Feminists and male-supremacists; xenophobes, racists, and ethnocentric people- nepotists in general- have an important thing in common: they are intellectually dishonest.

Why does this matter? Intellectual honesty, like common sense, is an invaluable trait that is actually quite uncommon. Its value derives from the fact that it prevents cognitive dissonance, which has been shown time and again to be the most painful experience humans can have.

Cognitive dissonance can be described as follows: if one doesn’t normally do or believe something, and then is put into a position where they must, cognitive dissonance arises. The person has to try to convince themselves that it was alright to do or believe it just that once, that it was the lesser of two evils, or something along those lines.

A prime example can be found on page 9 of the Dec 08/ Jan 09 Scientific American Mind , where the article claims “Soldiers who have taken a life defend Iraq War more.” These people would not normally kill a person, so they convince themselves that the war effort was worth that sacrifice. A soldier who hadn’t killed anyone would be much less biased in their thinking. Cognitive dissonance at its finest. Some people may feel that physical pain is worse, but people continuously refuse even to approach cognitive dissonance, whereas they feel pain is sometimes a necessary evil.

That said, I’d like to object to a number of especially glaring cases of intellectual dishonesty.

1: Some claim that “history is his-story.” WRONG. History is not HIS-story, per se . The word is originally from the Arabic “istoora” [lit.: a group of lines, i.e. on paper], which became “history” and “story” (both formerly meant the same thing). In the 14th century, Ibn Khaldoun’s pioneering made a dichotomy between research-supported stories and others; Renaissance Europeans arbitrarily used history to mean the research-supported ones.

But, I will grant the fact that the research was mostly conducted by men, through men, and for male audiences, so there was male bias, but they didn’t flat out lie, and even if they did, it’s literally impossible to do that and get away with it nowadays because of peer review. Before Ibn Khaldoun’s methods were widely accepted, one couldn’t confirm whether what was said was true or not. But nowadays, one can.

2: Some claim that evolution is “just a theory.” WRONG. “Just a theory” is an oxymoron, for a theory is the highest level of acceptance a scientific paradigm can achieve. Medicine is based on germ “theory”, transportation is based on “theories” of internal combustion and controlled explosions, “climate change” is a theory that no one debates (the debate is over whether it poses any risk to Earth or humanity) and the list goes on. The point is that theories are rigorously tested and only become theories after being well-supported, and they could always be tweaked or changed, but are quite unlikely to be overhauled.

Two key examples are what Einstein did to Newtonian physics and what Mendel did to Darwinian evolution: provided additional support for the gist of the theories by changing some important details. Einstein introduced relativity and made gravity much more understandable, whereas Mendel introduced genetics and made natural selection much more understandable. What more does an intellectually honest person need?

3: Some claim that religions are just as viable as science. WRONG. These are the very people that deride intellectually honest people by saying they worship “science” the way fundamentalists worship a deity. Science and religion are often pitted against each other because they answer the same question in different ways. Religions by default believe an explanation on the authority of the “founders,” “fathers,” or “prophets”. This is a logical fallacy and, as such, defines intellectual dishonesty.

And don’t get me started on the god of the gaps fallacy, which adds more premises and assumptions to an argument without really explaining anything- a direct contradiction to Ockham’s Razor, i.e. the notion that the explanation that makes the least assumptions (and thus tends to have the least steps) is most likely true. It’s logic is sound (especially when one takes into account the laws of entropy) and therefore it is almost universally accepted by non-quacks.

Science tries to figure out what happens in nature and how it happens. After extensive research, experimentation, peer review, and independent confirmation, these descriptions and explanations become scientific laws and theories, respectively. So, comparing the methods of science and religion is akin to the proverbial apples and oranges. This time, the apples are rotten and the oranges are freshly picked.

This said, religion is an unfortunate paradox for intellectual honesty. The usefulness of intellectual honesty is to prevent cognitive dissonance. But in order to be intellectually honest and reject irrational, illogical, and dishonest fear- and faith-based religions, one must endure the largest amount of cognitive dissonance they likely will ever encounter. That is why most people get to a point and drop out of such ventures as philosophy, theology, and the like.