I SOMETIMES do mad things on Twitter. I’ll have protracted arguments about whether or not the earth is a globe or flat.

I’ll debate with people who think gravity isn’t real or that evolution is just about proving God doesn’t exist.

Some argue for fun, they don’t genuinely believe what they’re writing.

Others are convinced there are all sorts of conspiracies in play and the Government or large corporations are hiding the truth.

The moon landing “hoax” is one such conspiracy.

It usually centres on things like a flag moving when there’s no wind on the moon, shadows falling the wrong way, or a lack of stars in the background of photographs.

The “evidence” of the moon landings being fake doesn’t stand up, yet people persist in believing we never went there.

Is it sensible to think that thousands of people who worked on the various missions all colluded and kept quiet about us not going to the moon?

The fact we left evidence behind, including footprints, machinery, even reflective surfaces that we still use today to fire laser beams at to measure the distance from the earth to the moon, counts for nothing.

It’s the same with a flat earth. No matter how many proofs you put to the flat earth believers, they will always decry it as “fake”.

The big question of course is what’s the point? Why say the Earth is a globe if it genuinely is flat? What do we gain by doing that? Nothing that I can see.

When it comes to evolution, some people are convinced that it’s all about trying to prove God doesn’t exist.

As someone who has looked deeply into evolution and creationism, I can’t find any genuine evidence of a hoax, or a conspiracy by scientists to disprove any God exists.

Once more, I fail to see how that benefits science. If anything, it renders science as obsolete.

Anything we can’t explain could be put down to “God”. In other words, we would stop trying to understand and explain things. Ultimately, science would stand still.

Imagine if we put all illnesses down to God, saying every death is just how it has to be, we’d stop looking for cures. As it is, evolution is central to our understanding of many diseases and conditions. Because of this we can develop effective cures for illnesses that previously would have proven fatal.

So why do people believe in impossible things? There are three main causes that we think control such beliefs.

The first is what’s called patternicity – we see patterns that aren’t there. For example, we can look at a cloud and see the shape of a rabbit, or look at a piece of toast and see the face of Jesus.

There’s no rabbit, no Jesus. As a species though, this trait can be helpful.

Seeing the shape of a tiger may make us run, even if there isn’t one.

That’s better than ignoring the shape and being killed.

A second cause is called agenticity.

This is where we artificially infuse patterns with meaning and intention.

This is like thinking that having a donated organ means you acquire the characteristics of the person who donated it, or that having an object that once belonged to a murderer is somehow “evil” so we should never touch it in case it makes us do evil things. This also explains things like astrology.

The final cause is a chemical reaction in the brain when you do something positive. Solving a puzzle, for example, can make you feel good. That feeling is in part caused by a flood of the chemical dopamine in your brain. Put simply, dopamine is one of the brain chemicals that makes us feel happy.

It’s very human to seek patterns, but it’s also the same for many other animals, their behaviour is governed by patterns that they follow, though we have no idea if animals infuse meaning into patterns as humans do.

I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories.

The hard part is dealing with people who are convinced they are real. Making logical arguments, presenting them with facts, isn’t enough.

They perform Olympic standard mental gymnastics to prove you wrong, or ignore the evidence. You’ll never convince a die-hard conspiracy theorist that they are wrong.

No matter what you put in front of them you are working against some powerful factors, not least the flood of dopamine that rewards their mental flips to make the real sound unreal and vice versa.

Conspiracy theorists are like drug addicts, each hit of dopamine needs a larger hit next time to satisfy the craving. When facts contradict them, their twisted logic becomes like a ball of string after a kitten has played with it – almost impossible to unravel.