I'm sorry to be unclear.
His approach, Dakdak's.
No worries; you can argue it either way. You can say he's poisoning the well by saying that if you're too educated, you can't see the "common sense" reasons why Apollo had to be fake. Or you can say that I'm poisoning the well by handwaving at "superstition" rather than taking DAKDAK's argument on its merits.
The latter would be well-poisoning if I were to say, "He's a Fundamentalist Christian, so you can't expect him to make sense." That would ignore the merits of his argument. But if I say, "His dismissal of the scientific arguments for Apollo is more likely motivated by his Fundamentalist beliefs," that's a defensible position.
I dunno. Maybe I've run into this too many times at Delusional Idiots Forum - the entire notion that somehow education is bad, or unnecessary, or is a tool of the "elites" to brainwash the masses just seems like sour grapes.
I agree. In the general case, people with appropriate education are dismissed as being too educated to see what others see plainly with their common sense. They rely on the premise that everything always should be intuitively obvious, even when experience shows it isn't. This is attractive to people who feel limited by their lack of education and want something to help them see education as a useless hindrance to practical knowledge. Sour grapes, as you say.
And as you go on to say, a different flavor of this claim says that anyone who has been through the process of formal education has been brainwashed by the Powers That Be into thinking the way they want you to and knowing only what they want you to know. Part of the general woo-woo philosophy is that certain people are innately more gifted at understanding the universe, and that this intuition gives them more insight and information than other people who have to rely upon the "crutch" of education and be thus stifled.
However the Fundamentalist provides another dimension. Yes, it's still poisoning the well. But the anti-education sentiment arises from the tendency of things learned in school to contradict directly the Fundamentalist's interpretation of holy writ. Astrophysics and cosmology directly dispute the literal 7-day creation cycle. Paleontology and biology directly dispute the
ab origine speciation of organisms. And if the Bible says the Moon emits light, then the belief had better be that the Moon emits light; any "science" that says differently is somehow wrong.
But equipped with a firm, unshakable faith in an absurdly literal interpretation of ancient writings, the Fundamentalist sees science as a perversion of the truth, as a way of substituting a feeble man-made knowledge for the God-approved truths that ought to prevail. So it's seen as a more insidious, more direct threat to "approved" belief. Instead of, "Oh, you poor misdirected and benighted sheeple," it's more like, "You instruments of the Devil! Stay away from me." There is an irony to that style of faith because the stronger and more rational the opposition, the more the adherent's faith is steeled to resist it. He gets spiritual brownie points for holding to his faith no matter how attractive or sensible the alternative. Some elements of science are
literally characterized as the efforts of the Devil to tempt and try your faith.
