Garrett J. Cummins, Ph.D.

What is Evidence Denial? A Crash Course

What is Evidence Denial? A Crash Course

When I started back at college in 2008, I hadn’t ever researched critical thinking and the importance of evidence when making claims and arguments. Likewise, this applies to accepting claims and arguments as well. Within a year of starting my English undergraduate work, I began YouTube surfing. While surfing, I found a channel named ExtantDodo. Watching his videos I got a crash course on the importance of evidence-based claims and arguments after I started watching and rewatching ExtantDodo’s YouTube video on Top 25 Creationist Fallacies.

 

 

In the video, ExtantDodo (2007) went through 25 separate examples with explanations detailing how creationists mischaracterize the science of evolution as well as how creationists misinterpret the evidence for evolution. In the example of the red herring fallacy, ExtantDodo showed video footage of John Pendleton, wearing a lab coat, which is strange because he is a chemical engineer–not an evolutionary scientist (CreationistWiki, 2019). As the video excerpt shows, Pendleton claims that evolutionary scientists claim that all fossils take a “long time.” To refute the claim he made, he shows an example of a human leg bone broken off into a cowboy boot, which took place in West Texas sometime in the 19th century. In presenting this evidence, Pendleton is attempting to deny the millions of pieces of evidence that the fossilized bones of ancient humans and all other fossils that took a long time. As such, he can use this cowboy leg bone fossil as a single piece of evidence. Essentially, Pendleton misinterpreted and illogically extended this single piece of evidence to all pieces of evidence that clearly support evolution.

The Pendleton example illustrates how people of any education or professional level can misread and misinterpret evidence when it serves their beliefs and worldviews. When defining evidence, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains how many kinds of things can count as evidence. In terms of a common definition, they include

consisting of an object or set of objects. Consider evidence that might
be found at a crime scene: a gun, a bloody knife, a set of fingerprints, or hair, fiber or DNA samples. The same might be said of fossil evidence, or evidence in medicine, such as when an X-ray is evidence that a patient has a tumor, or koplic spots as evidence that a patient has measles (IEP, 2024).

In the most common sense, evidence is something that you can see, which is a material or physical object. In this sense, evidence is something other people can corroborate on regardless of what they believe or do not believe. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, evidence’s earliest known Latin definition as “appearance from which inferences may be drawn” (OED, 2024). The word “appearance” highlights how what may be apparent to one person is not apparent for all people looking at the same piece of evidence. Pendleton was simply drawing inferences from what is apparent, why would I categorize him as an evidence denier?

I define evidence denial as the act of taking what is apparent, such as a cowboy boot being a recent fossil, and improperly inferring that all fossils must have formed in the same short amount of time. Recalling ExtantDodo’s (2007) YouTube video on creationists, Pendleton’s wild inference (or erroneous conclusion based on evidence), people who subscribe to conspiracy theories often engage in evidence denial. For example, when someone claims that global warming is not real because the last three or four winters have been the coldest on record, they are engaging in evidence denial (see this example from the Washington Times). In this article, Jayaray (2021) focuses on the temperature in India over a brief period of time. However, global warming refers to the entire earth’s temperature over more than 100 years.  On the USGCRP’s original data visual below, I made orange circles that highlight five-year temperature trends:

Long-Term Warming and Short-Term Variation
USGCRP, 2013, Third Assessment

As the data visual illustrates, short-term temperature change can hide long-term temperature increase trends. Reading this data visual from left-to-right, the first orange circle shows a five-year decline in temperature from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, as shown by the red-sloped line in the middle of the circle.  The second orange circle shows a flat-lined temperature trend from the late 1980s to the late 1990’s, as shows in the red-sloped line in the middle. Lastly, the third orange circle shows an increase temperature trend from late 1990s to the mid-2000s, as shown by the red-slopped line in the middle. However, the blue circle surrounding all three of these circles illustrates a general warming trend from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. So, Jayaraj’s (2021) observations about the colder winters from 2019 to 2021 in India would not contradict bigger warming trends that the average world temperature would reveal.

In fact, scientific studies shows that the global temperature has been steadily increasing since 1880 (Hansen et al, 2006, which is a seminal study on the subject). Colder-than-usual winters in one part of the world over a short period of time doesn’t mean that the average global temperature is not increasing.

So, if different people can interpret seemingly apparent evidence in different ways, what are some differences between someone who denies evidence versus someone who accepts evidence? First, evidence deniers typically omit any mention of a larger body of evidence. Recalling the example of the Washington Times article (Jayaraj, 2021) leaves out any evidence from scientific papers (such as Hansen et al., 2006) or any other scientific paper. Instead, he quotes from CNN though he supplies no links to the specific CNN report (here’s a link to the exact report). When a reader clicks on the link, they can see that Chinchar (the CNN writer) includes a government scientist’s tweet from X, formerly known as Twitter, that explains that the “‘record highs will increasingly outpace the cold’” (Labe, 2021, as cited in Chinchar, 2021). As expected, Jayaraj omits key details that appear after the first paragraph that he cited. Moreover, CNN is credible on global warming reporting, but CNN is not a scientific journal. In contrast, an evidence affirmer would include data from multiple scientific sources as well as popular sources that agree with the scientific data. As such, the Washington Times writer would need to include the full context of the CNN data along with scientific studies.

Along with narrow reporting and citing of data, evidence deniers also reach illogical conclusions about the evidence they present. In the case of Pendleton from the YouTube video, he makes a leap about all fossil formations based on one sample. Only one sample fossil is hardly representative. In contrast, an evidence affirmer would qualify that fossils can form at different rates based on any number of factors. Additionally, they would include evidence from scientific studies along with their own observations. If Pendleton included many studies, which included carbon dating and more points of data (aka examples), then he might have some cases. As it turns out, the vast amounts of fossil evidence fit well within the theory of evolution instead of creationism.

Summary/Conclusion

This brief essay outlined the way in which evidence affirmation and evidence denial parts way when people use scientific evidence for their arguments. This essay and I take a dim view of evidence denial. As such, the essay means to open the conversation on how evidence denial illustrates rhetorical strategies that encourage unfounded doubt as well information literacy gaps. In the case of the ExtantDodo (2007) video, the viewer sees and hears how he uses a single point of physical/material evidence of a more recent fossil to create doubt in evolution as a scientific discipline. Likewise, Jayarag (2021) offers narrow scopes and small amounts of evidence. In turn, he makes wide claims that outsize the very scope of evidence they present.

Moreover, the essay sought to open the readers’ mind to connecting the rhetoric of evidence denial and the misinterpretation of evidence that people demonstrate when they subscribe to elaborate and unlikely conspiracy theories. Scholar of conspiracy theory rhetoric, Dr. Jenny Rice offered a brief description of how conspiracy theories deny evidence as a strategy to bring up surmised claims, “‘You can only believe the things that you can’t see,’ she explained. ‘The things that we are shown are deliberately produced and delivered to us and therefore are not trustworthy’” (Rice, 2024, as cited in Hagen, 2024). Expounding on Rice’s description, conspiracy theories avoid drawing their inferences and conclusions from material objects or even clear appearances, as the IEP (2024) and OED (2024) include in their evidence definitions. Instead, conspiracy theorists’ mistrust and even disavow evidence, which show how they embrace unobvious interpretations.

In terms of QAnon conspiracies, people on 4Chan and 8Chan interpret fragmented clues and alleged code words in posts as evidence for Trump’s reclamation of the White House after he lost in 2020 (Holoyda, 2024). These clues only confirm the biases and ideas the believers already held. At the same time, the news covered President Biden’s inauguration where he was sworn in as 46th president. Likewise, Jayaraj (2021) and ExtantDodo’s (2007) video of Pendleton illustrate how people can amplify and cherry pick from a small sample of evidence to confirm what they already believed. While conspiracy theorists do engage in evidence denial, people who deny evidence are not necessarily conspiracy theorists, such as QAnon followers. These similarities, however, do suggest that further analysis is needed to consider how evidence denial works on a spectrum, ranging from what someone can see in Jayarag and Pendleton, then moving into QAnon-level conspiracy theories.

References