Those who refuse to look through telescopes (because the evidence might upset their treasured notions of reality) have always been around. I wondered whether t

Those who refuse to look through telescopes (because the evidence might upset their treasured notions of reality) have always been around. I wondered whether that particular story about Galileo's contemporaries was apocryphal, but it appears to have some fairly solid evidence: https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2016/2016-05-12-Galileo.html https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2016... However, note that 'science denial' has been an attack used by all manner of charlatans and fraudsters - as well as by people who are simply ignorant of facts - to defend their positions throughout our so-called 'age of reason'. This has often led to the spectacle of two different groups of perhaps well-intentioned (or not) people hurling the insult of 'science denialist' at each other while refusing to engage in actual science, i.e. examining observational data, conducting experiments, developing theories, rinse and repeat. Part of the problem is that science often reveals facts that powerful interests don't want to accept, for example, that smoking cigarettes greatly increases the risk of lung cancer, or that burning fossil fuels leads to warming of the planet and climatic destabilization, or that using antibiotics on factory farms increases the rate at which antibiotic resistance arises (due to the pressure of natural selection as per evolutionary theory). These outfits have made a practice of hiring deceptive and dishonest 'scientists' for PR purposes, because simply accepting the science would be expensive and/or embarrassing, and they're the ones who tend to scream 'science denialism!' the loudest. Hence it is not a very useful phrase, and it's always better to be explicit about what particular scientific concept you view as being subjected to attack on dubious grounds.