“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.”

Then, in A Scandal in Bohemia (1892), Mr. Holmes expands a little with:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

The capital mistake is to try to fit the data to your pre-existing idea rather than letting the data form your model. To do the former leads to biased judgments and twisted facts – square pegs rammed into round holes. It is a distortion of reality and a fundamental method of disseminating lies and half-truths. Learning to recognize this is one of the components of becoming proficient at critical thinking.

A helpful concise discussion of an example of where this has occurred was recently published by Gary DeMar over at the American Vision website. It is brief enough and instructive enough to quote in full here:

Charles Babbage (1791–1871), an English scientist and mathematician who conceptualized the idea of a programmable computer, understood that scientists were often guilty of manipulating evidence to add credibility to a theory. Babbage described three types of misconduct: forging (the outright invention of data), trimming (the cosmetic ‘massaging’ of data, so as to display them to best advantage), and cooking (discreetly losing the data that were out of line or did not help the hypothesis).[1] A careful and practiced eye will be on the alert for attempts to manipulate the evidence to support a preconception of a theory.

Misleading people on any given topic is made easier if the general public is ignorant on a subject or does not have the inclination or the ability to check the facts. John Adams is all the rage with his own HBO special based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book John Adams. In the past, Adams and other founding fathers have been used to support any number of views. For example, Barbara Ehrenreich ’s article “Why the Religious Right is Wrong” succeeds because it takes advantage of our nation’s historical ignorance. “[John] Adams,” she writes, “once described the Judeo-Christian tradition as ‘the most bloody religion that ever existed.’”[2] As we will see, Ehrenreich trims and cooks the historical record and then hides her tracks by not referencing the Adams citation or offering anything else he said on the subject. How would she explain, for example, what Adams wrote in his Diary dated July 26, 1796?

The Christian religion is, above all the Religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern Times, the Religion of Wisdom, Virtue, Equity, and humanity, let the Blackguard [Thomas] Paine say what he will; it is Resignation to God, it is Goodness itself to Man.[3]

There is no need to reconcile this diary entry with Ehrenreich’s “trimmed” citation. Her Adams “quotation” is pulled out of context from a series of letters which he wrote to Judge F. A. Van der Kemp on issues relating to religion and politics. Adams actually stated, “As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.”[4] In this letter, Adams defended biblical revelation against its many corruptions, certainly a worthy and needed enterprise, but Ehrenreich’s cooked and trimmed citation is a gross misrepresentation of his views. Levi Anthony cites Ehrenreich’s clipped citation in his article “God in the Classroom” without questioning its validity. She can get away with this because of the general ignorance of Americans when it comes to American history. I’m interested to see Mark Bauerlein’s new book The Dumbest Generation who “finds nearly six in 10 17-year-olds can’t place the Civil War in the second half of the 19th century.”[5]

Check out David Diefendorf’s Amazing . . . But False! There’s even some historical flim-flam in this book. Without an accurate knowledge of history, we are at the mercy of professional “mythstorians” who continually pull the historical wool over our eyes so they can promote a destructive social, scientific, and political agenda as Al Gore is attempting to do with his global warming hysteria, claiming that anyone who does not agree that global warming is man-made is akin to those who believed in a flat earth. Gore is as ignorant of the history of a belief in a flat earth.

1. Walter Gratzer, The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), vii.

2. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Why the Religious Right Is Wrong,” Time (September 7, 1992), 72.

3. John Adams, The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L.H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), 3:233–334.

4. Letter to F. A. Van der Kemp, December 27, 1816. See Norman Cousins, ed., ‘In God We Trust’: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 104–105.

5. Greg Topp, “Dummy ‘drumbeat’ goes on,” USA Today (February 26, 2008), 5D.