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Me: I'd say that remembering sources and the formulation of their arguments is an important element in the practice of occasionally revaluating your beliefs. Otherwise, education and critical thought eventually lapse into dogma.
Mr. P: I dont.

Then how can you be resonably sure that your knowledge isn't lapsing into dogma?

Even if this is actually the only explanation for how science and inquiry developed, it is simply a case of the student surpassing the teacher.

Actually, the problems addressed by Descartes in his "Discourse on Method" have intensified with further scientific discovery. A good primer on the problems posed to metaphysics and epistemology by recent scientific discovery may be found in Jacob Bronowski's "The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination". This whole notion of "the student surpassing the teacher" seems a bit too Star Wars. It seems to me that you'll allowing the skepticism that you would apply to something like religion to flag when it comes to science. A truly consciencious mode of critical thinking would necessitate that you think just as critically about science as you do about anything else, and that analysis should go right down to the roots of the discipline. I'm pointing you to those roots now. If you dismiss them altogether, then you end up treating science much as Creationists want to treat humans, as something that appeared fully formed, not subject to the development that guides all things like it.

I am sure you will! Your statement above sets up a tautology. I can hear it now..."It is not a tautology because I do not consider it a tautology."

No, I think we can both agree on what you mean by tautology: a statement that demonstrates its truth by reference to itself, correct? For example, it would be a tautology to say "a is b because a is b." If you can point to an instance where I have made that sort of error, then I should not rationally be able to deny it. You've claimed that my argument is riddled with tautologies. If you refuse to point to an instance of one, then I should feel inclined to believe that either you're unsure of that claim or that you respect my integrity so little as to think that I can't admit when I'm wrong.

You seem to be a person who reads alot of books, you will stumble upon them eventually...but if you do, you will never see what or how I do, so it will mean nothing to you...as what most of what you propose means nothing to me.

My reading actually suggests that the present is more banal than the past, or at least that modernity is more banal than antiquity. If you ever get the time, I suggest that you check out Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem". The subtitle is "A Report on the Banality of Evil", so I think you can see how it relates to our discussion. There's a rather wide body of literature on the mechanization of culture: see the works of Ernst Cassiers, Martin Heideggar, and, hell, just about any novelist writing abount industrialized civilization. You might also check out George Steiner's "In Bluebeard's Castle", which I'm reading right now and which served as one of Karen Armstrong's references in "The Battle for God".

How is our world today more banal than the past...and be careful, this is a highly subjective topic, so there is no right and wrong, right?

I don't know that I'd say more banal (though there are certainly people who would make that argument), but I'm not willing to say less banal either. The basic argument, with which I tend to agree, is that modern culture has adapted the modes of mass production and industrialization. The pertains mostly to the way in which people work, and to really have a sense of the comparison you'll need to read up on work in other eras. But what is immediately observable in modern culture is the mundanity of the vast majority of jobs, a mundanity that is increasingly systemized. You can see this systemization in the predominance of the cublicle as a work space, and in the monotony of factory work. Specialization is also a symptom of this systemization, and you see that on nearly all levels, from factory work to professional careers like medicine and law. Specialization tends to limit the variety available to any given worker, and often stratifies the worker from the ultimate goal of the work, as in the case of workers who make a single small part on a product who finished state they may never see. There's an increased level of social mobility afforded by modernity, but what you'll find is that such mobility tends to be vertical only -- you can progress as high in any given field as you'd like, but the higher you go, the less capable you are of changing fields, not for any lack of ability, but for a lack of credentials. I'd say that we as a culture have, in response to banality of our work, created a veritable cult around those few glamorous jobs that do exist. You can see it in the lionization of entertainers, whose jobs afford far more variety than ours. There's a rather large cottage industry built around books about employment, particular those which advise you on how to find a job that pays well without banality. And a wide range of our entertainments center around professional occupations: witness the glut of television shows about doctors, lawyers, detectives -- occupational-centered programming, in short, culminating perhaps in reality TV like "The Apprentice". Work, I would say, is almost inarguably more banal today that it was in the past, when even substinence work like agriculture was attuned more to the cycle of a year than the cycle of an eight hour shift. And since work tends to dominate about a fourth of the average adult's life, I'd say that's enough.

Now, there are of course benefits to this culture, trade-offs that are potentially worth the drudgery. I won't deny that. But the assertion that those benefits make modern life, on the whole, less banal than it was for previous generations seems, to me, unwarranted.

In fact, as a side note, we might point out that those benefits are often the cause of the aforementioned drudgeries. Luxuries like the internet and increased literacy and freedom of travel are made possible only by work, and for every hour that one of us spends enjoying a particular luxury, others are spending an equal amount of time working a dull job in order to facilitate that luxury.