I Argued with a Creationist, Flat Earther Conspiracy Theorist - They Exist!

I couldn't believe it. This happened a few weeks ago at my "God on Trial" talk in Bournemouth at the Bournemouth Skeptics in the Pub. Half way through the talk, for some reason, evolution was challeneged. The whole talk almost got derailed as I took the bait and started to go to town on this chap standing at the back who denied evolution and used all the standard shitty arguments to deny a scientific truth, including denigrating science and its methodology.

During the break, this guy came up to me to ask me some questions. It just got worse; a whole lot worse. This guy bought it ALL. The whacko theories started with Young Earth Creationism. But that was the least of it. His arguments were off the scale. He forcefully argued for a flat earth. An actual flat earth. To defend this from ideas that we had been into space and seen that it was not, he also claimed we had never been into space; that it was all a conspiracy. In fact, everything was a conspiracy.

The sheer probabilities required for all of his theories to be true are mindboggling. Pretty much everyone in the world would be lying in some way about something to everyone else. Because everything about our reality was apparently conspiracy.

And that included gravity.

The guy, so ordinary looking and seeming, was a Christian nutjob of the highest order. To listen to him defend notions of us living on a flat earth, and how he rationalised his claims was psychologically fascinating.

Indeed, skeptic psychologist Rob Brotherton, who has written a book based on his PhD into conspiracy theories and psychology, has researched such people. It turns out that once you buy into one whacko theory, there is a very strong probability that you will buy into many others. As the Sunday Times states concerning Brotherton's book, Suspicious Minds:

The psychological, rather than rational, force behind conspiracy theories explains why people who believe in one theory are more likely to believe in others. Austrian researchers devised a fake conspiracy theory that the energy drink Red Bull makes you want to have more of it and even “caused lab rats to grow rudimentary wings”. The same people who thought this plausible also consider 9/11 was an inside job, and so on. Even more strikingly, people who suspect that Osama bin Laden might have been dead long before American special forces got to him are also liable to maintain that he might still be alive. Brotherton dubs bin Laden “some kind of Schrödinger’s terrorist, alive and dead at the same time".