I'm an atheist and a sometimes follow the atheist/skeptic movements. Lately, I've noticed the disturbing pattern that the main message atheists/skeptics are getting across is "question everything". This can be seen on both ends of the political spectrum from the birthers, to the anti-vaxers, from small government libertarians to anti-corporate greens. The most reliable place to find it is in the comment section on any article about schooling or education. There you'll find endless commands to "teach your children to question everything".
But what people don't understand is that it is impossible to do that. If you demand to see the raw evidence backing up every claim you accept and for every decision you have to make you would spend every second of your life reading and still not be able to buy groceries.
Let's consider a very simple decision: whether to buy corn or salad for dinner. Let's assume we are in USA for this. We would have to consider the likelihood that the corn we buy will be a GMO and consider all the evidence on the safety of GMO corn including the several hundred page documents required to get FDA approval and the hundreds of independent scientific papers on the topic. We also have to consider the validity of these papers including evaluating the suitability & relevance of the animal models used and the study design (some papers on the topic have since been retracted while others question the reasons for said retractions). Once we have determined the safety of corn as food stuff we should also consider the nutritional content of corn vs salad as well as the multitude of studies suggesting many chronic diseases are caused by the over-consumption of starchy foods in the modern diet. To compare to the salad we must look up the permissible pesticides to be used on each component of the salad and the legislated limits of pesticide residues. We can then consider the other large corpora of papers & data examining the long term toxicity of the different pesticides and the potential for synergistic effects between them. Frankly you will have died of starvation before finishing reading it all.
Thus, 90+% of the time we have to trust someone else's interpretation of the data on a subject. It is just impractical to obtain the raw data and have the required expertise to interpret it ourselves. A perfect example is when you buy a car, it is just impractical to let every car purchaser to take apart the entire vehicle to check it works properly or to watch all the safety tests the car has to pass before being approved for use on the roads. Instead we trust the manufacturer that the car is correctly assembled and we trust the government regulations are strict enough to ensure the car will be safe to drive.
But it is just as clear we should not trust everyone all of the time. For instance its probably worth test-driving that repaired junket the used-car salesman is trying to pass off as "as good as new". And thinking twice about what that "PR professional" just told you.
The real skill we should be trying to teach under the name "critical thinking" or "skepticism" is not to simply question everything but is the ability to evaluate how much we should trust different claims coming from different authorities.
