[No_Foolin'?]

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...is not that the universe is so easily explained without invoking a god (it isn't), it is that the existence (and proliferation) of these theistic religions is so easily explained without invoking a god.

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Indeed. Witness the foibles of a local fundamentalist preacher who I recently conversed with via email. He argues vehemently that the earth is 7000 years old because the Bible tells him so, and will back his argument up using multiple scriptural passages, complete with references to and detailed explanations of the Greek in the original texts. He also asserts that fully one-half of all the "experts" in the sciences that deal with the age of the earth agree with him.

However, pressed for details regarding his assertion about these "experts", he falls silent. He has no answer and has ended our email exchange.

My point: Something somewhere in the human psyche tends strongly to cause us at a certain point to hop off the locomotive of rational thought and into all kinds silliness, all in the name of perpetuating our personally-cherished and largely ignorantly-held notions about our lives and the world around us. Witness my preacher aquaintence: An otherwise very rational, measured, deliberate man suddenly suspends all reason because he has stumbled upon a fact that fails to support his world view.

I can think of no reasonable explanation for this phenomenon other than that it's a product of the interchange between our lizard brain and our more developed brain.