DangerousTalk

Guest Blog from Michael Rosch of The A-Team:

“Don’t give up the fight!!!!! We know the vaccines cause, or are one of the causes of Autism. Never let them win. Keep spreading the word. No matter what they say or decide, they will NEVER change my mind.”

This is an excerpt from an actual Myspace bulletin I received from a very passionate individual expressing their outrage that the judges in the first 3 Autism Omnibus court cases would have the audacity of disagreeing with his sacred beliefs.

Here, this individual comes right out and admits that “they will NEVER change my mind.” [his emphasis on “NEVER”, not mine] This is dogmatism, the inability to change one’s conclusions to fit the evidence. What this individual is saying is that he’s simply put his nickel down on a conclusion and no matter how much evidence is against him, he will never accept that he’s wrong. If that isn’t the height of arrogance, I don’t know what is. It’s also a sure sign of fanaticism.

Rational people take positions but ultimately accept the agnostic view that because they don’t have all the evidence, they could still be wrong. Likewise, science is always subject to revision upon the arrival of new evidence. Science deals in likelihoods, not absolutes. Of course there are certain beliefs we hold that we’re very confident about and consider it pretty much crazy to question, like the non-existence of leprechauns. But we feel comfortable simply saying there are no leprechauns because we have GOOD REASON to believe there are no leprechauns. But who among us would dare confess that they’d never, ever accept that leprechauns exist EVEN IF presented with extraordinary evidence to the contrary?

Same goes for the Abrahamic God, Yahweh. I’m frequently asked by Christians, what would it take to get me to accept that Jesus really was the son of God? It’s one of the rare examples of Christians actually asking a good question. My answer is usually some variation of, “If Jesus showed up at my door, magically healed an amputee right in front of me without the aid of any scientific technology and resurrected someone who was medically declared dead and buried weeks prior, I’d begin to accept the possibility that he was indeed Jesus and the son of God, but I still would not follow him.”

The point is that I know more or less what would be required to convince me that I’m wrong. And when someone tells me that they believe in a rather dubious, extraordinary claim with little or no good evidence to back up that belief and that “nothing” will change their mind, that’s a major red flag that they’re not thinking critically enough about their beliefs. There are many red flags we can look for. And because nobody is an expert on everything, it is in our best interests to learn what those red flags are in order to best determine whether a particular claim is indeed persuasive or if it’s just a belief that they’re emotionally attached to and unwilling to let go of despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

As Judge Vowell said a few weeks ago, the evidence for a link between vaccines and autism “is weak, contradictory and unpersuasive.” I agree. To date, none of the evidence presented I’ve heard of convinces me that vaccines cause autism. Though, as always I remain open to any good scientific evidence that might change my mind.

Filed under: Religion