#746: Will Hart

Will Hart is a creationist, and he has no qualms about asserting that creationists are the victims of a Darwinist conspiracy. Indeed, Hart’s conspiracy-laden creationism has been sufficiently out of touch with reality to earn him a page on whale.to. For instance, in “Stormtroopers for Darwinism” he points out how critics of evolution have been subjected to a real witch hunt – I mean, they have been criticized by other scientists, and their views have been called “bad science” and even “stupid”. If that’s not persecution, what is?

But evolution is not the only conspiracy concocted by scientists, according Hart. The scientific conspiracy also alleges such things as:

1. There is no mystery about who built the Great Pyramid or what the methods of construction were, and the Sphinx shows no signs of water damage.

2. There were no humans in the Americas before 20,000 BC.

3. The first civilisation dates back no further than 6000 BC.

4. There are no documented anomalous, unexplained or enigmatic data to take into account. [uh … what?]

5. there are no lost or unaccounted-for civilisations.

So Hart has, accordingly, endorsed pretty much every single major trend in pseudo-archaeology. The sphinx is 9000 years old, for instance, the ICA stones of Peru show that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and there is “DNA-evidence” that Atlantis existed (how such evidence might be, you know, evidence remains an open question, and Hart has no answer, but at least he got the conviction evidence). In addition, he points out that scientists have been critical of Michael Cremo’s works, and even (it seems) the shows on History channel. Clearly, such criticism proves that there is a conspiracy. Why would anyone (except Hart himself) ever criticize anything if they weren’t in a conspiracy against it driven by nebulous agendas of world-control?

Therefore the theory of evolution is false.

In addition to whale.to, Hart has had his work published in the Nexus magazine and on Rense.com. He has also contributed to the Atlantis Rising Magazine. “Skeptics” criticize those sites as well, which again constitutes almost impeccable proof that Hart must be right, according to the common inference trichotomy “if the experts agree with me, it shows that I am right; if they criticize me, it shows that they are threatened by my research and therefore that I am right; if they don’t say anything, it shows that they have no way of refuting me and therefore that I am right.”

The Hart in question is probably not the same as William B. Hart, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and signatory to A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. But that Hart probably deserves an honorable mention as well.

Diagnosis: A fairly typical example of a whale.to contributor, Hart is one of those who take any disagreement with any branch of pseudoscience as evidence for a conspiracy. Probably not very influential himself, but his reasoning strategies are illustrative for a rather large number of people, and the movement he’s part of has become rather uncannily big during the age of the Internet.