The Collapse of Critical Thinking

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

- Richard Dawkins

Before I begin, I suppose I have an obligation to provide a working definition of 'critical thinking' so there is no room for confusion. I'll provide here the very definition provided by CriticalThinking.org: Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

That's simple enough right? To paraphrase; critical thinking is the process of collecting information and evaluating it logically. It's a healthy and fulfilling way to approach problems and situations, and if there ever was a 'right' way to think, this is it. Critical thinking helps to weigh pros against cons so that you can find genuinely beneficial solutions. Simply put, critical thinking = yay. We get that right? Good.

We live in the technology age. An age where machines with ridiculously flawless logic circuits are living in an incredible 70% of Australian homes*. The idea that people can even now be abandoning the processes of critical thinking is beyond belief, but still, they are.

I was reading a thread on the SomethingAwful Forums just yesterday where someone was suggesting that their house may be haunted. I'm unsure of this person's age, but they are old enough to be living independantly, suggesting at least 18, definitely old enough to know better. Their reason for believing that ghosts may be haunting their house? One of the windows kept opening itself and he heard rustling in the night. As you can imagine the critical thinkers quickly piped up explaining that the rustling was likely rodents, and the window opening was probably caused by counterweights becoming too heavy for the window**. As a firm believer in the strength of critical thinking I was incredibly disappointed that this person's first response was "OMG GHOSTS".

It's this kind of problem that really worries me. There are an unfathomable number of people who have no understanding of the world around them, or the scientific advances made in uncovering our history. The very idea that anyone can still discount evolution as a fallacy is mind-boggling. The information, the evidence is all out there - how can these people be so ignorant to the world around them? We have this shit creeping into our schools masquerading as science, when in fact NONE of it follows the scientific process (which of course involves the requirement that evidence be given for one's conclusions. This is difficult to do when in fact your conclusion is a load of shit).

There's so much to cover in this topic, I wish I had more time to address it. At some stage I might come back and expand this item, because there is a LOT to be said here. For now though, I'll leave you with another quote from a legendary biologist well ahead of his time:

Science is simply common sense at its best that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

- Thomas Henry Huxley

* Statistics gathered from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

** In old houses, the windows are usually constructed with counterweights that are concealed in the wall on either side of the window in an effort to aid opening of the window. As the house ages the window rots, warps or gets eaten by termites. As a result, the counterweights become too heavy for the window, and tend to open it by themselves. A simple adjustment of the weights involved usually corrects the problem.