If I told you, "I had cereal for breakfast today", would you believe me? I mean, it's a common breakfast food. Maybe you know me, or maybe you've seen me eat cereal before. It'd be real easy to believe it then. Perhaps you know that I'm generally trustworthy, and you have heard me say that I like, and occasionally eat, cereal. Even if you don't know anything about me or my character, it wouldn't be a stretch to accept me eating cereal for breakfast as truth.
But what if I said, "After breakfast, a huge beam of light came in through my window and lifted me off the ground! I couldn't move, and the light pulled me through the window and up into the air, where a voice in my head said 'You have a purpose'…"
Unless you're the believe-anything-you-hear type, you probably wouldn't believe that story. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and eating cereal for breakfast is one thing. I'd have to produce some extraordinary evidence to support my extraordinary claim of abduction.
Not taking extraordinary claims without sufficient, serious evidence is the natural, default approach. Despite its many flaws, the court system we have established in America operates on this very same premise: innocent until proven guilty. This system has shown itself to be the best approach, and just as with most everything else, if it works best we use it; if it doesn't work we fix it.
Anyone can make claims about anything, but making the claim alone doesn't make it true. In my example above, you'd probably be asking for proof. Shouldn't I have to produce some sort of reason for why I could say such things?
There's no reason for any rational mind to place any confidence in the validity of the beam o' light tale. The positive claim that something has happened begs for positive evidence. Maybe it really IS true; maybe it really DID happen, but I'd have to back that up somehow if I wanted you to believe me. And this is in no way a shortcoming or flaw in you: until we have a reason, we take the default approach and choose not to believe. How would we function if we entertained every wacky idea anyone's ever had?
-STA
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