With the advent of the internet, there is an even wider exchange of ideas and beliefs between people. Unfortunately, this also means that any idea, no matter how ignorant of reality they might be or how fraught they are with pseudoscience or superstition, is also quickly spread across the world. From the 9/11 truth movement to HIV deniers, the rampant lack of critical thinking, faulty logic and just plain ignorance is a growing problem in our modern world. We might look at the loons who go around and scream about evil space aliens and think to ourselves, "Thank god I'm not a nut like them," the truth is however, the same process that leads someone to commit suicide under the belief that their bodies will float up to the sky and be carried away on a giant spaceship to utopia is the same process that will lead someone else to believe that their local naturopath can cure their cancer.
[...] There are barriers to mastering critical thinking; and the older we get, the harder it can become to let go of our assumptions, to look outward and not care about being wrong. Our minds are extraordinarily good at protecting us; our memories become distorted, shortened or simply omitted over the years to present to us a life story that makes us look good. They diminish the losses, the contradictions and failures while lauding the victories and accomplishments of our lives. [...]
[...] When used correctly, it serves as a self-correcting fact checker of our minds, weighting new statements, new facts against the objective evidence we've already collected in the past and deciding whether to reject or accept them. But if we're lacking in critical thinking, if we can't objectively look at facts and bend our reality to new ones coming in, we'll end up doing the opposite, deceiving ourselves from truth, creating a new world based only what we want to be true. [...]
[...] Of course once upon a time, it may have been perfectly acceptable to believe the earth was young; there was no science, no facts that contradicted that statement, but eventually people discovered how to tell the age of rocks, they discovered that the Earth was in fact billions of years old and it became just another fact, just another building block of knowledge. Yet these creationists still exist today, they teach their children to ignore science and to have unyielding faith in their tenets alone; they have even built museums dedicated to their warped version of reality which is of course filled with creationist science. [...]
[...] Science at its best however takes into account the biases of men, it doesn't care who the men behind the science are, only about the results. Those therapies mentioned earlier remain alternative for one simple reason; the science behind them is weak in the best of cases, non- existent in the rest. Apart from the actual results, they also have no plausible basis in biology, chemistry and just about any other branch of science you can think of. Yet they have followers, they have people who swear up and down that their homeopath cured their back pain or arthritis or even their cancer. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
