I don’t want to be misunderstood. I think skepticism is a good thing. A person should be skeptical by nature. But as with everything, the extremists have given skepticism a bad name. Taken to the extreme, a person can be skeptical to a fault, to the point that the person becomes closedminded. And more often than not, such a person, and I have met more than a few, becomes condescending in their skepticism, looking down on those who believe something they do not (which is damn near everything). Such uber-skeptics love to break out Occam’s Razor. This is the principle that states that the simplest explanation to any problem is in most cases the correct one. Well, let us apply Mr. Occam’s shaving tool to the discovery of that giant wolf track recently reported thereupon. The Amarok is a beast of Inuit legend, a gigantic wolf. This footprint would seem to indicate weighty evidence that the Amarok might just exist, and not just as a myth.
Occam’s Razor, then. What is the simplest explanation, here? That the Amarok is a living Direwolf, supposedly extinct but still extant? Or is the Amarok a supernatural entity, a being of spirit, as the Inuit maintain? Two fantastical solutions. If we must choose between the two, applying the Razor, which is more probable?
This one may well make an uber-skeptic’s head explode.
