As a practical matter, it’s almost impossible to prove or disprove anything to another person’s satisfaction. Sure, there are special cases where, for example, a mathematician or a scientist can prove something to another mathematician or scientist. But you and I generally can’t prove anything to anyone. If you want to know whether neutrinos are real, don’t ask me. I’ve never seen one. I can’t even prove who ate the last cookie.
Evolution is my favorite example of something that’s hard to prove to the average person. All I know for sure is that scientists have proven evolution to the satisfaction of most other scientists. I haven’t seen any of the evidence first hand. And if I did, I wouldn’t know what I was looking at. I can’t tell a fossilized monkey femur from a fossilized monkey turd.
So what I find myself doing, since I can’t prove ANYTHING one way or another, is something I call sniffing and lumping. By that I mean I hear the arguments for and against something, then I sniff, then I lump the topic in my mind with other things that kind of smell the same.
For example, leprechauns and the tooth fairy smell the same to me. I can’t prove they don’t exist. But it seems to me that if leprechauns really cavorted in the forest for thousands of years we’d have some evidence. Surely a hunter would have bagged one by now. Likewise, if the tooth fairy was actually sneaking into houses at night, by now someone would have caved in her skull with a golf club. So I lump leprechauns and the tooth fairy together in the bullshit category along with ghosts and UFOs and Santa Claus and Bigfoot and the Boogey Man and God and free will and immortal souls.
I could be wrong about any of those things. They just smell the same to me. So I lump them.
Sniffing and lumping can often keep you out of trouble. For example, I’m sure you’ve had the experience of receiving an offer that seemed too good to be true. You can smell trouble long before there is any evidence of it. I don’t KNOW that all of the e-mails I receive from rich Nigerians with temporary cash flow issues are scams, but they smell that way. There’s something familiar about the pattern.
I’m always surprised when people watch “reality” television and believe it’s totally unscripted. Maybe Jerry Springer’s producers are geniuses with a knack for finding guests that start fights almost every time. But it sure smells like professional wrestling to me. I lump those together.
The big problem with sniffing and lumping comes when the odor and the scientific consensus don’t match up. For example, evolution is considered a fact by mainstream science, and I generally want to side with mainstream science. But I can’t shake the fact that our current understanding of evolution smells wrong to me. Not 100% wrong, just wrong in some important way that we’ll figure out later. I can’t defend that position rationally. It’s just a smell thing. If feels like a pattern I’ve seen before but I can’t put my finger on it.
Global warming is another issue where the scientific consensus doesn’t match the odor that I’m picking up. I have no rational reason to doubt the consensus of scientists in the field. But to me it SMELLS like “The sky is falling” and “The Y2K bug will destroy civilization.” It’s hard to resist lumping global warming with those examples even though it makes no sense to do so.
I have the same problem with the idea that Iran’s leadership is working toward destroying both Israel and itself with a nuclear war. There’s plenty of evidence for that view (Hezbollah, the Iranian nuclear program, pronouncements about wiping Israel off the map, etc. etc. etc.). Rationally, if you live in Israel you have to treat the risk as a certainty and act accordingly. But to me, it just doesn’t smell right.
There’s no need for you to leave a comment explaining the evidence for or against evolution or global warming or Iranian plans to annihilate Israel. That’s not the point today. I accept the wisdom of acting on reason and not odor. It’s just interesting to me when the smell and the evidence don’t line up. It’s a fascinating glimpse at how the mind works.
Do you have any examples where your reason and your sense of smell don’t line up?