Christians (depending on the variety) must resist a whole plethora of temptations ranging from eating bacon, having premarital sex, drinking alcohol or coffee, and just about every other wonderful experience out there. While most skeptics wouldn’t have a problem with any of those, we have our own share of temptations. Okay there’s only a few that comes to mind.

First is the temptation to accept the burden of proof. However, the burden of proof lies with the person who makes the positive assertion (i.e. UFOs/big foot/my god exists or my alternative medicine/holographic bracelet/snake oil works), not with the person who doesn’t buy into it. It’s easy to get sucked in when you want to save people from themselves, such as when they buy the latest in snake oil (i.e Power Balance) or when you’re in a discussion with someone and you question the efficacy of the art they’re a practitioner or customer of and they challenge you to research it. The research isn’t all that difficult and neither is formulating arguments, but it’s not your responsibility. Besides, if you ask them for evidence to back up their claims it will have more impact on them than if you just present them with the list of relevant articles or report that your search yielded nothing.

Next, you need to be very specific with your question and what your standards of evidence are. If you just ask for papers from peer-reviewed journals and reject some for not being the right kind, the author not having sufficient credentials, or the journal being of questionable repute then you would be setting yourself up for accusations of moving the goal posts. As lay people, most of us aren’t qualified to fully evaluate the evidence, so its often easier to evaluate the source. When addressing such claims as alternative medicine be careful with potential placebo effects and don’t settle for effects that are indistinguishable from the placebo, but again be specific.

The final one is to over state things. The moment you make a positive claim (it doesn’t exist/work) verses a statement of skepticism (I haven’t seen enough/any evidence to support it’s existence/efficacy) you now are in the position of needing to provide evidence to support your claims. If you have the time and energy to do a thorough investigation then feel free to do this, otherwise stick to the other approach.

These temptations can be quite strong and I fell victim in the past week in a discussion on Facebook. The problem with skepticism done poorly is it just makes you look like an ass.