I wholeheartedly agree, but I also think it's an inevitability of removing religion.

It's not that I think people should be religious but that humans have the following proclivities:

- Mystical thinking

- Defensiveness against ideas that threaten the ego at the individual scale

- Slowness or lag against canonizing new information

- Poor introspection

A current day example of many of those attributes are many of the intellectual liberals of my generation whom are ironically quite conservative in the true sense of the word, just not in the way that most visualize conservatism. Challenge any ideas that they consider to be common sense, especially if they are ordained by authority figures, and they speak as if you have committed blasphemy against the holy church. It doesn't even matter if you agree with them on 99% of points; there's something wrong with you for disagreeing with The Science.

Experts themselves fall prey to these flaws. As someone who is freaking obsessed with nutrition and digestive science, it's baffling how many authority figures ignore information that either doesn't support the establishment or doesn't support a theory that their ego is riding upon. I can't help but conclude that the current axioms around human health are legging at least 20 years behind where they should be.

This is why I use science as a compass, and why it's not something I simply just believe in. Science isn't even designed to be a system of belief. Belief can only come from within, and society gets closer to the truth faster when there's a confluence of true individual belief, not because everyone believes in a system.

The mistake we've made IMO is the mindset that, by simply dumping knowledge on people, they will make better decisions and be smarter. In other words, the greatest tragedy of our time is in telling people they are smarter than they actually are without requiring any sort or rigor before they can reach that level of "smartness", if you will.

How else would "believe in the science" work if we didn't remove religion and didn't essentially tell people they are smart enough to understand enough science that they can believe in it? We threw science at the masses, from intelligent to mentally-challenged, and they turned into a cargo cult.

In fact, I often find intellectuals to be worse in this regard because the rationalization of cognitive dissonance requires intelligence. Many intellectuals will do anything to defend The Science os the one true way to examine anything, often turning philosophy into some sort of historic curiosity that shouldn't really be taken seriously once you've passed your humanities prerequisites in college. At least Forrest Gump would have the openness to consider the meaning that "Life is a box of chocolates". Some intellectuals would scoff and spend time coming up with reasons to conclude that life is entirely predictable, often not even to consider an idea themselves but to use the other party as a neuron-treadmill.

> Obviously, knee-jerk doubt is no better than knee-jerk trust, but there needs to be a balance,

If the knee-jerk leads to everyone running off a cliff, I fail to see how knee-jerks are "obviously" preferable to essentially doing nothing. There are problems that resolve faster without intervention, or are at least not made worse when people don't do what they think is obvious. It's obvious to many that if you get stabbed that the first step is to pull the knife out, but immediately pulling the knife out can make an already bad situation 100x worse.

Certainly, there must be trust, or else you don't have a society. Trust doesn't come from condescension or having information withheld. That can work for a period of time, but isn't sustainable, just as most despotic dictatorships don't last long in the 21st century (American invasions notwithstanding) in the face of another regime or a revolution. With a globalized world that efficiently propagates information, you can't proselytize The Science without a significant number of people disagreeing for any number of reasons. The only way for The Science to get its way is to suppress the scientific process and to cut individuals off from information channels for their own good.

I'm pessimistic. The Science is too profitable from all angles. Ironically, it's becoming the next step in religiosity. We went from many gods with specific roles to believing in one more amorphous and omnipresent God to an even more abstract system that doesn't specifically describe any universal truth. When the people know too much, religiosity has to become murkier in order to survive. Science turned out to be a superior host for religiosity because, the more research you read, the more you realize you don't know; black holes and white holes of knowledge can be manufactured at will.

Skepticism has become a tainted idea, in my eyes, and too often becomes "The Skepticism", but it is the only way forward that I think there may be, at least for individuals. They have to understand that skepticism doesn't mean knee-jerk disbelieving in everything but that gnosis is arrived at from both questioning and faith, or not having a position in an idea until a position is justified.

We have to choose to teach this as a virtue to our children. But will we do so?