unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [66]
We think the chances that Darrow ever said anything like it are vanishingly small. The transcript of the Scopes trial shows that Darrow used the words “bigotry” and “bigot” a lot, but not in a way creationists would find comforting. For example, when the opposing counsel, William Jennings Bryan, accused him of being out “to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible,” Darrow shot back: “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States and you know it, and that is all.”
Responsible creationists no longer use the bogus Darrow quotation. Norman Geisler wrote, “I wish to commend Tom McIver for exposing the questionable authenticity” of the words he had once attributed to Darrow. Geisler also said that Bird, the author of the Yale Law Journal article, recognized now that the quote is “probably not authentic.” And yet plenty of creationists and “intelligent design” advocates still use this spurious quotation, nearly two decades after McIver’s 1988 article exposed it as a fantasy.
How Can We Know?
How could an undocumented quote be so widely accepted as accurate? McIver thinks those who swallowed the quote fell into a psychological trap like those we spoke of in Chapter 4: “It says what they want to believe, so they assume it is true.” But we think there’s a larger question here. How can we ever be certain of our facts when even the Yale Law Journal can turn out to be wrong? What should we do to avoid being misled? Clearly, finding facts in a world of disinformation requires something more than just relying on generally reliable websites, or generally reliable books, newspapers, or encyclopedias, or factual sources of any description, for that matter. We’ll spend the rest of this chapter giving you some of the general rules we follow at FactCheck.org.
RULE #1: You Can’t Be Completely Certain
THE FIRST THING TO REALIZE IS THAT ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY IS ELUSIVE, especially in the practical domains with which we have been dealing in this book. We are not speaking of pure logic or mathematics, where 1 1 1 always equals 2. Nor are we dealing with faith-based beliefs, which generally aren’t subject to scientific proof or disproof. In fact, we should be suspicious of any claims that something is “always” or “never” so. How can you be certain?
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“Slam Dunk,” Then and Now
THEN:
PRESIDENT BUSH (Dec. 21, 2002): “I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we’ve got?”
CIA DIRECTOR GEORGE TENET: “It’s a slam-dunk case.”
BUSH: “George, how confident are you?”
TENET: “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk.”
—quoted by Bob Woodward in his book Plan of Attack
NOW:
TENET: “Those were the two dumbest words I ever said.”
—quoted by The Associated Press, in a speech at Kutztown University on April 28, 2005
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You might think that all swans are white because you have never seen a black one. But there are black swans, in Australia. Karl Popper, a famous philosopher who died in 1994, held that even the so-called laws of science are hypothetical, subject to being disproved someday by new evidence. You only need one counterexample to disprove a claim of “never” or “always.” All swans are white—until you see a black one. But you never can tell when that might happen.
Everybody craves certainty, if only because living with doubt is psychologically uncomfortable and gets in the way of deciding what to do. That’s why we often fall into the “I know I’m right” trap we mentioned in Chapter 4. CIA director George Tenet did that when he expressed absolute confidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But experience