I apologize for the spelling errors in this one, but I felt that in the name of integrity I should leave the comments to which I was replying intact. This was a reply to an especially grievously retarded Denialist I encountered in the midst of a debate on 9/11 "Truth".
"They determind the official report did not add up and they looked at the info they had and tried to see what conclusions could result"
This is the definition of confirmation bias. You just admitted that they knew what conclusion they wante...d to reach, then they actively looked for evidence SPECIFICALLY to support that conclusion. That is not scientific.
"...but nothing is absolute."
If nothing is absolute, then neither is your statement that nothing is absolute.
"Science its self is flawed and almost everything is theory"
Ahhhh yes this one. You hear it from the religious and the magical thinkers all the time, because they don't understand what exactly science is.
Science is not a God-surrogate. Where a god or religion will claim to have all the answers, science readily admits that there are things to learn. The entire point of the process is a constant and cumulative re-assessment of what we claim to know. Science seeks to create a model of the universe, and through a careful - cautious, even - and rigorous process that model gets consistently more accurate.
People use the word "Theory" as though it implies doubt. What people mean when they say "theory" is closer to what a real scientist would call a "hypothesis". Scientists, however, are much more precise with their language. When a scientist says "theory" it means that whatever being discussed is a model for a phenomenon that accurately and consistently predicts the behavior of a system. What we know of gravity is "just a theory," yet I know if I drop my coffee cup IT WILL fall, and while doing so it WILL accelerate at a rate of 32f/s/s until either drag = gravity (which we call terminal velocity) or it hits the ground.
Besides, if science IS indeed flawed - and I will say right here that it is not, because if it were then the scientific process would have discovered such an error and corrected for it - then you must accept that the conclusions reached by Truthers using so-called scientific methods can be flawed, especially as they were constructed by lay-people instead of scientists. To insist upon a margin for error as an argument against one side and to ignore it on your own is not scientific.
"They have limited information to go off of"
So do scientists. Nobody happened to have any equipment set up in the towers to record the event - no high speed cameras, no accelerometers, nothing. Yet the scientific community has overwhelmingly supported the orthodox view of the events of that day. Of course, there are always outliers, even in the scientific community, but to focus on the extremes of the bell curve is to ignore the whole. And excluding evidence in favor of using a couple of outliers out of context is the epitome of "not scientific"
"the government is capable of getting away with anything" and "The government is not going to give free reign to anyone"
I love this one. This line of thought proves beyond any other how much more Truther thinking aligns with religious rather than scientific thought, because while in scientfic thought we don't generally see absolutes, we encounter such characters all the time in religion. I call this particular character the Omnipotent Malefactor, and this is what reason does to him:
The Omnipotent Malefactor takes many guises in conspiracist thought - the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, the Lizard People, Zenu - but most are forms of "The Government" or "The Man". The Omnipotent Malefactor has these qualities: it is infinitely powerful, it is monolithic, it is impersonal, and it thrives on acts of evil and hubris. It is responsible for all the evil in the world and yet, despite its power, it tends to prefer to work in secret. It can do anything, it can prevent anything, and it commands millions - if not billions - of thralls. And interestingly, despite its infinite power, money, and influence, it always makes some mistake which reveals its hand in the evil in the world; some little details that only a small group of miraculously enlightened and free people recognize and will use to fight this all-powerful, all-evil being.
Examine that construction closely. We have an all powerful entity for some reason intimately interested in and connected to the events of our dust mote in the cosmos and a small group of people who have recieved "Truth". Stripped of names, dates, places, you would be right in assuming that conspiracism is a religion, the same in content, methodology, and mindset as any of the Abrahamic faiths. There is God, steering world events for good or ill, his angels and ministers to help work his will (for some reason) and a church, who despite never seeing, nor hearing, nor having ANY evidence whatsoever for his existence claims to not only KNOW he exists, but to know his nature, his methods, and sometimes even his innermost thoughts.
And I'll say it here, as an aside, to keep with the theme of my essay: Religion is NOT scientific.
But like many religious constructs, we reach an interesting conclusion. Like all ideas centering on omnipotence, we have the inevitable issue of how one reconciles free-agency with that power. That is, if our Omnipotent Malefactor really is so powerful that it can "get away with anything" then it is powerful enough that nothing exceeds its will.
If the Omnipotent Malefactor makes "mistakes" then it is surely not all powerful - id est, not omnipotent - and cannot "get away with anything" and the entire argument falls on its face. A simple and effective way to prove that line of thought wrong, but not very entertaining. What it means, of course, is that if this entity makes mistakes, then we have to examine the entire Malevolent enterprise with an eye for error.
What happens when you allow such massive mistakes that even an idiot like Alex Jones can see them? The entire thing falls apart. There would be no conspiracy, because the sheer scale of the conspiracy would require that at some point PRIOR to execution that a mistake would occur that would doom the entire thing. We see this in conspiracies MUCH smaller ALL THE TIME - at some point the payoff for selling out the conspiracy outweighs the payoff for carrying it out. The larger and more complex the conspiracy, the more time it takes to pull off, the more likely a traitor becomes. Even if there is not a traitor, simple human nature, expressed so well in Murphy's Law, is such that the more complex an enterprise of any kind becomes, the more likely it is that somebody or something will screw up. While smaller conspiracies can and sometimes do manage to avoid or survive such mistakes, a conspiracy as large as the one that the Omnipotent Malefactor would have had to construct in order to make it appear that Muslim Fundamentalists hijacked planes and flew them into three buildings (for some yet unknown, yet highly conjectured and delightfully malevolent ends) would have suffered BOTH problems MULTIPLE times and the conspiracy would have collapsed in upon itself.
Since it evidentally did not, as no traitors have come forward nor were any mistakes apparently made in the preparatory phase, we must assume that either the Omnipotent Malefactor actually IS Omnipotent, in the full and literal sense, or does not exist at all.
Perhaps, like Jehovah, this Omnipotent Malefactor is a vain entity. In that case, then the Truthers are also its unwitting servants, thralls and sheep like the rest of us, whose purpose is to point at the Omnipotent Malefactor and say "Oh you! I see what you did there! Gee Whiz, was that a grand show of power! By Golly, was that evil! But Darn, you are so good at being secret that nobody caught you! That must be because you're SO powerful!" I especially like this idea, because it makes conspiracists the biggest shills of all. But unfortunately, I do not believe in the Omnipotent Malefactor, and so the conspiracists are simply idiots.
But there is yet another layer in this Malevolent onion, and the one most likely to draw a tear. In order for there to BE a conspiracy of the type proponed by Truthers there MUST be an Omnipotent Malefactor behind it. Because of the capacity for error otherwise introduced, the Omnipotent Malefactor MUST be at least functionally Omnipotent to such a degree that nothing escapes its will. Without such an entity, we are forced to believe less extraordinary explanations for the events of early September, 2001, because without such an entity such a complex conspiracy could not come to fruition. Without an Omnipotent Malefactor, the Truth movement is simply wrong. But if the Omnipotent Malefactor exists, then by definiton nothing - absolutely nothing - can be done about it. Even the Truthers are part of its evil plan.
Yes, the last layer is that the inescapable conclusion that we reach when looking at conspiracists is that they are either hopeless - subjects all to the whims of the Omnipotent Malefactor - or they are wrong.
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