Fantastic connections, Ken Wilson. You know, where I live, cable news is full of advertisements for the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter in Kentucky — institutions that replace carefully collected evidence about geology and early human experiences with religious dogma.
These “museums” essentially leverage conspiracy-theory techniques to indoctrinate children, to encourage them to deny evidence and rely on interpretations of religious texts instead.
And we wonder why Americans are so susceptible to conspiracy theory. I don’t think it’s such a stretch to lay a big portion of the blame on people who deny convincing evidence while questioning the knowledge and motives of experts who spend lifetimes collecting, analyzing, and teaching evidence.
Is it so hard to deny climate science when you’ve been taught all your life that geologists and biologists are almost always wrong about almost everything? Denying climate science would seem almost obligatory under circumstances like that.
The same goes for people who believe conspiracy theories about vaccines. Why wouldn’t they be prone to believe in conspiracy when they’ve grown up in a religious culture that DEPENDS on denying scientific credibility and advancing conspiracy theory?
They’re primed to embrace conspiracy theory.
Geology, climate science, and medicine are easy. They’re mostly about observable reality that can be quantified and examined very rigorously. If people of faith are used to denying even the results of those rigorous disciplines, how much more susceptible must they be to failing to critically examine harder questions posed by less exact sciences?
I like the idea of non-overlapping magisteria, the presumption that faith and science pose different questions and need not conflict with one another. But when one magisterium tries to poach off the lands of the other, big problems result.
Certainly, borders are fuzzy and hard to see sometimes, and we can’t always tell where the overlap starts and stops, but the answer to that real problem cannot be to deny evidence to starve the magisterium of human investigation and evidence-based knowledge. If evidence takes us somewhere, but we refuse to see the path, then the magisteria have overlapped to the toxic detriment of truth.
Dangerous conspiracy theories are but one inevitable outcome.
