> Since they cannot judge theories scientifically, and they cannot judge them based on how well they're presented, they can only fall back on social consensus and instinctive sense of weirdness.
Why judge at all? Or rather, why develop certainty when you lack the capacity to judge accurately?
The answer is that certainty, even when it is unwarranted, is sometimes useful and necessary. Certainty can also lead to major oversights and failures so it is something we should use with caution and care. When assessing the appropriate level of certainty we need to address not only our own level of expertise, but also the utility (and risk) which adopting a particular certainty provides.
However, I find this article rather misguided in its conclusions:
> And so on for several more iterations, until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable. What finally broke me out wasn’t so much the lucidity of the consensus view so much as starting to sample different crackpots. Some were almost as bright and rhetorically gifted as Velikovsky, all presented insurmountable evidence for their theories, and all had mutually exclusive ideas. After all, Noah’s Flood couldn’t have been a cultural memory both of the fall of Atlantis and of a change in the Earth’s orbit, let alone of a lost Ice Age civilization or of megatsunamis from a meteor strike. So given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology, rather than those of the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.
The author has discovered their lack of expertise in ancient history. Knowing that, it seems to me that adopting a high level of certainty about ancient history based on "mainstream" or "the academy", without a clear idea of the utility of adopting that certainty, is epistemically irresponsible or at least unnecessary.