The importance of critical thinking

Earlier this week a man stabbed my father in the back and took his money. The incident caused him to lose some of the sensation in his lower body.

This actually happened to my dad, and I will come back to it at the end of this post.

Fair warning, this post will be unlike my typical posts. It stems from a question I recently received from a faithful member who was thinking about a criticism against the prophet Joseph Smith. The question centered on a claim that all of the letters of the English alphabet and Arabic numbers can be found in the 'Anthon transcript.' Here is a picture of what we'll call 'the claim' (sorry for the poor quality, this is how it came to me):

 

On its surface, this isn't even a very worrisome criticism. Even if this claim were true, I could easily see how a marginally-literate farmer might transcribe foreign characters in a way that resembles the English characters they already know. 

However, I'm not willing to simply accept this claim as factual until I look into it myself.  Not surprisingly, once we investigate, the claim begins to unravel.  

I'd also point out that referring to the document as the "Anthon Transcript" suggests that this was the actual document Martin Harris took to Charles Anthon. It almost certainly wasn't. (Read more about that here and here.) The characters in the image above all come from the so-called 'Caractors document' shown below.

Applying critical thinking skills to investigate the claim

Oxford defines critical thinking as "the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment" (source).

In order to determine how serious I should take this criticism, I went through the images in the claim above to find them in the 'Caractors document.'

'A', 'B', and 'C' as presented look pretty similar to what we would write, so that's interesting. 

But then look at 'D' as presented in the claim.

Is that how you write a D? Of course not, but it is certainly vaguely D-shaped. If I tell you I'm going to show you a 'D' and then I show this image, you'll probably not stop to question why it has those extra markings along the left-hand side.


Let's keep going. This is where we start to find dishonesty in how this is presented. Here's E as shown in the claim:

That looks like an 'E', but what they don't tell you is that you won't find this character in the document. You can find this character in the middle of the second row:

That looks a lot less like an E, doesn't it? Why didn't the author of this claim mention that the image was rotated? It gets worse. Notice how the bottom line runs to the right edge of the image? Why is that? Well, that is because the entire character isn't included as it appears in the document. The whole thing looks like this:

Let's all just agree that the character as it appears in the document looks nothing like an E.

So in order to create an 'E', the person who authored this claim took a lot of liberties and didn't mention what they were doing. They are relying on the reader to accept the claim at face value rather than looking into it. Why not mention cropping and rotating the image?

Well, it wasn't mentioned because it would significantly weaken the claim they are trying to make. As you'll see below, any set of characters, if sufficiently large and varied, can be cropped and rotated into the English alphabet.

This isn't an apologetics blog, but I've seen too many good people have their faith weakened by claims which are disingenuous, so I thought it important to put this on display.

At this point, in my opinion, the claim becomes a non-serious one, and the source of the claim becomes "generally untrustworthy." That means any other criticism put forth by this person should be met with a high degree of skepticism. Anyone who desires to be taken seriously should outline materials and methods used to produce evidence. They should offer explanations as to why certain decision were made, and couch any conclusion in some degree of uncertainty, especially if this kind of procedure is required to produce the desired result.

Just for fun, we can keep going a little bit more, and you of course are welcome to carry this on further to your heart's content. :)

Here's 'G' as it actually appears on the document, before it was rotated 180 degrees:

H is shown as it appears in the document, but it has an extra comma-shaped component in the upper left. Here's 'I':

Cropped and flipped 180 degrees again. Doesn't look like any 'I' I've ever written.

And here are J and K in context:

Now that we've looked into this, we can better judge for ourselves if this claim should be taken seriously. I personally focus my attention on sources and claims which do their best to maintain a high degree of intellectual honesty, and I don't find that in this claim.

Setting up a control

One method I use to reality check a critical claim is to compare it to a control. For example, can we find the English alphabet in the Japanese writing system known as Hiragana?

If I tried to write out some of these symbols from Hiragana (from a Japanese writing system I am totally unfamiliar with), I might use English characters as a guide for some. For example, 'no' looks like a backwards rotated lower-case 'e', 'tsu' resembles a 'c' that is backwards, 'shi' is a backwards 'J', 'ku' is a 'V' turned on its side, 'hi' is a lot like a 'U', 'he' is a rotated 'L'.  These examples are easy to see, and I didn't even have to crop any characters.

There are only so many different ways to combine straight and curved lines, and our minds are hard-wired to find meaning in visual input, so we automatically see letters and symbols we know in foreign characters.  This is similar to the phenomenon of seeing animals in clouds.

So what about your dad getting stabbed?

At the start of this post, I made a completely factually accurate set of statements to get your attention (and mislead you).  The thing is, the 'stabbing' happened in a surgery center. The loss of sensation was intentionally caused by numbing medicine used during the procedure. The 'man' happened to be a very skilled physician.

Taking innocuous things and turning them into seemingly nefarious things is not difficult, especially if you are willing to play fast and loose with the facts. The take-home lesson is this:

Never outsource your critical thinking, especially to someone who is being disingenuous.

Don't allow someone else's conclusions to become your own until you've done some work to validate them.