Intellectual Humility: A Guiding Principle For The Skeptical Movement?

[Sal]

"It is a pity that the ignorant are always so certain whereas the wise are so full of doubt."

I think that anyone who studies the world with an open mind learns to be humble.

Scientists learn how conclusions that seem completely proven by evidence can fall apart nonetheless. History shows that much of what we hold to be true today will seem laughable in the future.

Historians see that systems and ideologies which their adherents took to be inevitable to human nature pass away with time.

Religious people see that there are good people in other religions, and that their own religion doesn't guarantee goodness.

Atheists discover that the views of religious issues they had when they became atheists are overly simple.

The trouble is that people are only tenuously and sporadically rational. All these groups of people hold to their beliefs with more passion than is justified, and filter evidence to suit their preferences. Humility is always justified, and rarely accepted.

1. Children, from the onset, already have open minds. I forget who said it, kids display a level of honest inquiry not so dissimilar from natural philosophers & researchers/scientists, paraphrasing. You can guess how closed minds come about.

2. The former is easy; anyone that's honest with themselves knows the error-correction we constantly make, and not only in scientific theory, but also in daily life. Also, I think you have a misapprehension about what a scientific model is. It's not so much that a model is wrong, for the most part, rather that we correct them to better fit the available evidence. Secondly, if history has taught us anything, it's the provision that comes with any view, which might later seem laughable. Such as an observation Eric Weinstein made about supposedly smart people, which was that for centuries, people carried their luggage. It wasn't until someone got the not-so-genius idea to put wheels under their luggage, that they realized a better way to move their luggage, and today we take that for granted.

3. Is this another one of those credulous ideas that we have to respect people's point-of-view of old times from their vantage point? This might work for historical purposes, to better understand their systems and ideologies, but does nothing for us now. We know better now, and I have no doubt in my mind with further discovery, inventions and overall advancement, that we will know better still in the future.

4. BuuuuUUUuuuullshit. Show me a consensus that shows this for the average believer for various faiths across the board. Not only are no two faiths the same, they also think that they, particularly, have the special sauce. This type of thinking excludes the possibility of granting errors on their own, and imposes on them the thinking that everyone else is wrong. Think about it in a memetic evolutionary way: The wishy-washy faiths without copying and survival mechanisms built into their tenets died out, being replaced by those faiths that did have those mechanisms. Religions can only survive as mind viruses.

5. Maybe for the lucky atheists that weren't brought up with a faith being shoved into their face every Sunday. Try that same shit with an apostate, you'll get a different response.

6. We are emotional first. Reasoning is built upon a skewy layer of emotions. It's easy to see why too when comparing a decision based on emotion and one on reason. The decision behind, e.g. choosing between 10 different flavors of ice cream takes way too long trying to reason about it, when with an emotion (of I like that particular taste better or whatever other criteria) it takes no time at all. I wouldn't be quick to dismiss emotional responses. With that said, you can't use in a meaningful way, e.g. what path is the shortest between 2 points with emotions, and that's where reason plays its part of an analytical approach. It's with humility that we are able to accept errors on our own part. Faiths hijack this.