It is uncontroversial — or at least correct — to note that scientific naturalism requires some metaphysical structure. It not the case, however, that the specific idea of causality is part of that metaphysical structure. And not only is induction not part of the metaphysical structure of science, it is not even a valid inference rule in scientific naturalism.

Popper* gives us a useful definition of "metaphysical" in the Logic of Scientific Discovery. A metaphysical statement is a meaningful statement that is not in principle falsifiable by experience. Not all unfalsifiable statements are metaphysical — some are simply meaningless — but all metaphysical statements are, by definition, unfalsifiable. Note that this definition is itself metaphysical: the definition is (or at least appears to be) meaningful, but there is in principle no empirical observation we could make that could falsify it.


Another example of a metaphysical system is the set of rules that define the game of chess. There is no empirical observation that could, for example, falsify the rule that bishops must move diagonally in a straight line. If we observe a player move his bishop horizontally, we can conclude only that either the player has made an error or that she is not playing chess. (Note that the statement that "human beings consider chess to constitute thus-and-such rules" is a scientific statement: we can observe how human beings define chess, and in principle falsify the statement.)

Popper departs here from the Logical Positivists, the latter assert that all statements neither verifiable nor falsifiable by experience are not meaningful in any sense. Popper in contrast admits that unfalsifiable statements can be meaningful.

Popper departs as well from a common theme in philosophy, the theme of metaphysics as a synonym for ontology. In his demarcation criterion, Popper establishes a metaphysical "rule" of scientific naturalism: unfalsifiable statements are ontologically meaningless. If a statement is empirically unfalsifiable, is is for that reason categorically not a statement about the world. If it can be charitably interpreted only as looking like a statement about the world, then it is nonsense — "not even wrong" — having at best only the appearance of meaning. This principle does not deny all meaning of unfalsifiable statements, only a specific kind of meaning.

In a similar sense, the statement, "The bisectors of two angles of a triangle intersect inside the triangle," is a meaningless statement of Euclidean geometry. It's not true, it's not false. Specifically, the word "inside" is a term without referent anywhere in Euclid's axioms. We have to create a different context — e.g. analytic geometry — to make the statement meaningful and true.

Thus scientific naturalism — being itself metaphysical — is not a statement about the world. It is, in essence, a language game we play. One is free to play any language game one chooses, including religious language games and the language game of calling religious people jackasses whose views on reality and morality are at best ridiculous and at worst malevolent.

Popper's construction gives us a metaphysical framework to rigorously discuss meaningful ontological statements — i.e. statements about the world — that are not directly empirically observable. We cannot, as Hume noted, observe causality: all we can observe is that one event usually or always follows another in time. But we can falsify a causal hypothesis: We can hypothesize that event X causes event Y, i.e. that event Y will always follow event X. If we were ever to empirically observe that event Y did not follow event X, our hypothesis would be proven false; we must change something: the hypothesis itself or something in its theoretical framework.

Scientific naturalism does not deny the meaning or truth of statements that in a sense transcend empirical observation, i.e. statements whose truth or falsity we cannot directly determine by observation. Scientific naturalism not only admits statements that "transcend" empirical observation, but gives us a rigorous way of determining which transcendent statements are meaningful and a rigorous way of at least rejecting meaningful empirically transcendent statements as definitely false.

Of course, scientific naturalism does deny the meaning of statements that transcend empirical observation in a different sense, i.e. statements interpreted as about the world that cannot in principle be falsified by empirical observation.

Intelligent Design is an excellent example. At first, to their credit, cdesign proponentsists ID advocates proposed empirically falsifiable statements: there were structures — the bacterial flagellum, for example, or blood clotting mechanisms* — that could not have evolved (except perhaps through wildly improbable coincidence) through the unintelligent, purposeless and intentionless mechanisms of uncorrelated heritable variation and natural selection. However, as the candidate structures have been shown to have a plausible evolutionary history, ID advocates have retreated to unfalsifiability: perhaps there is an intelligent designer whose work cannot be empirically distinguished in any way from the work of unintelligent mechanisms. To the scientific naturalist, such a statement is not just outside the boundaries of science, it is outside the boundaries of meaning. It cannot be a statement about the world, it is not even wrong, it is no more meaningful than the assertion that all gnorts are kerfibble.


Scientific naturalism excludes some statements as meaningless, statements that appear to have meaning, that are grammatically correct, that do indeed activate our minds in interesting and complicated ways. Perhaps it's the case that scientific naturalism is simply limited, in the same sense that Euclidean geometry is limited and cannot discuss concepts such as "inside" or "outside". There's no way to prove that scientific naturalism is not limited, that statements rejected by scientific naturalism cannot have meaning and truth in some other system.

The best we can say — and it's pretty good — is that scientific naturalism has in a couple of centuries given us a profound understanding of the physical universe from the cosmological to the subatomic, a technological civilization that can feed, clothe and house more than six billion people and has at least the potential for real humanistic justice and universal prosperity, and is beginning to crack the mysteries of consciousness and human behavior. In contrast, after more than two millennia religion has given us nothing but mystical mumbo-jumbo, ridiculous self-serving and self-aggrandizing fairy tales, repression, oppression and the near-constant support of even the most monstrous and abhorrent ruling classes that would maintain the privilege and status of the priesthood.

Tim Kowal responds to my criticism of his post chiding atheists' "intellectual procrastination":

We are certain some element or elements of a theory — a set of statements about the world — are false if the theory entails false statements about observation.

There cannot be any "true" statement about reality once one rejects the concept that truth can transcends the empirical world. You are correct that there are as many models of truth and reality as there are religions--more, even. This is a debate for the respective adherents to those models. But to reject any truth that is not empirically observable is to cut oneself off at the knees. At the very least, atheists must posit that objects in the world have causal relationships with one another, that the future will resemble the past, and so on. Religion is simply an organized, systematic way to organize these transcendental truths.

Atheists certainly don't reject causation and induction, but they don't give an account for how they can know it. They simply refuse to acknowledge the transcendental truths they rely upon. This is disingenuous.

I'm never encouraged when readers cannot read and understand simple declarative sentences in the English language. But after blogging for more than 30 months and discussing religion and philosophy on the internet for a decade, I'm rarely surprised. Much as I dislike repeating myself, I will do so. Even if it were true (which it's not) that "Atheists... don't give an account of how they can know" about causation an induction, it is necessary to acknowledge that we do not have such an account before we can begin to create one. Organizing wildly contradictory religious "models" — models that give no account of knowledge more sophisticated than an invisible sky-fairy magically putting ideas into our heads — in some systematic way and leaving the resolution of those contradictions to some vague debate on unspecified grounds just avoids beginning that search for truth. Even if atheism were to bring nothing at all to the philosophical table, it would be rational and sensible to reject religious thought and admit profound ignorance. If after millennia they are unable to give us anything at all better than magical sky-fairies and consensus by the sword, then we are rationally entitled to explicitly acknowledge we are starting from nothing at all.

But of course there is something. There were atheists before scientific naturalism, but it is no surprise that atheism has flourished under scientific naturalism, which does not just recognize the failures and vacuity of what passes for "epistemology" in religion but gives us a powerful way of explaining features of the world both gross and subtle in a more sophisticated way than invoking magic.

Even an inattentive reader should note the glaring contradiction in Kowal's comment: in almost the same breath he complains that atheists "don't give an account" of knowledge while also undermining the account we do give, i.e. empiricism. Just this discrepancy alone forces the reader to choose which of two uncomfortable interpretations is the most charitable: either Kowal is insane, he is simply too stupid to detect this rather obvious contradiction, or he is intentionally trying to deceive his readers. If he does not like the epistemic account that scientific naturalism does in fact give, let him say so: to critique an account he does not acknowledge the existence of too greatly shocks the mind of those unpracticed in religious doublethink and cognitive dissonance.

Worse yet, Kowal must reach decades back to the beginning of the 20th century (or perhaps to the middle of the 18th) to find a natural epistemology he can criticize with cognitive abilities deficient in competence or honesty.

It is simply false that modern scientific naturalism — the sort of naturalism practiced for centuries by actual scientists and explicitly described by at least some philosophers of science for decades — "reject[s] any truth that is not empirically observable." Even the most misguided of the logical positivists and naive empiricists would not have gone so far: even they admitted truths derived from an empirical foundation, even if those derived truths were themselves not empirically observable.

But of course problems with the naive empiricism of the 20th century were anticipated in the 18th by David Hume (objections that Kowal mentions without crediting Hume, an atheist). We cannot directly observe either causality or consistency over time, and much to the dismay of the naive empiricists, we cannot rigorously deduce these features of the world from the directly observable evidence. (There are a lot of other problems with logical positivism and naive empiricism, not the least of which is that the systems themselves are neither observable nor deducible from observation.)

Philosophers are little better than theologians, and it is unsurprising that anyone who reads only philosophy might think that this naive view constitutes the core of scientific thought. There are intelligent philosophers who have propounded more sophisticated concepts, but their work is buried in a mound of bullshit exceeded in scope and elaboration only by theology. The atheist criticism that finding the diamonds of theological sensibility is simply too difficult to be worth the trouble applies equally to philosophy*. Kowal's misunderstanding of scientific naturalism is excusable and correctable in a way that his "bad food and not enough of it" contradiction about the very existence of a natural epistemology is not.


Modern scientific naturalism shares two features of theology. First, both systems make guesses about how the world might be. We do not directly know the world is causal, and we cannot (as we have discovered) deduce the world is causal from what we do directly know. In order to talk about causality, we have to introduce the concept without knowledge or even any real confidence as whether it's actually true. Second, despite their protestations of universal truth, scientific naturalism and theology are dynamic: one way or another, when these systems fail to correspond to the world of experience, both actually change.

But — and this is a very substantial but indeed — from these similarities scientific naturalism departs radically from religious faith. In religious faith, our core guesses about God (and thus God's world) are upheld "come what may". Our articles of faith are utterly immune from change (until an authority changes them). Anything and everything else might change — we might even deny experience itself (who are you going to believe? the Pope God, or your lying eyes?) — but our articles of faith are immune from public criticism.

Under scientific naturalism, however, none of our guesses are immune from criticism. Everything is, at least formally, subject to change. Similarly, no authority can declare any guess as immune from change; no one requires the permission of any authority to change any part of any theory.

More importantly, a theory that predicts more (in a specific sense) is, under scientific naturalism, considered worse than a theory that predicts less. A theory that predicts that we will see an object move is worse than a theory that predicts that we will see an object move in a particular direction at a particular velocity. The first theory predicts more: our theory is consistent with observation if we see the object move up or down, left or right, fast or slow; the second theory predicts less: movement in one direction only and at one velocity only.

In contrast, it is no fault under theology if our core faith predicts more or less. God's love is equally compatible with slavery or abolition; His hatred of homosexuality equally compatible with loving gay marriage as with discord; His contempt of women equally compatible with women's demonstrable competence as with their failure; His divine creation equally compatible with life-friendly physical law as with constant miraculous intervention; His intention to create a race of beings to worship and adore Him equally compatible with a 6,000 year-old universe with the Earth at its center as with a universe of such cosmic scale and scope that all of human history is no more significant than the mold in my shower is to all of terrestrial civilization.

Our scientific naturalistic theories about the world are true because they explain and predict this world; they are valuable because they predict only this world. Theology is compatible with any old world we might find ourselves in: change the laws of physics, remove them altogether, transform billions of light years of galaxies, clusters and superclusters to a uniform distribution of a hundred stars or even lanterns in a quintessential firmament, chop scores of elements from the periodic table and rearrange them with a throw of the dice, and not one word of the vast edifice of theological bullshit created over the last ten thousand years would have to change.

Kowal admits that theology and religion lack any epistemic system. In his own words, all we can do is organize and systematize all the contradictory models and theories about the world: we can do nothing to choose between these theories other than a handwaving mention of some vague debate (a "debate" that throughout history has all too often been conducted through the media of murder, rape, slavery, torture, conquest, oppression and genocide). Indeed scientific naturalism has developed a way to choose between these models and — while Kowal complains in that we have no way to choose — he complains in the same breath that our epistemic system is fatally flawed because it does choose, and it chooses against the arrant superstitions and vacuous bullshit of theology.

When Glendower famously boasted, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," Hotspur astutely retorted, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?" Answers are easy: I can answer any question, or so can any man; but are they true? Theologians can indeed answer any question, but we suffer not from a lack of answers but from a surfeit. We know that scientific materialism can not just answer some questions, but we can know that those answers and only those answers are true. If, by applying some distinction we are left with some questions entirely unanswered, with every candidate so far rejection, that is but a small price to pay for knowing that other answers really are true. Answers are easy: we can always think up more answers and test them out.

It would of course be disingenuous or at least incomplete to extol the virtues of scientific naturalism without mentioning legitimate philosophical objections.

Science is, of course, a human endeavor, and its pursuit susceptible to the ordinary intellectual and moral vices typical of human beings. Our scientific knowledge is dependent on what we choose to study, the kinds of knowledge we choose to pursue, and our answers are dependent on the questions we choose to ask. Science is no universal panacea, a machine we can put questions into and be confident of always or even often get true answers. The best we can say about science is that sometimes it makes some distinctions. But just sometimes is incomparably better than never, and that sometimes is on the basis of ordinary logical thought and the evidence of our senses, not the pronouncements of ridiculous men in silly hats or the elimination of dissent by the sword and the prison cell.

Strictly speaking, scientific naturalism does not separate theories into true and false, it separates theories into definitely false, not definitely false and bullshit: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." We cannot know the theory of universal gravitation with the certainty we know that "there are infinitely many prime numbers" is a theorem of the axioms of arithmetic. If for this reason you don't want to label scientific naturalism as knowledge, so much worse for your view of knowledge. When you can demonstrate the truth of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics with deductive certainty, let me know. Until then, I'll happily trade certainty of nothing for confidence in not just something but quite a lot while you play solipsistic games you could pursue without distraction if you put out your eyes and stopped up your ears.

We cannot apply scientific naturalism to scientific naturalism without circularity. But scientific naturalism as a method is not itself a theory about the world; it is simply a language game we play, a game we play not because we can somehow prove it itself is "true" but because we find it useful, a utility that — because we are uninterested in the what appears to be its the sole utility for justifying abominable behavior — that religion has never and apparently cannot provide.

Indeed it is the theologians whom we must accuse of intellectual procrastination. They have, to be sure, been diligent about providing answers, but after ten thousand years we are still waiting for them to give us a way — any way, however imperfect, that appeals not to our prejudice but our reason — to separate the the meaningful answers from the bullshit and the true answers from the false.

Tim Kowal chides atheists' "intellectual procrastination":

[W]hile one may be an atheist before he can fully “explain how and why the universe came into existence,” he is immediately and continuously under an intellectual duty to engage in providing a cogent answer to these problems. Atheism cannot be merely passive or destructive. It must fill the intellectual gap it creates, not simply revel in sacking others epistemological systems.

Kowal is, of course, wrong. By rejecting notions about gods atheism does not create an intellectual gap: we merely observe that gaps religion fails to fill. We do not know for example how and why — or even if — the universe came into existence, but after examining religious "explanations" we still do not know.

It takes a little experience to detect Kowal's equivocation in the above quotation. An explanation in this context is an ontological statement: it is a description of how the world actually is and how it works. An explanation is not an epistemological statement: it is not a statement about how we know whether one explanation or another is actually true, whether one description or another actually corresponds to reality. When atheists reject religious "explanations" we are sacking not religious epistemology, but religious ontology, and we are sacking their ontology in part because it scientific epistemology rejects it.

Indeed we cannot sack religious epistemology because the religious simply don't have one: none of them ever talk about how we can have a rigorous, determinable and shared method of separating statements into true and false*. Drill down to the fundamentals of any religious "explanation" of the world and its primary justification will be: thus-and-so is what the author happens to believe about God; if you do not already happen to share his beliefs, he will be unable to persuade you.


One person happens to believe that God is infinitely loving and powerful, and though we rarely understand, everything happens for the best. Another happens to believe that an infinitely loving and powerful God nonetheless respects our autonomy and free will. Another happens to believe that God is indifferent or unconcerned with human affairs. Another happens to believe that God is malevolent. Another happens to believe that God himself is above our parochial notions of good and evil. One happens to believe that Genesis is a literally and factually accurate account of cosmology. Another happens to believe it's more-or-less physically correct but couched in poetic language. Still another happens to believe it's allegory and metaphor having nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the physical world.

The problem with religion is not that it fails to provide explanations. The problem is that religion provides too many explanations. We want one explanation, we want to know that that particular explanation really is correct, and we want to know it's correct even if it contradicts what we happen to believe.

Atheists don't sack religious epistemology — there isn't one. Atheists use evidentiary and scientific epistemology to sack religious ontology. Indeed that's all that scientific epistemology actually does: it's a fundamentally negative epistemology. We are certain some element or elements of a theory — a set of statements about the world — are false if the theory entails false statements about observation. (And if some theory does not entail any statements about the world that are in principle falsifiable by observation, it is not a theory: it is not about the world.)

We are not certain that those theories that survive are true, but we are astonished (in a philosophical sense) that any theories about the world survive this filter, and that usually only one theory (or a family of theories with a single identifiable essential character) survives this process: the process itself does not by definition guarantee a single result. Furthermore, we are philosophically astonished that entirely different people — with different upbringing, local culture, habits, outlook and biases — almost always come to the same conclusion.

Scientific epistemology does not quite do the job philosophers expect: they would like to see a method that, like deduction, separates individual statements into certainly true and certainly false. Scientific epistemology only separates theories-as-a-whole into definitely false and not definitely false. But half a loaf is better than none, and neither philosophy nor theology gives us anything but arbitrary Just-So stories, separating statements into what we do or do not already happen to believe, a job we do not need any epistemology at all to achieve.

Worse yet, religious "explanations" are not explanations. All they do is relabel mysteries about the world as mysteries about God.

Theist: Why is the world the way it is instead of somehow different?

Atheist: I dunno. The world just happens to be the way it is.

T: That's no explanation at all!

A: Perhaps not. Do you have something better?

T: Of course! The world is the way it is because God wanted it this way.

A: Why did God want the world to be the way it is instead of somehow different?

T: I dunno. God just happens to want what He wants.

Of course, the theist will rarely be quite so honest in his last reply. The usual response is to point to some hefty volume of incomprehensible mystical blather. It is the rare atheist who will actually read this blather, but some do, and they invariably find that the tome does not actually explain why God happens to want the world to be the way it is. There are more tricks, and a clever theist can keep a naive and gullible atheist running around in circles for decades, but it all boils down to the same thing. All of theology consists of inferring what God wants from occasionally observing how the world actually is, or more frequently from how the author wishes the world to be.

Atheism by itself is merely the position that religion and theology have themselves failed to provide satisfying explanations, and failed to provide anything bearing even a passing resemblance to a system of knowledge. They have covered their abject failures under the most immense and rococo edifice of bullshit ever conceived by the mind of man (and thus deserving a certain measure of horrified fascination). If we want to know, and not merely comfort ourselves with self-serving fantasies, we must first admit we simply do not know, and set forth on a voyage of discovery, a voyage we are by no means certain to complete or even survive.

Religion demands that we burn the ships in the harbor because we cannot complete the journey before we set out.

A reader alerts me to the following article: Factory Defies Sweatshop Label, but Can It Thrive?:

The factory is a high-minded experiment, a response to appeals from myriad university officials and student activists that the garment industry stop using poverty-wage sweatshops. It has 120 employees and is owned by Knights Apparel, a privately held company based in Spartanburg, S.C., that is the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to American universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company.

As a communist, I'm not really impressed.

Communism has a moral dimension, but communism is not fundamentally about morality. Egregious and obvious mistreatment of the workers by the capitalists is definitely bad, but communism does not exist primarily to ameliorate or even eliminate these abuses. Even if the worst abuses were to disappear entirely, the case for communism would still exist. (Fewer abuses would make communism a much tougher to sell, but I'd happily make that trade-off; I just don't think it's in the cards.)

The recent financial collapse and world-wide recession that still threatens to fall into outright depression (by capitalist standards) is not the result of individual companies treating their workers poorly, and the misery the present economic circumstances are causing today to tens of millions in the US and billions around the world are not because capitalists have increase the active and intentional mistreatment of their workers.

The fundamental problems with capitalism — the problems that communism purports to address — are its economic limitations and inherent positive-feedback instabilities. These fundamental economic problems cause far more misery, suffering and death than any petty sadism encouraged by the inequalities of the capitalist system.

The argument for communism vs. capitalism is similar in tone to the argument for scientific medicine vs. shamanism or faith healing. In the latter case, it fundamentally doesn't matter that faith healing sometimes works (which it does). It fundamentally doesn't matter even that most faith healers know they're charlatans and frauds and many actually make people worse: we don't want to get rid of the worst of the faith healers, we want to get rid of all of them. With both cases, the point is that we could have immeasurably better lives by making deep changes rather than simply tweaking a system flawed at its roots.

Or, similarly, there were some slave-owners who treated their slaves with a measure of relative dignity and respect, but that didn't excuse slavery as an institution.

So, OK, some guys in the DR are paying $2.83 instead of $0.80 per hour. Yippie. Good for them, and I mean that sincerely. But that's still just a subsistence wage: it's still a wage that still keeps the working class subordinated to the capitalist class. The owners and bankers are still using their privileged access to capital to make a profit and pay themselves enough not just to live, not even just to enjoy luxuries, but to accumulate even more economic power and privilege. They themselves are not paying the additional wages out of their own profit and interest, they are asking us, the working class customers, to pay. (And pay we should, with a good will.)

And how sustainable is it? Remember: social change happens by selection, which is selection against. The only way a setup like this could create lasting social change is if it were to force marginal producers who didn't pay a living wage out of business, and I don't see how they could do that. If anything, it will encourage some competitors to focus even more on price competition, now that their access to the high-end market has been diminished.

There's a big difference between the race to the bottom and the struggle for the top.

William Lane Craig on intellectual honesty:

You don’t have to have any brains to tell someone, “Have you seen the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology? Before you say there are no intelligent theists and no good reasons to believe in God, maybe you’d better look at that book first. Otherwise, you’re not really informed.” You don’t need to have read these books yourself if you’re so pressed for time. All you have to do is know a few titles. ... Shame the unbeliever for his ignorance of the literature. ...

[L]earn to drop the names of some Christian scholars. ... Name-dropping is distasteful when someone is trying to show off, but in a case like this, you’re simply offering counter-examples to the sweeping claim that all Christians are ignoramuses, a view that is itself rooted in ignorance. [emphasis added]

A honest skeptic would say, "If you're going to argue a position, there's no substitute for learning about it. Read X, Y, and Z." I honestly believe that Dr. Craig is simply too stupid to understand his own profound intellectual dishonesty... and he's the best Christianity has to offer.

The problem is that if you actually read all the books and authors that Craig cites, you will soon realize their arguments are not just weak, they're total and complete bullshit.

The Pundit Delusion:

What I expect, instead, if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal — when his real mistake was doing too little to create jobs.

If? Ha! I called this two years ago.

Actual headline: Dick Cheney Without a Pulse, Must Be Plugged In. What a surprise.

I've decided to restore comments.

As before, spam, pr0n, threats, commercial advertising, completely off-topic comments, batshit insanity (that means you, David Mabus) and outright lies about matters of fact (yes, you, Rob Singleton) will not be published. Otherwise, I'll publish most everything else. I don't care about profanity. Feel free to call me a fucktard. You may post anonymously. Word verification is on to keep spambots from making too much extra work for me.

The big change is that I will rarely respond directly to comments. I will usually respond only to provide additional evidence or in rare cases clarification of points I myself consider unclear. I might create another post generally based on questions or criticism in comments, but don't hold your breath. Usually I've said what I have to say; 90% of criticism is from those who apparently cannot read and understand simple declarative sentences in the English language; it's usually a waste of time repeating my arguments. If you want a specific response, or you want to debate or argue with me in any sense, you can email me. I won't promise anything, but you at least have a shot.

When commenting, you must address me, not other commenters, in a similar fashion as addressing the Chair in parliamentary procedure. If you want to address another commenter directly, do it by email, their blog or your own, or find a message board. In general, I'm not interested in hosting debates between commenters. If I feel a debate is brewing, I will close comments for the post.

I cannot edit comments, and would not if I could. I myself cannot (and would not if I could) keep any records regarding the origin of comments or the locations, IP address and any other identifying information about commenters. I cannot speak for Google.

As always, in the final analysis I retain the unconditional privilege of publishing or rejecting comments at my arbitrary discretion.

What is the skeptic’s option? The author asserts,

Skepticism is looking something directly in the eye and stating for everyone to hear that you don’t believe it.

No.

The author has an excellent point: The internet is indeed set up to make skepticism vastly more difficult, more difficult than it already is. But skepticism is not just open disbelief. Were that so, then we should consider evolution and global warming deniers skeptics in good standing.

Skepticism is believing or disbelieving on the basis of evidence and evidence alone. When a skeptic says that she's skeptical about this or that, she is not saying she doesn't believe it, she's saying, "Show me the evidence." I will abandon my most cherished belief if the evidence is against it, but more importantly I will adopt the most bizarre believe if the evidence supports it: if I'll believe quantum mechanics, I'll believe anything.

(Skepticism is not a belief formation mechanism; it is a filter, and an expensive filter at that. It is impractical to hold only those beliefs that have survived a rigorous skeptical filter; even the best skeptic holds a huge number of beliefs just because everyone else believes them. But when a belief becomes controversial or untenable, a skeptic is someone who exercises the discipline and will to look to the evidence and adopt, reject or suspend belief on the basis of the evidence and only the evidence.)

I was talking to an atheist the other day about economics (my favorite hobbyhorse). He's trying to be skeptical about economics: he says (paraphrasing from memory) that he looks at what both sides have to say, and believes the side that's more plausible. At least he's looking, and good for him, but that still isn't skepticism. The whole point of skepticism is believing ideas that sound intuitively implausible because the evidence supports them.

The idea that fundamental particles are in a near-infinitely dimensional superposition of states and in a sense aren't even there when no one is looking ought to boggle the mind. That the complexity of organisms and ecosystems evolved over hundreds of millions of years by mechanisms no more complicated than random variation and natural selection is ridiculous. That the "rock solid" Earth is whizzing and whirling around space at unimaginable speeds is ludicrous.

Without the massive amounts of evidence and enough methodological knowledge to evaluate that evidence, all of modern science is completely unbelievable. I personally know that quantum mechanics, evolution and heliocentricity are true because I do have enough methodological knowledge and I can evaluate the evidence more or less directly. I know that much of modern economic theory is complete bullshit because I've studied the subject directly and I can look at the evidence.

You don't need enough knowledge to do original work in a field: you just need enough knowledge to evaluate claims on their own merits. But even this limited knowledge takes discipline, hard work and most of all time to acquire. But the work is indispensable: without it, you cannot have an informed opinion.

I myself am suspicious of evolutionary psychology, but I cannot be skeptical of it: I haven't done the work to evaluate the claims directly. It sounds like bullshit (and I think I have a pretty good intuitive bullshit detector), but I don't know it's bullshit. All I can really say is that there are scientists I respect, scientists who could evaluate the evidence directly, who are indeed skeptical. Experts' controversy a little bit of evidence, albeit indirect, that I can evaluate myself, but it's just not enough: every new idea, good and bad, justly faces the skepticism of established experts: that's their job. The best I can do is acknowledge my suspicions and suspend judgment.

The author is correct: The internet — especially "social media" — is not conducive to skeptical examination: it is not conducive to the evaluation of beliefs on the basis of evidence and evidence alone. On the other hand, the internet makes the fundamental process of learning enough of the fundamentals of any science and discovering the evidence on which to base a skeptical decision easier than ever before. You can, if you are so inclined, learn enough about just about anything to make an informed judgment, and learn it for no more than the cost of a computer and broadband connection... plus your time.