When considering information, it is prudent and advisable to have a healthy skepticism, but that skepticism itself must be rationally grounded, every bit as much as we want the given information to have been sourced and processed in a rational manner. We want to have a good sense of rational skepticism, and avoid the lure of irrational skepticism. Rational skepticism helps us use reason and logic to evaluate what we are given. Irrational skepticism, at its worst, avoids reason and logic and becomes an insulator against enlightenment so that we might reject entirely valid rationally derived information.
Rational skepticism helps science progress and self-correct, ideally, as we continually observe and consider. Our theories and models are thusly mutable, as for instance, Newton's gravitation became supplanted by Einstein's. Irrational skepticism hinders the furthering of knowledge, as widely accepted information tends to be entirely dismissed in favour of poorly supported reports, speculations, or suppositions.
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Anonymous2010-07-02 5:14
Rational skepticism has made it difficult to accept a great many popular ideas, and may therefore disappoint us. For instance, the evidence for bigfoot creatures, astrology, and psychic powers is not very compelling. Irrational skepticism allows us to feel privy to special knowledge, and can help us keep confident in our view of how things are, while people who are supposedly smarter than us don't seem so smart after all.
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Anonymous2010-07-02 5:16
We can accept nonsense when that nonsense is sold to us as some sort of defense against wrong knowledge. Irrational skepticism is dangerously attractive, because it permits us to concentrate on being skeptical towards information that we already steadfastly believe is not true, regardless of what an analysis based in reason and logic would tell us. For instance, we might dismiss the well supported and robust information surrounding evolution of species, the relative risks of vaccinating versus not vaccinating against diseases, and even the historical fact of manned exploration of the moon.
Through irrational skepticism, we can, ironically, have gullible disbeliefs.
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Anonymous2010-07-02 6:08
Here's something that many have placed at my feet.
Science, atheism and competing religious factions.
[History]
Catholic religion first got rolling by believers going into villages, listening to what the locals had to say, integrating what was said into their own religion and then preaching it back to the locals. Ergo, locals then converted to Catholicism. Your typical persuasion tactics for selling any idea.
So my question is, if I study religion from many factions, question and listen to many atheists, and pool many scientific studies and communicate with many scientists...could I not then integrate them all into one working medium and preach it back to the world?
What would the result be?
World Unification?
Who knows?
It doesn't exist now, but it might later. I used to not exist, but now I do. If this process can work for me it can work for this idea as I was just an idea before I became a reality. The only one who has the balls to do it...is me.