Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detection Kit

I am a true blue believer in the spiritual worldview. But I must admit that I like Michael Shermer. He is a skeptic about spiritual truth claims and confident that science can explain all human phenomena. His contributions to the video series, “The Question of God,” were significant and pointed. I like his style.

He has posted at his website a video that unwraps his Baloney Detection Kit, listing ten questions we must ask of every explanation offered to us.

I am enormously interested in the biological aspects of spirituality. The question is how much of what we describe as spiritual experience is actually biological phenomena. My response to that question is two-fold. One, much more than we have guessed. Two, how little science as we know it can explain human experience – love, worship, self-concious, the location of the connection between body and mind, etc.

The world I belong to is evangelicalism. It is my heritage, and I am emotionally comfortable with it. I am also an intellectual convert to its power of explanation. However, on a regular basis I am embarrassed by its credulity and susceptibility to views and explanations that are clearly off the wall. While it does not on a regular basis find the Virgin Mary showing up on grilled cheese sandwiches, it does flirt with marginal and extreme movements that are not grounded in serious thinking and rational analysis. There is an anti-intellectualism of which it is sometimes even proud.

But evangelicalism is capable of producing serious thinkers who do an admirable job of not only defending a spiritual worldview but a worldview that centers on the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This brand of Chritianity has taught me not to fear the skeptic but welcome him in the conviction that whatever is true will be able to answer all questions posed to it. The more intelligent the questions asked, the more oportunity there is to deepen my faith in Jesus.