Skeptoid - Skeptoid #120: The World According to Conservapedia
Aired: 2008-09-23
Duration: 15:36


=== Wikipedia's Evil Twin (06:23) ===

[00:00:03]  Who should be the arbiter of what's true and what's not?
[00:00:07]  That's a thorny question indeed.
[00:00:09]  Every community and every tribe seems to have their own trusted source.
[00:00:14]  Something like Wikipedia is good because it's a synthesis of all perspectives from all communities.
[00:00:20]  But did you know about its evil twin, Conservipedia?
[00:00:24]  It's the encyclopedia of what's true from the Christian fundamentalist perspective.
[00:00:30]  We're going to have a look today on Skeptoid.
[00:00:37]  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
[00:00:39]  You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
[00:00:43]  I'm doing something else now.
[00:00:45]  I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
[00:00:48]  On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
[00:00:52]  Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
[00:00:57]  No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
[00:01:00]  That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
[00:01:03]  Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
[00:01:13]  You're listening to Skeptoid.
[00:01:15]  I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
[00:01:18]  The world according to Conservapedia.
[00:01:22]  Today we're going to look at a surprising relative newcomer on the World Wide Web, Conservapedia, a young earth Christian encyclopedia built on the model of Wikipedia.
[00:01:33]  But I caution you, we need to start by setting the stage with the appropriate tone.
[00:01:38]  Let's browse to Conservapedia's article on the theory of evolution.
[00:01:42]  What picture do you think they might have on this page?
[00:01:45]  An image of a DNA helix?
[00:01:47]  A picture of Charles Darwin?
[00:01:49]  Wrong.
[00:01:50]  It's a photograph of Adolf Hitler screaming into a microphone.
[00:01:55]  No fooling.
[00:01:57]  Conservapedia's purpose is to be a conservative Christian version of Wikipedia that promotes young Earth anti-science.
[00:02:05]  But in an effort to distance themselves from this egregious intellectual dishonesty, they've posted a special page called How Conservipedia Differs from Wikipedia that lists an entirely different set of reasons for its existence that makes no mention of any conservative Christian agenda, as if such a thing has never occurred to them.
[00:02:27]  The page is mostly a list of false charges leveled against Wikipedia.
[00:02:32]  They say Wikipedia is a money-making scheme.
[00:02:35]  Wikipedia encourages long-winded obfuscating articles.
[00:02:40]  It contains gossip, journalists' biased opinions, obscenities, and pornography.
[00:02:46]  Wikipedia subjects its articles to extreme liberal censorship.
[00:02:50]  The purpose of Wikipedia's talk pages are to create a forum for its editors to bully its users.
[00:02:57]  And my personal favorite, that Wikipedia monitors the personal blogs of its readers and bans them from using Wikipedia if they exercise their free speech on their blogs.
[00:03:09]  Well, if nothing else, these charges certainly do distract attention from Conservapedia's Christian anti-science bias.
[00:03:18]  Another difference between the two is their size, both in number of articles and length.
[00:03:23]  For example, on the date I checked, Google lists 50,000 pages on conservapedia.com and 14,200,000 on wikipedia.org, giving Wikipedia almost 300 times the number of pages as Conservapedia.
[00:03:39]  To get a fair estimate of the difference in comprehensiveness of their articles, I did a number of random searches.
[00:03:45]  Wikipedia's article on Walt Disney is 8,570 words long.
[00:03:50]  Conservapedia's article is only 195 words long and contains little more than an anecdote about his wedding, a list of eight of his movies, and a warning that since his death, the Walt Disney Company has promoted pro-gay activism.
[00:04:07]  This was just one random search off the top of my head, and I was struck by Conservapedia's ability to siphon all the juice out of any topic until only the bitterest right-wing dregs remain.
[00:04:20]  But Conservapedia is not really about finding liberal skeletons in closets.
[00:04:25]  It's really about promoting young Earth fundamentalism.
[00:04:29]  For example, their article on the planet Earth contains no fewer than nine Bible references, and almost all of the external references are from, not scientific sources as you'd expect, but other young Earth fundamentalist websites, mainly answersingenesis.org, creationscience.com, and creationontheweb.com.
[00:04:51]  The age of the Earth is given with a pretense of also presenting real science as follows.
[00:04:59]  Young Earth creationists believe, on the basis of the biblical account in Genesis and biblical geochronologies, that the entire Earth, including animal, plant, and human life, was formed in six days, around 4000 BC.
[00:05:15]  Mainstream scientific journals, committed to a naturalistic worldview, contend this view.
[00:05:22]  Most scientists believe that the Earth formed by natural processes, instead of being supernaturally created.
[00:05:28]  However, as one scientist noted, most every prediction by theorists about planetary formation has been wrong.
[00:05:38]  Note the assertion that the mainstream scientific journals contend the young Earth story because they're committed to a worldview that is not about promoting Christianity.
[00:05:50]  I commend Conservapedia for conceding that most scientists are not of the opinion that the Earth was formed supernaturally, but even then they throw in a quote from creationscience.com that most scientific theories about the Earth are eventually proven wrong, and they bolster this quote with an argument from authority by crediting it to a scientist.
[00:06:12]  Conservapedia has a fine article on radiometric dating.
[00:06:16]  It says almost nothing about radiometric dating.
[00:06:19]  It lists only five types, giving no useful information about what they are, what they're used for, or how and why they work.

=== Potassium-Argon Myths Debunked (02:54) ===

[00:06:26]  The entire article is simply a lecture that they are all uselessly unreliable.
[00:06:31]  This argument is made with explanations like the following.
[00:06:36]  This formula depends on the laws of physics remaining constant over time.
[00:06:41]  Some creationists have argued that God increased the rate of potassium-argon decay during the first few days of creation, thus causing the potassium-argon dating method to give erroneously old date readings.
[00:06:57]  They don't give a biblical citation for that particular factoid.
[00:07:01]  If some listener knows what authority they referenced that talks about God's manipulation of potassium-argon decay rates, come to skeptoid.com and post it in the comments for this episode.
[00:07:13]  If we're playing name the logical fallacy, this is called a special pleading.
[00:07:18]  A special pleading states that, my claim is true because some higher power, that you can't comprehend, makes it true, no matter what you say.
[00:07:27]  Potassium-argon dating is unreliable because God will do whatever is necessary to make your readings wrong.
[00:07:35]  Really?
[00:07:41]  Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
[00:07:47]  Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
[00:08:00]  This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
[00:08:15]  We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
[00:08:23]  You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
[00:08:28]  You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
[00:08:38]  We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
[00:08:44]  This is a true sailing ship.
[00:08:46]  You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
[00:08:50]  You can even take the helm and steer.
[00:08:52]  This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
[00:08:56]  But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
[00:09:00]  Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
[00:09:04]  Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
[00:09:10]  Hope to see you on board.
[00:09:11]  That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.

=== Avoiding Religious Bias (06:15) ===

[00:09:21]  They have a page of rules for editors, but predictably they call it the commandments.
[00:09:26]  Most of them are good, what you'd expect from a wiki, like always cite your sources, though almost all sources cited in Conservapedia articles are from young Earth creationist websites.
[00:09:37]  Your posts should be clean, concise, no foul language, no personal opinions or advertisements.
[00:09:43]  But I thought this was funny.
[00:09:47]  When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give appropriate credit for the basis of the date, BC or AD.
[00:09:56]  BCE and CE are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical basis.
[00:10:05]  It's actually more than just funny.
[00:10:07]  CE and BCE, similar to the better known BC and AD, stand for the Common Era and Before the Common Era of the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
[00:10:18]  It is the International Date Standard ISO 8601.
[00:10:22]  BCE and CE have been in use since the year 1615, beginning with non-Christian cultures, and has since become the international standard because it does not force everyone to comply with one particular religious standard.
[00:10:36]  When he read a student's paper that used common era notation, Christian activist Andrew Schlafly founded Conservapedia in 2006, initially as an online resource for homeschooled Christian students.
[00:10:51]  Schlafly felt that teaching evidence-based science represents a biased view that wrongly excludes Christianity.
[00:10:59]  And so his vision of Conservapedia was to avoid this bias by looking at every topic through a conservative Christian perspective.
[00:11:07]  And the more you go through Conservapedia, the more you see that avoiding bias is what it's really about, but a very curious and specific brand of avoiding bias.
[00:11:17]  It avoids the bias of giving fact more validity than fiction.
[00:11:22]  Throughout its articles, Conservapedia presents both the young Earth version of a subject and then the scientific version and treats them more or less equally, as if fallacy is no less valid than fact.
[00:11:35]  To find another example, I looked up Tyrannosaurus Rex to see what Conservapedia has to say on when it lived.
[00:11:45]  Young Earth creationists believe that they became extinct sometime since the Great Flood, dated to approximately 4,500 years ago.
[00:11:54]  Evolutionary scientists believe that the T-Rex lived at the end of the Cretaceous period, dated to approximately 65 million years ago, and that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs such as T-Rex.
[00:12:09]  You might as well say one small extremist religious fringe group believes X, but science tells us why.
[00:12:17]  Conservapedia presents these as equally weighted, competing theories which should both be taught to students under the guise of presenting both sides of an issue.
[00:12:28]  Science does not have two sides.
[00:12:31]  Science has one side.
[00:12:33]  If Conservapedia truly wants to avoid bias, then why are they only presenting the young Earth fundamentalist belief alongside science?
[00:12:41]  Why not also present the Islamic story, the Mandinka story from Africa, the voodoo story, the Hawaiian story of Pele, or Scientology or Realism?
[00:12:53]  I'll tell you why.
[00:12:54]  It's because Conservipedia exists only to promote Christian young Earth anti-science.
[00:13:02]  Why would anyone want to teach anti-science?
[00:13:05]  The vast majority of Christians worldwide accept the evidence-based age of the Earth and the universe, and accept modern sciences, and many work in scientific fields.
[00:13:16]  What do most Christians think of Conservapedia?
[00:13:19]  Do they feel it gives them a bad name?
[00:13:22]  Are they primarily supportive of its proselytizing mission and less concerned with the accuracy of whatever facts it presents?
[00:13:30]  My sense is that most Christians are not really aware of Conservapedia.
[00:13:35]  Its take on science certainly does not represent that of most Christians, let alone most conservatives, since we know that the young earth crowd is only a small fringe minority.
[00:13:45]  The danger is that Conservipedia's mere presence and self-assertion of unbiased authority might mislead an uninformed web surfer into accepting that some of these young earth myths are valid science, or even just give the impression that the young earth thing is more widely accepted than it really is.
[00:14:04]  Both of these are crimes against intelligence, and anyone who contributes to Conservipedia is guilty of willfully eroding the collective intellect, to the detriment of all.
[00:14:20]  You're listening to Skeptoid.
[00:14:21]  I'm Brian Dunning from skeptoid.com.
[00:14:30]  Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
[00:14:39]  And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
[00:14:48]  And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
[00:14:52]  And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
[00:14:57]  Why support Skeptoid?
[00:14:58]  If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
[00:15:05]  If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
[00:15:19]  Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
[00:15:23]  Next to giggling, of course.
[00:15:25]  Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
[00:15:36]  From PRX