Stephen Fry: How To Know What To Believe

How do we know what to believe?

To me, it's so important that people test everything anybody says, don't just believe it. They test it either literally as an experiment, which is how you're supposed to learn science, the good old Neufeld empirical way, or, if it's a fact about what it is to be alive, test it against experience, against what you have experienced as a human being. But don't take anything to believe on trust. Now that doesn't mean, again, just being bloody-minded, going, "Why, that's just your opinion. That's your opinion, isn't it? Well, I don't see why that's true because that's just your opinion." You know. "It's your opinion that Shakespeare's good, and it's my opinion that he's ...." You know, that is, unfortunately, the way most of the people one was at school with behaved, in different accents perhaps, but that's, you know, the kind of feeble excuse people use for not thinking.