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WHAT TO BELIEVE?

by Ed Ross

April 15, 2006

With all the contradictory information available today, it’s becoming harder and harder to know what to believe. Aside from the sheer volume of information, increasingly we are flooded with information on the subjects of history, politics, religion, and science that confuses rather than enlightens us. History is changed daily by research and discoveries that at once expands our knowledge and overturns what we thought we knew. Politics has always been about people with different points of view, but today’s communication technology and sophisticated messages focus on bold conflicting claims rather than informing people on the substance of the issues. Religion finds itself no less vulnerable to confusion. New books and movies (fiction and non-fiction) challenge the pillars of traditional religious faith. And when it comes to science, where you would think things would be a bit more clearly defined, it seems that every new scientific study that informs of us one cause and effect relationship is followed by another that contradicts or challenges it.

Not just historians, but anthropologists, archeologists, paleontologists, and a host of other disciplines are rapidly redefining the history of our planet. Together they have reexamined just about everything we ever learned in our elementary and high school history books and redefined people, places, and events in new and different ways. Heroes have become villains. Stories about people and relationships we once held as fact have been disproved.

Once, new information like this would be published in books and would be slow in finding its way into the broader public domain. But today’s cable television networks are full of channels that carry stories about new discoveries and reinterpretations of events nightly. Whether its programs about the ancient Egyptians or dinosaurs, the Crusades or the Civil War, more information like this is available today than can possibly be absorbed by any one person. And even what can be absorbed is not always accepted. If you’ve grown up on a diet of cowboy and Indian movies and believed that George Armstrong Custer was a brave and noble soldier, you might find it difficult to accept that when he met Sitting Bull at the Little Bighorn the Sioux had better rifles, were better led, and the last stand was a total route.

In the world of American politics, it’s even harder to discern fact from fiction. Retail politics, actually meeting the voters one at a time, is becoming a lost art. In order to reach the largest possible number of voters, candidates spend millions of dollars running thirty-second campaign ads on television. These ads are not intended to inform the voters on issues, only to create a positive image about the candidate and a negative image about his opponent. Most voters are predisposed to believe good things about their candidate and bad things about the other guy. Genuine independents and moderates in the middle are left to sort through all the hype and misinformation to find the truth.

With religion, particularly Christianity, there’s a different problem. When the movie The DaVinci Code opens next month it will tell a story, based on the best selling novel by Dan Brown, that offers a whole new perspective on the role of the Catholic Church in art and history and on what most Christians believe about Christ himself. Brown’s book is only a novel, and a good one based a series of compelling fictional assertions, but its only one of numerous fiction and non-fiction books about Christ and Christianity that challenges fundamental beliefs.

There’s also been a renaissance of sorts in the study of the 16 early gospels that were rejected by the Church in the 4th Century and excluded from the Bible, like the Gospel of Judas. Some scholars find in these texts a whole new perspective on the life and death of Christ and the history of the Church. Whatever their value as historical or theological texts, however, the frequency with which they are debated by theologians in television documentaries and adapted to fictional books and movies spreads confusion about their true meaning. Much of what is written about them in the press is both wrong and misleading.

Then there are all the scientific and medial studies that are published on a regular basis that can not help but confuse. An active debate continues among paleontologists about whether or not the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago because a large meteor struck the earth. No one disputes the meteor; they just disagree on whether it caused a mass extinction. Things are worse in medicine. Studies that state, “Long term cell phone use causes brain cancer.” Followed by, “Study finds no link between cell phone use and brain cancer.” My favorite is “red wine reduces cholesterol buildup in arteries.” This study has been in and out of vogue several times. Currently it’s in. Also there’s the debate over global warming. One group of scientists says that data on weather patterns and the rate that glaciers are melting proves that global warming is a fact. Another group of scientists argue the opposite. They say earth’s weather changes in cycles driven by Sun spot activity. Currently the advocates for global warming appear to have the upper hand, but don’t be so sure they will ultimately win the argument.

If all this isn’t confusing enough, there are two competing theories about what this all means. One theory holds that the proliferation of information technology and the Internet makes it impossible for the purveyors of propaganda and misinformation to hold sway. The truth will always be available to anyone who searches for it. No one will be able to suppress it. The countervailing theory holds that you can overwhelm the truth. You can redefine it, shape it, make it hard to find. Which theory will prove to be true? You decide.