Think For Yourself
This morning on my commute I passed a truck that had this slogan cut into a steel ladder attached to the bed: "No God. No Master. Think for yourself." I don't have a picture, because I was driving. I guess this is a somewhat common saying among atheists. But it also suggested a question: where do you draw the line? At some point, presumably, you have to take someone's word for something, or be willing to learn from a professor, mentor, teacher, or someone who has more experience or knowledge than you do (what you might call a "master"). You can hardly expect everyone to independently rebuild the entirety of human knowledge from scratch. At least, not if you want humanity to move forward. The more advanced we get, the more we rely on the masters of the past: the more we have to just take their hard work and discoveries as assumptions to base our work on. It's not that they can never be questioned, but there's always a baseline level of belief in thos