Essay:Personal Incredulity and Modern Civilization

Personal incredulity is the fallacy of not believing in something because it doesn't make sense to you. It's a rather frustrating fallacy to deal with, mainly because the person who is committing it is actively denying the truth. Try taking an ancient Norseman from two thousand years ago and plop him here in the present day. Try explaining to him what causes lightning, tell him about the charged particles and static electricity. Despite your greatest efforts, the Norseman will never believe you. He will always believe that Thor struck an anvil with this hammer and that is what creates lightning. In his mind, there are no charged particles or static electricity. Yes, he has never been taught about them, but that doesn't matter because the idea of electricity and invisible particles makes no sense to him. He would have to go through a long process of scientific education to understand the nature of lightning, and even then we have to assume that he would conform to the philosophy of empiricism and the scientific method, while also trying to combat his polytheistic faith. Maybe this is too extreme of an example. Calling a Norseman from the 700s an incredulous person is pretty harsh, when there was no possible way he could have ever known any of that information. Granted, he is still incredulous, but it's not like we can expect him to evolve into a 21st century mindset over night.

What is not an extreme example are people, in 2020, who are incredulous. Let me start by saying that personal incredulity is that logical fallacy that you can very easily outgrow. Learning how to think like a scientist pretty much guarantees that you'll never think like that again. Science is the antithesis of incredulity, because when there is an unknown or when there is something complicated to understand, science doesn't dismiss it, science aims to answer it with absolute certainty. Think of a person watching those PBS YouTube videos about astrophysics. Those videos are not written for the average Joe, and quite honestly, they are way too complicated for me to ever understand. These videos often deal with very complicated facets of the universe and explains them like a college professor would to their fourth year astrophysics majors. An incredulous person would watch their video on string theory, watch it for two minutes, get bored, click out of the video, and go about their life not believing in string theory because it makes no sense to them. Meanwhile, people such as myself and anyone else with a brain, would watch the video, try their best to comprehend it, and then at the end say: "Well, there are people who know way more about this topic than I do, so I have no authority to say if this is correct or not." This is what separates the incredulous person from the logical person.

I'm writing this essay because the pervasive presence of personal incredulity in the 21st century is appalling. There are many groups of people and lines of logic that fall into the trap of personal incredulity, and it is quite frustrating when the answers to their delusions are right in front of them. What I aim to do is establish three groups of people who commit this fallacy ad nauseam and then try to link this to how we can try to eradicate this way of thinking altogether. Most logical fallacies are very easy to commit, as they are the easiest lines of logic our minds create, but some, like personal incredulity, are incredibly easy to avoid.

The Flat Earth Society

Alright, let's get the most ridiculous group out of the way. Flat Earthers, for those who do not know, are people who believe the Earth is a relatively flat disc instead of an oblate spheroid (or just sphere). For most of us, it can be incredibly hard to comprehend how someone could possibly think like this, and truly it is. We will never know how someone willingly believes in something so fantastical because we can't read their minds. In fact, we are so bewildered by their outlandish ideas that we wonder if the really popular flat earthers on the internet even believe in what they preach, that they could just be doing it for the fame. All in all, it is futile to try and reason with something that is intrinsically unreasonable. All we can do is sit down and laugh at them, which is exactly what I did. I would watch YouTube videos of science teachers debunking flat earth videos, and then watch the flat earther's pathetic response. These videos were truly entertaining while also being slightly depressing that some people actually believed in this stuff. But over time, these videos started to lose their luster with me. Every single video was the same. Flat earthers make the same mistakes over and over again and these science teachers keep correcting them. I just got to a point where nothing was really surprising anymore because flat earthers use the same incredulous logic across the board. And even though a typical flat earther commits a lot of logical fallacies, personal incredulity is at the root of their beliefs.

Let me clarify for those who may have never seen these videos. Flat earthers never prove anything, all they do is cast doubt on scientific fact/theory and use that denial as "proof" for their ridiculous ideas. Some flat earthers do try and follow the scientific method, which is great, but their experiments are complete shams and hopelessly flawed. Whenever a flat earther is speaking about their delusions, it can always be traced back to personal incredulity, even in an experiment. This is why I started to lose interest in these videos, because they're all the same. Every single doubt that a flat earther has about the globe can be answered with absolute certainty, but because those answers don't make sense to them, they won't believe in it. And yes, you can say that there is more going on here, such as personal pride or even mental health concerns, but in reality, the flat earth society is fundamentally rooted in personal incredulity.

To find some great examples of flat earthers seeing a question and refusing to find a scientific answer for it, I took a trip to the Flat Earth Wiki. I looked at their stellar article about the Coriolis Effect, which is primarily caused by the rotation of the Earth. In a typical flat earther fashion, the whole page is about bashing what has already been established as fact. The whole page is honestly one big incredulous dump on the internet, with my personal favorite being that because military snipers don't have to take the rotation of the Earth into account when shooting at long distances, the Earth therefore does not rotate. The real reason why snipers don't have to take the rotation of the Earth into account is purely because at the distances they shoot at the rotation of the Earth would never impede ballistics. In fact, one of the only times in human history that a weapon had to account for the rotation of the Earth was the Paris Gun in World War 1. This massive artillery piece was designed to hit Paris from an incredible distance, so far that the crew firing the piece had to take Earth's rotation into account. Unsurprisingly, the Paris Gun is missing from the Flat Earther Wiki article on the Coriolis Effect, despite their chapter on how military ballistics do nothing to prove Earth's rotation.