Book review: "Age of Doubt" by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang (Eds)

November 27, 2025

I can remember the first time I met someone who doubted science. I was eleven years old and class 6OC from Eastwood Public School went on an excursion to the Coca Cola factory. On the production line, empty bottles first had a few cenitimetres of concentrated Coke added (although it would have been in inches in those days), then a layer of cold water to fill the bottle. Carbon dioxide was then forced in under pressure and the bottle cap was put on. The final step before packing the bottles for delivery was to rotate them a few times to mix the concentrate with the water.

I was driven home by the father of one of my friends. At one point on the drive he turned to me and said "Here's a question your science can't answer". Today, of course, I would reply that there are a lot of questions that science can't answer because if it could answer all questions it would stop.

The question: "Why doesn't the brown stuff settle to the bottom of the bottles?" I gave the only reply I could think of, "Because it's dissolved in the water", but this wasn't good enough.

Doubt about facts has always been with us. It's the foundation of skepticism - how do we know that what we "know" is true. The difference today is that the Internet and social media have provided platforms for anybody and everybody to express their opinions and express their doubts about almost everything. (Look for believers in a flat Earth on Facebook and see them ridiculing "globists" for believing that gravity exists. Do you know that clouds disprove gravity because they contain millions of tonnes of water and if gravity were real they would fall down?)

This book contains twenty-five essays by a range of writers about various case of baseless or even irrational doubt, and not just the science deniers. Sometimes with good reasons people doubt politicians, the media, corporations, the education system, doctors, scientists and any number of other things.

The book is divided into five parts, each dealing with areas of trust.

Part 1 asks "Trust, where has it gone?" and looks at the decay of trust and the effect of disinformation. Part 2 looks at the effect of doubt on democracy when we don't know who to trust in our legislatures. Part 3, "Trust and the messengers", looks at the obvious effect of an untrustworthy media where we see, hear and read opinion dressed up as facts and what we might be able to do about it. Part 4 addresses the problem of untrustworthy corporations and Part 5 considers the future and what we might do to make things better.

Every article comes with a comprehensive set of references (seventeen pages in total) plus a brief biography of each of the contributors. Part of building trust is providing just this sort of information, and without it the book would just be a collection of opinions. And we can get that any day of the week from the media, from politicians, from PR hacks at corporations and from "informed" pages on Facebook.

The book is highly recommended. You won't read it in a day and you don't have to read it in page order. Just jump in and read a random chapter and you will learn something.

Bathurst Library has a copy and you can get it by interlibrary loan.

About the editors

Tracey Kirkland is the Continuous News Editor at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Gavin Fang also works for the ABC as Editorial Director.