>I find these people particularly interesting, not because of the absurdity of their belief, but because of the certainty they have in their belief and how difficult it is to convince them otherwise.
The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...
I hate to point this out, but one of these isn't quite like the others: the one about ghosts. The problem with that one is that you can't prove a negative; it's impossible. There might be ghosts; there's simply no way for you to disprove it, no matter how much evidence you amass. You can make the case that it's highly unlikely because you haven't been presented with any sufficiently-compelling evidence yet, just like it's highly unlikely that pink unicorns live on the Moon in underground caves, but you can't disprove it, and with ghosts you can't even amass decent evidence against it (like by going to the Moon, searching for underground caves, and if any exist, looking in them for pink unicorns and coming up empty). Personally, I don't believe they're likely to be real, as I've never seen any good evidence, but lots of other people have claimed to, so while I don't put much stock in it, I think it is a bit different from the others, because the others have strong evidence countering those claims. There's plenty of evidence that vaccines don't cause autism, that climate change is real (the main debate is the source: AGW, but even here there's plenty of evidence that it's man-made), there's literally tons of evidence of the Moon landings, there's enormous evidence that the Earth is much older than 6000 years (and that human civilization predates this too), etc.
>Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.
The problem is that religious people like this actively disbelieve in science. You can show them all the evidence you want and educate them about the Scientific Method and it won't help. After all, here again, you cannot disprove their assertion, that "the devil" planted this stuff. After all, science basically assumes that some intelligent force isn't involved in faking the evidence, so that when you carry out experiments they'll come out the same way every time because the laws of the Universe are constant. What if there's some higher force (or "Force"...) that can change the laws of the Universe at will to subvert your scientific experiment?
Of course, here you have to ask, why would someone believe this silliness? It's not that much different from the ghost thing, except that here instead of a relatively benign belief that disembodied souls are wandering around and occasionally doing odd things to give us the willies (like knocking objects over or slamming doors), it's a much more detailed belief that some evil being is screwing with us just so that somehow we won't get into eternal paradise because we don't believe some silly creation tale that has no supporting evidence. Of course this also seems to go hand-in-hand with being a member of some crazy church and needing to give them a significant portion of your income....