Conservapedia vs. Relativity

By Peter Bokulich

Conservapedia bills itself as an avowedly conservative (and “trustworthy”) alternative to Wikipedia. The entries there are more sympathetic to creationism and conservative Christian views — and more hostile to climate change science and black holes — than Wikipedia is. (Conservapedia attributes this to Wikipedia’s “liberal bias.”)

I’m particularly fascinated by Conservapedia’s denialism about Einstein’s theory of relativity. It seems that this might be partly due to a conflation of physical relativity (which says that the speed of light is constant, but mass, length, and time are relative to one’s state of motion) with moral relativism (which says there are no objective moral facts).

It appears that the Conservapedian denial of relativity is distinct from the recent surge in defenders of geocentrism (that is, the view that the Earth is at rest in the center of the universe, and the sun revolves around us) — which I’ve blogged about before.

You can find some discussion of Conservapedia’s relativity denialism in this podcast by Phil Plait, and also at RationalWiki.