I’ve noticed an interesting disonnect between proofs some fundamentalist believers use for their religion and their beliefs about science (especially evolution). For an example, let’s take Judaism, which has a proof that the Torah is divine. This is called the Kuzari Proof or the Kuzari Principle. Here’s someone else summarising it better than I would:
The Kuzari Proof has been proffered in several forms and incarnations but the gist is as follows:
1. Three million Jews witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai.[3]
2. Starting with the witnessing generation, one generation has told the story to the next, leading us, in the current generation, to be inductive witnesses to this event.
3. It is impossible to fake a large public event and its subsequent intergenerational transmission (with inferred acceptance) as described in steps 1 and 2, thus the original event must have happened. [Source]
Now, I don’t intend to discuss this proof much. If you think this is a strawman, look up Kuzari Proof, here are two examples of posts that take this seriously — but it’s a reasonably common syllogism in the Chareidi community (aka the “ultra-orthodox”). The refutation is also left as an exercise for the reader (also the first 20 Google results for the proof seem to be refutations). What I’m interested in is the parallels to science.
There are many other cases of other religions being defended in a similar manner: “why would the founder(s) of the religion lie?” Another common one is within Christianity — the supposed historicity of the Apostles willingly being martyred shows that they really did experience Jesus. After all, “why would someone die for a lie?“. These proofs all rely on a very anti-conspiratorial type of thinking: one of the premises is that large-scale conspiracies are impossible or extremely unlikely.
And yet — a lot of the same people are deniers of evolution. Or global warming. Or geology and various forms of radiometric dating. Or of Big Bang cosmology. Or a group of traditional Catholic geocentrists — really. And many of those denials are founded very explicitly pro-conspiratorial thinking. There is basically a vast conspiracy of evolutionary biologists, climate scientists, geologists, astronomers and the like, all keeping the truth from us. The best example of this is the evolution-is-a-lie meme: when you present evolution as something manufactured by a large “scientific establishment” this is a conspiracy theory of Biblical proportions.
This is I think the biggest problem with conspiracy theories. They are usually applied very selectively: when it suits your pre-conceptions to believe in a conspiracy you do, when it suits you to believe large conspiracies are impossible, you do.
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