Do religious beliefs survive encounter with Carl Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit"?

[Calypze]

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection is an essay that was published in Carl Sagan's 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World. The essay is available online. It provides a "baloney detection kit", with tools for skeptical thinking about all sorts of beliefs. It can be applied to religious beliefs, for example.

An excerpt:

If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.

What’s in the kit? Tools for skeptical thinking.

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true.

Among the tools:

· Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”

· Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

· Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

· Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among“multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

· Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.

· Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it,you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.

· If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise)—not just most of them.

· Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.

· Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable, are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle—an electron, say—in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

There are also many logical fallacies listed in the essay, click on the link in order to read the essay in its entirety. A short summary is also available at RationalWiki.

How many religious believers have applied these tools for skeptical thinking to their religious beliefs, and had their beliefs survive intact? If children from an early age were taught to think like this in primary school, and to subject beliefs and claims to examination along those lines, would the world have fewer or more religious believers than it currently has?

[chriscase]

I think a look around this forum will show it’s possible to embrace and apply critical thinking and yet maintain an outlook that self-describes as religious. As someone who does not find religion generally harmonious with critical, empirical reasoning, I tend to suspect there is some compartmentalization going on there, but if we press too hard on that, we run the risk of committing our own version of the No True Scotsman: “Yeah he says he’s religious, he’s not really religious,” (because he is also applying reason) or “He says he’s skeptical, but he’s not really skeptical,” (because he still identifies as religious).

The universe is certainly enormous and there’s liable to be plenty of room for what we don’t know, so I expect the best we can do is lobby, exhort, and demonstrate for the virtues of thoughtful, grounded reasoning, wherever it arises.

[MaximiIian]

I have, and my religion's community does approach things critically. Modern Paganism is based in equal parts on having personal, mystic experiences with divinity, and adherence to traditions and practices without regard to belief (because the rituals are a cultural/headspace/tradition thing, not a faith thing). The latter requires critical thinking and research to develop in the first place, because we're deriving them from ancient ways. The former might be a bit of a leap of faith, but it's usually done in the context of group activity, so there is an element of observation independent from one person's frame of reference, and most Pagan groups are non-authoritative and communal so there are no arguments made from a position of authority (40 years ago that might've been a problem, but that's largely in the past).

[Prodromos]

Do Carl Sagan's beliefs survive encounter with his "Baloney Detection Kit"? Such as his belief that a mob of religious zealots destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria.

https://historyforatheists.com/2017/...of-alexandria/

Better yet, does Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" survive encounter with itself?