This issue is much easier to resolve than by way of the thousands of words the article's author used.
What a layman calls "skepticism", a scientist called the "null hypothesis." The null hypothesis says that an idea with no supporting evidence is assumed to be false. So in science, and to a skeptic, until there's evidence, there's no justification for taking an idea seriously.
To someone not trained in science (the "sheep"), an idea is true until there's contrary evidence. To a scientist (the "goat") by contrast, an idea is false util there's supporting evidence.
A sheep believes in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and UFO visitations only because these ideas haven't been disproven, but they cannot be disproven -- that would require proof of a negative, an impossible evidentiary burden. This explains most of the really weird things people believe.
The remedy is skepticism, a healthy intellectual posture that awaits evidence. That's why I'm still a skeptic.
Fair enough, but I think (a) skeptics aren't necessarily a group, and (b) perhaps skeptics should stand up and be counted as individuals. This view might not seem important in a society in which religious True Believers keep to themselves, or evolution deniers don't form their own political movements and try to change what's taught in school, but we don't live in that society.
Pollsters regularly tally up voting blocs based on the views people are willing to express -- like the religious, and like those who reject a scientific outlook. If skeptics don't ever speak up, society might miss the fact that the outlook even exists.
The problem is that people who are uncritically accepting stuff they have no actual proof for, yet who see themselves as skeptics, are able to convince themselves that they are merely engaged in rational thought when they are not.
As an example I offer http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine/... by Sam Harris. Absolutely none of his moral claims make any sense without first accepting parts of his moral view that he fails to even question. In fact he uses an unquantified quantity called "well being" as justification for his theory. Yet the only scientifically supported definition for well being for living things is "evolutionarily successful". And by that measure, being religious and scientifically ignorant is very good for you!
Yet his reasoning is utterly compelling to himself, Richard Dawkins, and many other "skeptics".
What a layman calls "skepticism", a scientist called the "null hypothesis." The null hypothesis says that an idea with no supporting evidence is assumed to be false. So in science, and to a skeptic, until there's evidence, there's no justification for taking an idea seriously.
To someone not trained in science (the "sheep"), an idea is true until there's contrary evidence. To a scientist (the "goat") by contrast, an idea is false util there's supporting evidence.
A sheep believes in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and UFO visitations only because these ideas haven't been disproven, but they cannot be disproven -- that would require proof of a negative, an impossible evidentiary burden. This explains most of the really weird things people believe.
The remedy is skepticism, a healthy intellectual posture that awaits evidence. That's why I'm still a skeptic.