Is it True?

This morning at breakfast I was reading the latest Sports Illustrated. There was a small article about research on football players. It is common knowledge that professional football players have remarkably shorter lifespans than the typical males in our culture. Their life expectancy is about 58. This startling statistic has been around for years. According the the SI article, it is not true. A researcher looked at a study group and determined that, in fact, their mortality rates were far lower than expected. This includes suicide (something on the radar with the widely publicized suicides of a couple former NFL all stars). How did the bad statistic get out? No one is sure. Like numerous stories of this kind, they just seem to appear and get repeated over and over. A similar case, drink 8 glasses of water a day, is also not true. And the list goes on and on.

Ironically, we live in a time of increased information and, statistically, we can assume that a certain amount of that information is not accurate. Some falsehoods are so ingrained in our collective "knowledge base" that it may be impossible to get rid of if. For example, it is common (mis)knowledge that Columbus sailed out to prove the world was not flat. Ancients were dumb and thought they lived on a giant square. I remember reading some Thomas Aquinas (12th C) and being startled to see he did not think the world was flat. I was more surprised that most ancients thought the same. How then did it become common knowledge? Writers a couple hundred years ago fabricated it, in part to show the ignorance of the Dark Ages (= Middle Ages = Christian faith).

Some errors are intentional. I hear that Pom (the Pomegrantate juice) is not as good for you as they claim. I recently heard that blueberries have been overhyped. Everyone remembers the great 'egg controversy' of several years ago.

The problem with statistics is that we cannot always be sure that the measures are accurate. When they are accurate, we do not know if they are accurate about something that matters. Baseball is currently undergoing a huge shift in statistical assessment. Some of the popular measures have ended up being accurate, but simply not as helpful to measure a player' effectiveness as was thought (for a hundred years!).

It is hard to know what is true. Once a well accepted 'fact' turns out to be false, the question arises, "well how do I know the correction is true?" It is one reason we live in a skeptical age. It is also why faith wavers. It is part of the post-modern dilemma. While I understand the questions surrounding Christian faith, I think it only fair to counter that the Un-faith is equally open to the skeptics' sharp inquiries. So, we need to doubt our doubts as well. After all, can the same media which regularly passes on the newest (erroneous) statistics be trusted when it blasts the ancient faith?