If I had a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering from MIT, it wouldn't make me right or wrong.
It would make your argument more credible if you chose to base it, as you have, on your claims to expertise. If you are going to claim that your expert knowledge tells you Apollo can't possibly have happened as advertised, you will have to qualify yourself as that expert. You have made exactly that claim, and while you have attempted to qualify as an expert, you have spectacularly failed.
If your claim were made purely on the basis of lay observation, your expertise and knowledge would be irrelevant. But you have not made such a claim. Nor would such a claim be very relevant to the question of Apollo's authenticity. As long as the claim is, and must be, whether Apollo was a credible engineering project, expertise in engineering will be required.
The government lies all the time. NASA is the government. Why do people believe them? The moon landing is a belief system. It's a religion.
No, that argument is based on pure fantasy.
Let's first examine the vast majority of people in the middle of the demographic, those who don't have any special knowledge of science or engineering or space travel. While many of them believe in the Moon landings, a number of them believe it was hoaxed. In neither case is that belief especially informed. It is propositional belief, as you outline. It may be akin to religion in the sense that one simply believes what one is told, but that two-edged sword cuts both ways.
Now let's consider those who are appropriately schooled in the relevant sciences and who may additionally or alternatively have considerable professional expertise. We raise the notion of schooling because it is adjudicated training -- we can measure how well someone achieves it. We raise the notion of professional experience because it is the school of hard knocks and provides equal measure of success. In either case, there are consequences for being wrong, where "wrong" is defined as misunderstanding or mistaking the laws of the universe and the machines and techniques we use to employ those laws for our benefit. We find that among these people there is no question that the Moon landings were genuine. These are the well-informed people, not the unwashed masses. Their belief is not propositional. It is not religious. It is born of hard-won knowledge and experience. They are not fooled. They believe Apollo was real because they observe its fundamental principles at work every day and employ them in ways that would fail to their detriment of those observations were wrong.
Now let's look at the other dimension -- belief, versus knowledge -- and see where that envelope lies. Among those who believe Apollo was fake we find almost no one who can discuss how it worked or was purported to work with any degree of comprehension. We find people whose grasp of the historical record is so faulty as to make egregious errors such as "Buzz Armstrong." While many of these profess to be highly competent engineers, scientists, technicians, or otherwise, we find them almost completely unable (and subsequently unwilling) to demonstrate that competence. It is clear they've spent most of their time debating with people in that middle ground above, who have little prior knowledge of the subject. Easy pickings, in other words.
And curiously, proponents of Apollo hoax theories very often disintegrate in a poof of socio-political flame, as you have done. Their pretense to it being a rational argument with scientific and engineering support eventually gives way every time, and they reveal the true nature of their beliefs. These non-technical hoax believers, at the deepest level, simply want to pummel someone for their alleged folly and thereby set themselves up in contrast as deep thinkers. That's the neurological payoff. They want to believe they alone have discovered something secret and dastardly, and everyone else is just sheeple for believing otherwise. The thrill of rebellion is what you crave.
Now with that categorical analysis behind us we can examine your characterization of historical belief. You desperately want to believe that only the middle group exists. They are the ones you seek out because they are the most easily swayed by your arguments. And converting them to your beliefs gives you the emotional and intellectual payoff. You are unable to cope with people who can
rationally dispute your claims. You desperately want to lump us in with the ignorant masses from which you draw your supportive audience. But we aren't part of that group.
Now if you remain true to form, you'll realize that we can outsmart you, and you'll realize we aren't the uninformed masses. So in the typical model you'll now reformulate us as disinformationists or government shills. You'll acknowledge that we are able to rebut your claims, at least on the superficial level. But you'll maintain that your understanding is still superior and that we've just muddied the otherwise clear waters with meaningless sophistry. And you'll say that we're ideologically motivated to conceal the truth with technobabble. You'll desperately try to shift the argument from who knows more to who is more trusthworthy.
I can't prove Jesus didn't come to America, but millions of Mormons believe it. I could show them all kinds of equations, and it wouldn't change their minds.
Apples and oranges. Equations are not appropriate to what is inherently a religious (and only marginally historical) question. And a lot of people spend time showing Mormons that their historical claims are without merit. Whether their religious claims have merit is not even a critical-thinking issue. And worldwide, few people adhere to Mormonism's claims.
The Mormon claim is that the resurrected Jesus came to America, which is inherently a religious claim. It presupposes the existence of Jesus, his supernatural nature, and the reality of corporeal resurrection. Science (and this forum) cares not one whit for it. But it is relevant in that Mormons don't believe this based on a persuasive historical or technical claim. While a few Mormons argue there is historical confirmation for some of the relevant claims about their religion, few Mormons cite that as the reason for their faith. They read a book they're told is holy, and accept its claims entirely on faith. Many of their critics argue from within the context of religious propositions. While they do so critically, the axioms attendant to that debate don't fit here. Their other critics argue the historical claims, and do so from a position of scientific understanding and historical and archaeological scholarship, which
is somewhat relevant.
It's relevant because your analogy tells a story completely opposite from what you probably intended. You compare belief in Apollo to Mormon belief in Jesus and America, but in no way are they similar. Mormons admit their beliefs are largely religious and unprovable, but we assert strongly that belief in Apollo is strictly an historical and technical determination. You want desperately to paste propositional or superficial overtones onto it, but under no circumstances is anyone here claiming you must believe Apollo as a propositional statement. No one here takes Apollo on faith and no one is asking you to.
But just as Mormons, faced with the historical inevitability that their beliefs have little merit outside their church, resort to propositional and ideological promotions to distract from their pseudo-intellectual failure, so have you resorted to ideological handwaving. In the face of a debate ostensibly on the basis of science, technology, and secular knowledge, you are the one to "break" and dive into belief
per se. Your approach is exactly the "who you gonna believe, me or them?" claim. Sound familiar? Aren't you just asking to be taken on faith?
And just as Mormons, along with many other religions, decry the devil and urge us to be righteous in the face of it, you identify your own "devil" to scare people into believing you. Oh yes, you're very much creating the "devil" of government oppression and malfeasance, and you style yourself as one of the prophets of the "free thinkers" religion. You're the one who abandoned a debate over observable facts, not we. You are the one unable to fathom that, aside from any "government" statement, the historical and technical record unequivocally speaks in favor of Apollo and that there exist very many people whose belief in Apollo exists only as a product of reason and not as an expression of faith. Conversely there exists no hoax believer yet whose belief against Apollo stands on the basis of supportable historical or technical fact, and does not ultimately base itself upon an expression of faith, to wit: "I have faith that nothing said by the government can be true." You want to think that anyone who believes something that also happens to be the position of some government must believe only because the government says so. You are unable to cope with any other reason for belief. It simply does not exist in your limited view of the world.
Governments lie, and history is on my side in that regard.
History tells us that governments sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth. History also tells us that this is not a property limited to government, but is a property of all humans. You want to take the world to task for your straw man, specifically that anyone who presumptively believes the government tells the truth is necessarily deluded, and that anyone who can't admit to being deluded is closed-minded. What you fail to realize is that it's just as delusional and potentially closed-minded to presume the government always lies. Any such categorical presumption, toward either end, in the face of evidence to the contrary, is necessarily irrational. In your hurry to pretend to call out everyone for their irrational error, you have simply committed the converse error.
Except in our case it's not what we really believe. It's the motivation you desperately try to paste onto us. The error is only
your presumption; we hold no such presumption.
Where history ultimately shows that truth or falsehood may prevail and that presumption is unreliable, the only rational approach then is to examine each question in isolation. Presuming that someone tells the truth may lead to us trusting him hazardously. Presuming that someone tells a lie may lead to us dismissing him hazardously. Presumption is thus set aside; we can determine whether someone is telling the truth or lying only by examining the facts pertaining to that question -- and only those. To attempt conviction or exoneration based on past questions is to fall into the presumptive trap again. Hence to decide the question of Apollo we examine Apollo alone. And in doing so, by critical thinking, we find that the evidence overwhelmingly paints the scientists, engineers, and technicians who accomplished Apollo as those most grounded in fact and reason, and the uninformed ideologically-minded conspiracy theorists have no such grounding in fact. While we acknowledge that humans, including governors, may have lied in the past and may yet lie in the future, we find that the facts show they did not lie about Apollo.
Where Apollo his concerned, history is most certainly
not on your side. Don't pretend it is.
