It had been a long time since I wandered away from the sceptical community: from going to conferences, going to lectures and subscribing to magazines. It wasn’t all to do with being in a room full of men all the time, but that was a factor. Besides, I’ve been busy. For fifteen years.

I had read that there was a sceptics’ group that met in a pub in London once a month. Now, there’s some cultural baggage here. I’m an immigrant to the UK, and it took me a little while to figure it out, but to some extent pubs are a guy thing. British men and women often socialise separately. Married couples split up with the lads going down the pub for a pint; and women have “girls’ nights out”, which can involve a pub, but in my circle tends to involve dinner and going to noisy nightclubs filled with people who appear very young.

Women can go into pubs in pairs or in packs, but only guys go into pubs alone. And since my partner was going to be looking after our kids, wherever I was going, I was going in alone.

The pub thing just wasn’t going to be the way I eased myself back into organised scepticism. As it turned out, it was the Skepchicks forum that provided a way back. A few months participating there assured me that even though I am not a scientist or an atheist, and despite the fact that I don’t have a beard like a quickset hedge, I could still be a sceptic.

With that in mind, I recalled that pubs could be fun places (with their effectively unlimited supplies of alcohol). I also remembered that the group on the Pub web site had women speakers (about two out of ten).

So one cold February night I took the train up to London to have a sceptics’ night out.

The King’s Head in Southwark is big, high-ceilinged and, in the early evening, filled with after-work regulars. It is also filled with smoke. Did I mention that smoking in pubs is legal in England? It will be until next year. Even after ten years in this country, my delicate Canadian ex-smoker nostrils are not happy with this.

The place also is, like every watering hole in London, infernally noisy. It would be hopeless to ask, “I beg your pardon but where do I find the sceptics?” so I shout “STELLA!” to order the default English pub drink (i.e. Stella Artois: Belgian, fizzy, and high in alcohol). Then I lean against a wall and try to figure out who the sceptics are.

No dice.

On a trip to the ladies’ room, I discovered a stairway and noticing feet tramping upwards, I followed. There it was. A room set up for a lecture with a couple of bearded geeks already in their seats steadfastly not talking to each other.

There was, however, an organiser who had social skills and a New Zealand accent who was shaking my hand, predicting the arrival of food, and telling me to introduce myself around.

I have to say, for about ten minutes it was all pretty unpromising. Perfectly peaceable gentlemen would wander in, seeking only a quiet moment before the evening’s presentation, and this great loud hoyden with a North American accent would introduce herself and begin chattering semi-random pleasantries until another victim wandered in.

Food and a crowd arrived at about the same time. Coincidence? I think not.

A thin (beardless) intense looking man I had been talking to was now being lectured on the historicity of Jesus by a man even louder than I am. By the time I had a plate of onion rings, there were five other women in the room…along with the thirty or so men.

The upstairs room was non-smoking, which was a relief, but all the cool kids jammed into the stairway to smoke, so I ended up second-hand-French-inhaling half a pack of somebody’s cigarettes, but it was worth it for the conversation.

The presenter was Dr. Matt Morgan, an American Air Force scientist with a background in chemistry who gave a talk called “The Noahic Flood: Why Creationists Need it, and How They ‘Prove’ it Happened.” Dr. Morgan began with a disclaimer. The “M Word” was off-limits. This meant that any explanation that something was a “miracle” was pointless in a scientific examination.

I had a problem with this. If a religious explanation of the origins of the universe begins with creation of the universe from primordial nothingness or chaos or the ruins of previous universes or whatever, then it seems to me that miraculous explanations have to be part of the vocabulary of discussion. Trying to explain Noah’s flood purely in terms of science is … well, it is exactly what a whole stack of web sites try to do. Dr. Morgan had a whole stack of quotations from web sites which attempt in a very earnest and silly way to explain the Flood in terms of science without using the “M Word”.

Most of these web sites tried to do things like explain how millions of species of animal, or even hundreds of thousands of “types” of animal, could fit into a box displacing only 43,470 cubic metres. They tried to explain the source of all the water that would cover the Earth’s land masses to anything more than ankle depth.

A noisy man in the back was heckling in a way I’d never seen before: rather than abusing the speaker, he was shouting abuse on the speaker’s behalf at the absent editors of creationist web sites. This, I thought, is a very different sort of audience.

The presentation was fun and informative, but there was a problem. It was all so negative. It’s really easy to take a bunch of ideas that we really don’t understand very well and mock them. In this case people actively attract mockery by posting web sites that are full of ideas without Biblical support: proposing a vast cloud layer as the source of the Flood’s water, for example. Calling attention to their lameness just seems sort of obnoxious, really. It’s like being Nelson Muntz on The Simpsons, existing solely to provide mocking laughter at others’ expense.

The following month’s speaker had an antidote to exactly this problem. Rob Lyons has a regular column, “Don’t Panic”, at spiked-online.com which debunks panic stories in the media. Rob’s presentation suggested that sceptics need to have a more positive outlook; rather than believe that we are constantly victims of fast food, evil marketing or other vague controlling influences, we need to believe in ourselves as human beings.

This was not what the crowd had come to hear. After breaking to refill our glasses (like most pubs, the wine was truly abominable, but admirably well-chilled), the questions focussed on Rob’s debunking work and why the press are so ready to print scare stories.

Now, let me propose an experiment. Take a room of intelligent sceptical people with a few drinks on board. Give them a simple multiple-choice examination:

Do you think the press publishes scare stories because:

A. Newspaper editors really believe in all that pseudoscience

B. Journalists can’t be bothered to check facts, and most of them are humanities graduates

C. Newspaper editors aren’t very bright

D. Scare stories are “news” and news sells newspapers and sales figures sell ads which is how newspapers do business

My hypothesis is that a reasonable number of people would choose D, even if they were on their third pints of Stella. They didn’t asking Rob to talk about debunking scare stories because they wanted to hear his answer, they wanted to participate in the comforting sceptical ritual of being nasty to people who aren’t as clever as we are.

My third trip to the pub was to hear Ben Radford. Regular Skepchick readers will have seen his article “Dissecting Barbie” in January which told us that women are not nearly as insecure about ourselves as we’ve been led to believe. When you look at his bio it becomes instantly clear that Ben is a real professional sceptic. He edits the Skeptical Equirer and Pensar and writes sceptical books and actually follows up sceptical issues as his full-time job.

Ben was talking about psychic detectives--not people who go to psychics and detect fakery, but psychics who claim to find missing people. There are a lot of them, tend to be women or gay men, and are absolutely useless at finding missing people. What they are good at is making a vague statement about where the missing person is (“close to water”) and then claiming to have been correct afterwards (“there was a glass of water nearby”).

Maybe it’s because the barmaid at the King’s Head views me as a regular now (and fills my glass a little more generously than the law requires). Maybe it’s because after a few visits people become friendlier. Maybe it’s because internet sceptical celebrity “teek” (a.k.a. “tkingdoll, ” “Tono Bungay” and “Ms January”) was talking the event up on various forums and a whole host of online sceptics came to see a real, live nude model. Maybe it’s Ben Radford’s general cuddliness and charisma, but the place was packed this time (46 people of whom 7 were women) and the dynamic was much more positive. Questions focussed on how police forces dealt with psychic “detectives” and why some practising psychics choose to go into this line of work while others do not. It wasn’t just gloating over how these people couldn’t psychically detect lost change behind a sofa.

We suburbanites can’t linger long in London after an evening’s fun. The last train back to the other side of the green belt is pumpkin time for us, and that cuts things short just as the discussion down in the smoky bit of the pub really gets going.

I keep going back, though.

The Skeptics in the Pub message for online sceptics is to be sceptical in real life (ideally in a place that serves food and drink) and to get people talking about your event online. The message for all sceptics is to believe in ourselves, to keep demanding proof wherever it’s needed, and to not turn into a pack of harpies sitting in the trees and screeching at the poor ignorant people below.

For upcoming Skeptics in the Pub events in London check http://www.skeptic.org.uk/pub/.

Dr Lynette Davidson lectures and writes on history. She lives in a charming market town in the south of England with her partner and two daughters.

ISSUE 5 CREDITS

Skepchick-in-Chief
Rebecca Watson

Managing Editor
Diane Perry

News Editor
Chani Overli

Contributing Writers
Lynette Davidson, Donna Druchunas, Chris Blohm, Jamila Bey-Greenhouse, Jesús Pineda, Benjamin Radford, Mike McRae, Ed Rabin

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"Flash Guru" Nick

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