I do not live in a world of mutants with strange superhuman powers. This is an unreal assumption. But under this assumption, the mutant powers are inherited. Howard the Duck cannot father Polaris the Magnetic Lass. Under this assumption, the student’s mother’s claim to have lain with no man, no non-mutant man this is, is the more believable claim. That is the realistic conclusion of the unrealistic assumption.
Any reader who cannot get past his disbelief in the Invisible Man or the Magnetic Student — in this case, a well founded disbelief — to think about the logical implications of such a being, is not using his imagination. He is not being skeptical. He is merely scoffing.
A reader who can think skeptically, and accept for the sake of argument what it would mean if, say, men had free will or lacked it, or if objects were manifestations of ideal forms rather than forms being abstractions of objects, or even fanboys who can speculate about whether Logan’s claws could penetrate Steve Roger’s shield, surely such skeptics should allow to Our Lady the same degree of skeptical courtesy they allow to Magneto.
But we do live in a world where the Michelson-Morley experiment got an unexpected, nay, and impossible result. Light particles shining from the moon as she orbits do not have their speed increased or decreased by the lunar motion. Likewise, we live in a universe where precise clocks on fast flying planes or satellites do not synchronize with their earthbound twins, and where light bends around stars, and where the orbit of Mercury suffers procession which Newtonian mechanics does not predict.
If we imagine an unreal assumption that light is measured as the same in velocity to all observers, this is an assumption more wild than any wild imaginations of H.G. Wells, or Tolkien, or Ariosto about invisible men.
But the careful and skeptical examination of this assumption yields surprising results, which account for the Michelson-Morley experiment, as well as the procession of the orbit of Mercury, and which, strange as it is, fits the known facts better than the admittedly more sensible Newtonian assumptions. To invent or understand Relativity is an act of skeptical imagination, but in this case the imaginings are true.
We also live in a world where, according to the best historical records available, St. Luke died under torture rather than admit he invented the story of the Virgin birth. The only possibilities are that he invented it or not. If he did not invent it, the only possibilities are that St. Mary told the truth about the conception of her son or she did not.
That Jesus never existed at all is a difficult theory to square with known history, for then, unlike Buddhism and unlike Mohammedanism, we have a religion which claims to have a founder but which has no founder.
This claim would have had to have been circulated at a time when the events being alleged were within living memory in First Century Palestine.
The circumstances or causes giving rise to such a unique historical phenomenon would need to be unique. It would be akin to a man of this day and age claiming that Stalin never existed, or that the moonshots were faked. Such a thing is not logically impossible, but even giving it the benefit of the doubt, the argument and evidence needed to support such an extraordinary proposition need to be extraordinary.
In other words, if Luke wrote on or about 70 AD concerning events that allegedly happened in 30 AD, he is claiming to an audience where any middle aged man would recall the events that Herod slaughtered babies in the village of Bethlehem, and that a wandering rabbi cured the sick, raised the dead, calmed the storm, cast out devils, and was publically crucified. The middle aged men in the audience would no doubt include members of the new Christ worshipping cult or offshoot of the Jewish faith. Is it believable that no one in the audience had heard of any of these events, and yet each was so gullible that he is willing to believe Luke’s account rather than his own memory?
But, again, another possibility is that Jesus existed and said extraordinary things, and that some coincidences happened near him: such as people spontaneously recovered due to a placebo effect; or that two or three people in comas just so happened to recover from what seemed to be death when he so commanded; or that this rabbi was praying to be saved from a storm when the storm just so happened to die down for very ordinary and natural reasons; and he could walk on water due to really big blisters on his feet from all that walking, and the blisters were filled with enough helium to render him, and Saint Peter, buoyant enough to walk on water; and the man blind since birth was faking, but was too embarrassed to return to his trade of pretending blindness to milk passersby of alms; and the disciples hallucinated frequently, but due to a brain defect afflicting all 700 of them, they could not tell the difference between hallucination and reality; and the gospels contain a certain amount of lies, rumors, speculations and exaggerated claims; and St. Paul was always a friend of the Christians and merely pretended to be struck down on the road to Damascus, and he was never blind but was faking, due to an unexpected eagerness to betray his lifelong loyalties to the Pharisees, betray his God, and die under torture; or perhaps St Paul suffered an odd psychotic episode and only thought he was blind; or none of these people ever existed and the books of the Bible were written by Constantine in a secret room in Constantinople with the help of time-traveling Space Nazis from the Dark Side of the Moon; or…
The possibility that Jesus lived but performed no miracles is a theory that would have to a be squared with the historical record, what little survives, of the beliefs and behavior of the Ante-Nicene Church, including the writings of men like Polycarp, who studied at the feet of St John and who wrote when people who knew Jesus personally were still alive.
I invite the reader to invent such a theory. You will find it cannot be done solely from the historical record, that is, not without inventing an ad hoc conspiracy theory which assumes either one editor controlling all the records, or which assumes a dishonest unity of purpose in a widely scattered generation of men without any parallel in human history.
If the Orson Well’s Martian Invasion Broadcast had been believed, not for an half hour, but from that day to this, and all surviving records showed that Martians had landed at Grover’s Mill New Jersey, and all those surviving records were fakes, we would perhaps have a parallel in history for what would be needed if the Gospel accounts were fakes.
The closest I can think of to what a parallel would be is a prank my father and his fellow crewmates once played on a new man in the squad. The squad pretended that there was a crewman named Rodney D. Pumice in the squad, who just so happened not to show up for assembly or general quarters. My dad and his mates carefully arranged props and faked lists to show Pumice existed, and then the new kid to look for him with an important message, so that when the new kid, for example, stuck his head in the squad room looking for him, a cigarette would be half burning in the ashtry or a cup of coffee half empty on a chair arm, and Dad would innocently say that Pumice had just stepped out. The joke was to try to see how long it would be before the new kid figured it out.
This practical joke lasted less than a week. No one died under torture rather than admitting that Rodney D. Pumice did not exist. No one foreswore his loyalty to the Jewish authorities or converted to the adoration of Rodney D. Pumice after being blinded on the road to Patuxent River Naval Air Station. And no illiterate fisherman attributed to Rodney D. Pumice sermons and parables of weighty wisdom and real literary merit which other men in my father’s service then took so to heart, that they converted, repented, changed their lives, and so on. One would think that if the illiterate fishermen has such literary talent, they would have written something in their own names.
Now, if we are making a claim as hard to believe as the claim that a practical joke that lasted two thousand years and counting, all skepticism should be on the side of the theory saying that despite the records, Christ never existed or never performed miracles, not on the side of the theory saying the records are accurate.
On the other hand, if we claim as a matter of metaphysical doctrine that miracles do not and cannot exist, on the grounds that all reports of supernatural events, from ghost sightings to the operation of the free will, are and must be false, this is a different argument. This is not an argument where we say “granting hypothesis such-and-such which is the more believable model?” this would be an argument that says, “as a matter of fundamental dogma, I am not willing to grant hypothesis such-and-such. That hypothesis cannot be true in this or any other universe.”
If we assume as a dogma that miracles do not exist, then the report of a miraculous birth, like all other reports of miracles, must be false, and so therefore the birth was natural. But this is dogmatic reasoning.
And if we reason that the report of the Virgin Birth is false on the grounds that virgin birth is a miracle and all miracles cannot be believed because all reports of miracles are false, then we are reasoning in a circle.
Nor am I claiming that a skeptic reading the Gospel accounts or the early Church fathers is in a position where intellectual honestly leaves him no choice but to believe what those accounts say. Life is not that simple.
I am claiming that a skeptic, if he is truly skeptic, will not simply scoff and simply dismiss the claims without thinking, not claims of such momentous and personal import to his life.
I am claiming that the historical record does not favor the conspiracy theory of history over the ‘miracles sometimes happen’ theory of history. The conspiracy theory does not rest on the historical record for its persuasive power, but on a dogmatic belief denying the possibility of miracles.
But dogmatism is the very opposite of the rigorous and sober use of the skeptical imagination a question of this depth and momentousness requires.
That is not an historical argument about the record, but a philosophical argument about the metaphysical nature of reality, namely, whether miracles occur.
Metaphysical arguments do not rest on empirical grounds, but on rational grounds, that is, they are or allege to be rational deductions from first principles. A skeptical man can justify his first principles. A scoffer takes them as dogma, and scoffs at anyone who disagrees. A skeptical man uses his imagination. A scoffer does not.
I would deliver this challenge to John Derbyshire or any reader assuming his posture: Use your imagination.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
