It also has taught me to raise my own game.

One of the reasons I hang out here is to ensure my own comfortable beliefs are challenged. I’d rather be corrected than win an argument.

Are we all susceptible to believing things which affirm our worldview

YES. You have to question your assumptions. And then step back and question your new assumptions again. The trick is to accept nothing as simple. If you begin with a presumption of complexity you’ll be more likely to see the realities. And even then, you have to accept that you’re only seeing a part of the reality as filtered to you and as perceived by you.

As someone who comments on and follows the culture wars closely I can tell you it happens as much on one side as on the other. People are a lot like lemmings. They run and run and run on what they think is solid ground and by the time they figure out that they’re actually falling off a cliff it’s too late to do anything about it.

Of course, we all can use facts in a way that ‘affirms our world view’, and often do (and, as Zoe suggests, must constantly evaluate our behaviour in this regard and modify it as required). The issue with Barton & Co. is perhaps that they are not actually using facts at all, but rather departing from them.

Are we all susceptible to believing things which affirm our worldview, especially when it’s a matter that is beyond our area of expertise?

Is the Pope German?

Yes, of course we are. Atheists like myself too. It’s something every intellectually honest person must guard against, and something that I think everyone fails at sometimes too. You just have to re-check, and if need be, correct and apologise.

For matters within our expertise, we’re generally on safer ground. We have the habit ingrained of doubting the most convenient story, of testing it and assuming it’s guilty until proven innocent. Otherwise we wouldn’t have expertise in it, would we? Even then, “safer” doesn’t mean “safe”.

The dangers of ‘relativism’ (by which I mean taking something relative and proximate and proclaiming it to be an ‘absolute’) are very real and very present.