Is it experts or "experts"?

Omni,Nice post. I think you make good points, but there is one point at which I disagree: I don't really think that the expert-skeptic streak "ameliorates ignorance" at all--I think we tend to attempt to latch on to what serves our goals first, and different people have differing degrees of ability and willingness to examine the value / validity of the facts and viewpoints they've latched onto.I'd suggest that our current views on "knowledge" and "expert", as it regards to areas where there are multiple "experts" who have differing views, are broken. "Knowledge" can't always be judged absolutely in terms of right / wrong or more supported / less supported. Usually what happens is that each theory has observations that support it, and observations that are problematic for it.I think a more useful way (and I discussed this briefly with RAZD in another thread) is to break things up by usefulness. Theories are more or less useful in accomplishing a goal, and that should be the criterion upon which they are judged.It means that, just like morals, we can't have an absolute "better" or "worse" judgement of two theories; we can only measure how well they accomplish goals to which they are applied. Is ToE "right" or "wrong"? I'm saying that question isn't an interesting one; the interesting one is, "what does the ToE allow us to do?" Is creation "theory" "right" or "wrong"? I don't think it's a useful question; even if one instantiation of creation theory is fundamentally broken, I don't see a principled reason to believe that every creation theory is fundamentally broken. And that's the reason we get "moving target" syndrome. The real meat is in asking, "what does creation theory allow us to do?"How does this relate to your post? In a situation where we can't judge absolutely "right" or "wrong", where we don't want to defer to have to use appeals to authority to choose "right" or "wrong", and where we can't trust ourselves (as a group) to correctly judge "right" or "wrong", it seems to me best to discard the judgement of "right" and "wrong", and to simply move forward with "utility."If this sounds a lot like moral relativism... then I'd have to agree with you Ben

Hey Omni,Read your post, appreciated it... and then wrote nothing. Thought I should at least follow up and say "thanks."Thanks.Rogerian rhetoric reminds me of my high-school physics teacher, who said that in order to really choose between two positions, you first have to be able to believe in one. Then believe in the other. Once you're able to believe in each, choose. Seems to me there's a lot of merit in that.Take it easy.Ben