Deniers

They are called conspiracy theorists, or birthers, or truthers, depending upon what aspect of reality or settled science their group denies. They have in common a firm conviction that they are right and all the experts are wrong or that all the world’s scientists and researchers are members of a world-wide conspiracy. Because they deny reality as most people understand it, I call them deniers.

I suppose the original deniers were flat-Earthers who denied the planet was round. Today’s deniers include the Kennedy assassination’s lone-gunman deniers, moon-landings deniers, 9/11 truthers, anti-vaccination truthers, Obama birthers, and climate-change deniers. The list goes on.

The denial phenomenon is like a religion. Just as you can’t change someone’s religious beliefs with logic and facts, you can’t change a denier’s beliefs with logic and facts. Deniers will dismiss a mountain of evidence that points to a conclusion while embracing the weakest sliver of information (or misinformation) that might support their beliefs. Some deniers have resorted to threats, slander, and lies to promote their version of the truth (link).

America just flew a spacecraft called New Horizons past the dwarf planet Pluto, and new photos of Pluto and its moons have been all over the Internet. Naturally, a new group of deniers has risen to proclaim that it never happened.

This is interesting because the New Horizons program has a long history. There was mission planning, construction of the spacecraft, launch of the spacecraft, communication and course-corrections, and after nine years of flight across the solar system there was the encounter with the Pluto system. At what point did the mission become a hoax?

Anti-science nonsense may be our biggest threat to civilization. Despite the many benefits that science has brought to them, it seems more people than ever are rejecting scientific knowledge – especially when such knowledge conflicts with what is “convenient” for them. When science tells us we must change our ways or risk destroying our future, and our reaction is to bury our heads in the sand, then it’s likely that our future will be a lot shorter than we have imagined.