RE: atheists and "conspiracy" theories
May 3, 2012 at 11:08 am
(This post was last modified: May 3, 2012 at 11:11 am by Mister Agenda.)
The essence of a conspiracy theory is speculation about an alternate explanation for the generally-accepted version of an event. It's easy to get sucked into, because when you start really looking into something, you can always find apparent inconsistencies. If conspiracy theorists applied the same standards to how a particular piece of mail wound up in their mailbox and whether it might mean something other than what it apparently says, they would quickly find themselves in the land of 'who is the Post Office really working for?'. Humans are imperfect. Our knowledge is incomplete. Different witnesses to the same event will tell a different story. We say things that can be interpreted in different ways. ALL accounts of things that happen have 'holes' if you look closely enough. For it to be reasonable to accept a conspiracy theory as true, evidence sufficient to overturn the mainstream explanation must be found. And you have to get around the fact that people are terrible at keeping a secret, and the more there are, the less likely it is that they can pull it off.
I worked for the NSA for a bit while I was still in service: America's most secret agency could not keep blowing up the towers a secret if they did it (not that the NSA does that sort of thing). Successful 'small c' conspiracies (let's you and me blow up a government building) are not 'proof of concept' for successful 'big C' conspiracies (let's you, me, and fifty other employees of the US government destroy a building in NYC using government resources and kill thousands of our fellow citizens and make it look like the Moozlims did it). Note that 'small C' conspiracies are uncovered on a fairly regular basis, and it's easier for a small group to keep a secret than a large one.
Note that in this sense, 'Intelligent Design' resembles a conspiracy theory: it's an alternative explanation for the origin of species to the mainstream theory of evolution, but it fails to provide the robust evidence it would take to overturn the ToE, and is reduced essentially to critiquing the ToE, trying to find holes in it, as though finding enough tiny descrepancies will make their version of events more likely to be true.
I worked for the NSA for a bit while I was still in service: America's most secret agency could not keep blowing up the towers a secret if they did it (not that the NSA does that sort of thing). Successful 'small c' conspiracies (let's you and me blow up a government building) are not 'proof of concept' for successful 'big C' conspiracies (let's you, me, and fifty other employees of the US government destroy a building in NYC using government resources and kill thousands of our fellow citizens and make it look like the Moozlims did it). Note that 'small C' conspiracies are uncovered on a fairly regular basis, and it's easier for a small group to keep a secret than a large one.
Note that in this sense, 'Intelligent Design' resembles a conspiracy theory: it's an alternative explanation for the origin of species to the mainstream theory of evolution, but it fails to provide the robust evidence it would take to overturn the ToE, and is reduced essentially to critiquing the ToE, trying to find holes in it, as though finding enough tiny descrepancies will make their version of events more likely to be true.
