I think reading things which were believed in the past, and how they were justified, what 'proof' was held up, etc, is tremendously helpful. We can imagine re-

I think reading things which were believed in the past, and how they were justified, what 'proof' was held up, etc, is tremendously helpful. We can imagine re-walking their path and understand how they came to believe what they believed, and be confident that those techniques are not reliable. If you see those exact same justification or reasoning being used in modern times, you can know to be suspicious. You always have to account for the fact that a correct conclusion can be happened upon with an entirely wrong reasoning, but in most cases you will also have a head start on know how to disprove the conclusion if it's in doubt. It's surprising how often conclusions are abandoned, but the style of argument that supported them manages to stick around. You would think that if someone says 'clearly X is true because only an evil Creator would make it otherwise, and the Creator is not evil' but X is then thought to be false, that you couldn't justify anything else with the same argument, but its very common that they would just throw out X when it became impossible to ignore its truth, but preserve a whole host of ideas based on the same reasoning.