Earlier this year when Popular Mechanics published their book, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts, their editor-in-chief, James Miegs, described the aggressive sloppiness in the way conspiracists marshall their “facts” to build their theories and then defend them against the ever-growing body of contrary facts that mainstream researchers & reporters compile.

Those of us who’ve been debating hard-core creationists know these behaviors all too well: Relying on selective, out of context quotes of mainstream experts to bolster the opposite conclusion. Trumpeting early, inaccurate reports while ignoring or explaining away the later corrections. Focusing on holes & anomalies in the consensus theory, no matter how trivial, as proof that it’s a house of cards that’s about to come falling down Any Day Now, just as soon as the public learns about the vast conspiracy of evil scientists or other authority figures who are brutally suppressing the truth, which is nevertheless Out There.

The similarities to creationism are truly eerie. But is there some deeper truth that these similarities are pointing to? This question had nagged at me for months.

It took an Objectivist to put this deeper truth into words. Robert James Bidinotto, writing in the November New Individualist, combines the ubiquity of conspiracy theories, their single-minded goal of constructing an alternate reality out of bits & pieces of real facts, and the similarity to creationism to produce a groundbreaking revelation:

At the root of conspiracy theories is a primitive, childish view of the universe—an attempt to explain why things happen by attributing all events to some conscious entity’s intention. Primitive peoples believed in polytheism—a kind of metaphysical “conspiracy theory,” if you will—by which natural phenomena (wind, rain, thunder, flowing water, volcanoes, etc.) occur because specific gods or specialized demons intended for those things to happen. But while polytheism was the source of rich and creative mythology, it also made for a universe of unwieldy, chaotic complexity. When monotheism came along, it integrated and thus simplified the dizzying number of metaphysical conspiracies (and secret magical agents), leaving one grand source of all causality: a single, all-powerful god.

Conspiracy theorists have merely taken what we might call “explanation by intention” and applied it to the social arena. Like polytheists, some conspiracy theorists explain everything that happens around them in society by reference to a multiplicity of conspirators and plots. But, like monotheists, most conspiratorialists these days claim to have a more sophisticated understanding of the social world: they see everything that happens in society as caused by a single grand conspiracy run by a small number of devious plotters.

Observe that conspiratorialists attribute to secular schemers the same traits traditionally ascribed to the monotheistic god: omniscience, omnipotence, and infallibility. I mean, those guys control everything. And no matter how many plotters are involved, not a single traitor ever exposes their grand-scale machinations. That’s why conspiracies are so often regarded and described as “diabolical.” Who else but an all-powerful devil could do so much evil, yet never get caught?

In the conspiratorialist classic None Dare Call It Conspiracy, author Gary Allen frames the fallacious, quasi-theological premise underlying conspiracy theories: that whatever happens in the world is either the result of “accident” and “coincidence,” or the result of “intention” and “conscious design.” Allen and other conspiratorialists cite the tangled details and “coincidences” that invariably accompany any given event as “proof” that “all this complexity couldn’t have occurred by accident.”

What else is this except the theological “Argument from Design,” applied to society?

This is one of those insights that is beginning to change the way I see things. Unfortunately, if it is true, this means that creationism is more than a misguided attempt to make the Bible into a science text or to preserve traditional morality by appealing to an all-powerful Authority Figure. Creationism is instead the product of a deeper psychological tendency which would otherwise manifest itself as some other conspiracy theory.

How do you convince a creationist that they’re wrong? By showing them the facts and why the consensus theory uses the most reasonable inferences from those facts? Well, how often does that approach convince a conspiracy theorist that they’re wrong?