[QwertyPi]

> Sure, they could all be faking it, but at that point you have to question how much evidence it takes to believe in anything at all.

This is worth questioning (and hopefully coming back around to believing in)! Most of the reason I reject the idea of young earth theory is that the incentive to fake the earth's evident age is so vanishingly low my understanding of the rest of society would also have to be rejected. And that's a deeply stressful act to engage in without my own incentive to. But it's worth knowing about yourself that your view of the world is inherently based in your place and comfort within it, even the stuff that people broadly agree about, not some sense of discovering absolute truth. The latter aspect is just a symptom of having a coherent worldview, which people manage with very heterodox beliefs all the time.

It's worth looking into examination of flat-earthers and why they turn to it—it's often linked to myriad other conspiracy theories, each of which support each other.

[philomath_mn]

> incentive to fake the earth's evident age

Not arguing the specifics here, but a deliberate effort to deceive is not a prerequisite for a widely held theory to be false. It is likely that all of the proponents of luminiferous aether believed they were dutifully following the evidence but they still arrived at the wrong conclusion.

All evidence is theory-laden. Scientific study is still a sociological system despite our best efforts (yes, I've read Kuhn like everybody else)