To me, this sounds like a typical example of a theory that sounds neat and plausible when stated vaguely, but which turns out to be unsubstantiated on a closer examination. You can certainly tell a neat story to make it sound convincing, but when I consider in more detail the concrete mechanisms by which opinions of different sorts of people are formed in the modern society, I don't see any grounds to conclude that this concrete issue has much relevance.
(On a related note, the actual dynamics of the contemporary public opinion with regards to evolution and Darwinism are, in my opinion, very different from the standard story within which, among others, Drexler also frames his argument.)
To me, this sounds like a typical example of a theory that sounds neat and plausible when stated vaguely, but which turns out to be unsubstantiated on a closer examination.
Could be. But most beliefs (even most correct beliefs) are like that, you can't set some magical default level of certainty for everything that was not formally studied. The power of scientific evidence is in ability to conclusively destroy incorrect beliefs upon closer examination, but it doesn't hold monopoly on construction of correct beliefs.
I feel that the term "rationalism", as opposed to "rationality", or "study of rationality", has undesirable connotations. My concerns are presented well by Eric Drexler in the article For Darwin’s sake, reject "Darwin-ism" (and other pernicious terms):
So, my suggestion is to use "rationality" consistently and to avoid using "rationalism". Via similarity to "scientist" and "physicist", "rationalist" doesn't seem to have the same problem. Discuss.
(Typical usage on Less Wrong is this way already, 3720 Google results for "rationality" and 1210 for "rationalist", against 251 for "rationalism". I've made this post as a reference for when someone uses "rationalism".)